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Brought to you by Bondurant Consulting:
Volume 23, Nov. 30, 2011
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Greetings!
Welcome to Keeping it SiMMPle, a bi-monthly newsletter aimed at making and keeping your Strategic Meetings Management Program Practical, Light, and Effective. For Meeting Managers and Procurement Specialists, this newsletter will assist you in finding practical solutions and provide advice on actionable steps to gain visibility and control of your organization's meeting spend. For Suppliers, you will gain insights into the issues that your clients face, and how you can support their SMM programs. In addition, Keeping it SiMMPle will highlight key industry trends and identify tips that will make your job easier.
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Each issue of Keeping it SiMMPle addresses a component of the A to Z of SMM from a Practical, Light & Effective perspective. In this issue W is for the Who, What, Where, Why and When of Strategic Meetings Management.
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Who should consider developing a Strategic Meetings Management Program (SMMP)? Small, medium and large organizations who have even a limited volume of meetings should consider employing some of the purchasing best practices that are inherent within the SMMP. At a minimum, the registration of meetings and centralized sourcing & contracting of hotel contracts are great first steps to gaining visibility and control into your organization's meeting spend.
What is Strategic Meetings Management? We have talked a lot this year about Strategic Meetings Management (SMM). But to briefly reiterate, SMM is the development of a program that helps an organization bring order and control to their enterprise wide meeting spend. This results in the ability to understand who is planning meetings; the suppliers that are being used, and how much is being spent on meetings and events. Which leads to quantifying savings that are typically in the range of 10% to 20% during the first year of an SMMP implementation.
Where does the activity reside? Although the leader of the meetings department seems to be the logical lead for an SMMP, based on the organization, the responsibility for driving the SMMP can fall within a variety of areas. Alternatives to being lead by a centralized meeting team are SMM Programs that reside in either a travel, procurement, or centralized services department.
Why consider SMM? Meetings and Events are one of the last areas of significant unmanaged spend in an organization. Depending on the size of the business, there could be $4 million; $40 million or $140 million in meetings and event spend. Saving just 10% in this area would result in $400,000, $4 million or $14 million in cost reductions with an SMMP. Another key reason to deploy an SMM is the ability to mitigate risk in the forms of poor contract terms, meetings being planned outside of corporate or governmental regulations, and inconsistent messaging to your target audience.
When is the best time to start the SMMP process? NOW! Building an SMMP is an iterative process; so don't expect to tackle all of the elements simultaneously. But you can start by developing an overall strategy that is in alignment with your organizations' strategic goals. Institute a centralized meeting and event registry where all meetings of a certain size/scope must be registered. Additionally, a centralized sourcing and contracting group is critical so that contract terms are negotiated consistently. Once centralized, the ability to capture data such as hotels utilized, savings achieved and volume of meetings is possible. With this data you can make decisions based on business intelligence, and develop reports to senior management which will reinforce that value that you and your team bring to the organization.
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Tip #1: Start the SMM process by understanding the meeting and event spend in your own area, then move to other pockets of spend within the organization.
Tip #2: If you think there are not enough meetings within your organization to warrant an SMM, take time to total the 2011 volume of meetings and related hotel spend. Likely you will be surprised how quickly the relatively small cost of individual meeting numbers grow into large numbers when they are aggregated.
Tip #3: Once you have a view of the total volume of meetings by each supplier, use this information to determine if you should move market share from one supplier to another in order to get more favorable rates.
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Hotel and airline companies joined in the plethora of Cyber Monday extreme discount offerings
Hard as they tried, it couldn't be avoided, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection this week
Meeting Professionals International (MPI) introduced the Business Value of Meetings (BVOM) toolbox, at EIBTM (European Incentive Business Travel and Meeting Exhibition) in Barcelona, Spain this week
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Sincerely,
Betsy Bondurant, CMM, CTE
phone: 619.701.7709
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| About Bondurant Consulting |
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Bondurant Consulting provides the following services:
- Assessment of SMMP potential for your organization
- Development and implementation of SMMP for meeting & travel managers
- Training programs for hotel companies and 3rd party meeting planning agencies which increase their understanding of Strategic Meetings Management, resulting in more successful engagements with clients who are involved with SMM
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