The term Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) has been kicking around for the best part of 20 years, having originated in the North American meetings and events industry.
In that time, many industries have changed. We have a lot more regulation, particularly in such verticals as the pharmaceutical industry. Here, clear regulatory requirements need to be upheld in terms of delegate spend, the venues that can be used and so on.
Technology can ultimately assist us with this, and really that’s at the core of the concept of SMM.
The Global Business Travel Association defines SMM as ‘the strategic management of enterprise-wide meeting-related processes, spend, volume and supply to achieve a quantitative cost-savings risk mitigation and superior service. It includes matching an organisation’s departmental goals, corporate values and objectives while leveraging spend, data consolidation and reporting to really enhance the strategic value of events to a business.
It all sounds theoretical, but in practice it’s about understanding what a company spends on its meetings or events, and how can it actually use the data it has to improve the performance of events for its business. Typically companies achieve this by outsourcing some or all of their events management to specialists in the meetings industry, and there are a number of agents who now work in this space, as well as a number of technology providers that have SMM tools in place.
It’s very difficult to think of the tactical execution of an event from a strategic viewpoint, which is why it’s important to take a step back. That’s the role procurement can play through this process: a fresh set of eyes through a strategic lens, looking at the overall event programme. It’s certainly not about trying to take over the event management element.
The potential impact of SMM When you take this and overlay that with the current economic climate, you start to get a better handle on why we’re hearing a lot more about SMM as part of your core conversation about meetings management. Across the Asia Pacific region alone there is a US$85bn spend in the corporate travel and meetings industry. We know corporate hotel rates and air fare in this region is increasing, whether by surcharges or levies and ultimately it’s having an impact on our customers travel spend.
Largely due to this economic uncertainty, companies are trying to find ways to reduce costs. They are really trying to push more lower cabins across their travel programmes, looking at improving booking behaviour, booking tickets further in advance. The meetings and events industry is not immune to this. Companies are having to justify the return on investment attached to their meetings.
The time is right, and most organisations are starting to take events seriously, asking themselves the right questions to be able to say hand-on-heart that these events are a key element of their business strategy.
This is where you see the convergence of travel, meetings and procurement. There are obvious synergies between travel and meetings, chiefly when you look at their supply base. SMM is the natural child of corporate travel organisation.
Collectively, corporate travel and meetings can account for up to 20 per cent of a company’s costs, so it’s very important that we as meetings practitioners think about this to ensure we can help our customers, and we must justify and strategically plan how they go about their meetings and events strategies.
Meetings is the hidden category; it contains substantial spend with relatively poor visibility. The best way to get a handle on meetings ROI is by engaging with procurement. Allow them to help you get a better idea of how we go about managing our events.
SMM is not about commoditising meetings and events. It’s not about trying to take something that is inherently emotional and turning it into something transactional. The role of an SMM programme is to provide a strategic platform; a foundation to help the organisation get more out of its meetings and events, whether that’s pushing spend to particular hotels, or ensuring your risk is mitigated through your supplier base, or ultimately helping your business to understand and justify that spend. It’s about creating accountability attached to meetings and events and really looking at the return on your objectives with every event.
Although there are synergies with corporate travel, there are also major differences.
When you look at corporate travel, it’s typically driven through procurement and finance, without too much departmental input. Procurement may own the project and finance will act as the primary stakeholder.
Meetings circulate a lot deeper within an organisation, in part due to their fragmented nature. You need a much wider and deeper approach to stakeholder engagement. You need to be looking down to your executive and personal assistant level, at your travel teams, at your learning and development teams – how are they buying into this process?
SMM vs event management
Neither is SMM event management. This is a very important point. From a customer standpoint, events is very emotional area. There are a number of stakeholders within an organisation that enjoy doing event management. With SMM you need to take a step back an look at how can you achieve your overall spend while still ensuring the delivery of creative event solutions for your business.
One of the first misconceptions of SMM is that it is procurement coming in to take over your event management. It’s far from that. It’s there to complement your events and make sure you’re leveraging your spend and getting better value for money, ultimately granting your planning department some budget back to provide even better events.
When you think broadly about an SMM programme, there are really only four common goals, very much focused on gaining visibility of your events spend. These are outlined below.
Visibility
What’s key here is to talk about corporate travel. Many companies could immediately tell you what their total corporate travel spend was, probably down to the dollar. If I asked my customers how much they spend on their SMM programme, it’s a very different response. SMM is about trying to get a better picture of how much you do spend. What role do those events play within your corporate objectives?
Risk Mitigation
We know events are very much fragmented throughout a business. The are sourced and managed by support staff, administration staff, HR staff, for whom event management, strategic sourcing may not be a core competency. SMM comes into that to really ensure the certain elements of event planning are actually managed by professionals. These programmes are very flexible about how you go about your event management, but ultimately you’re looking at the venues you’re sourcing and understanding the terms an conditions thereof.
In fact one of the first stages of an SMM programme is to look at which hotels you are using. How can you design a hotel contract or addendum for your business that applies to all hotels and venues you use for your events, for example. They need to meet your terms and conditions.
Efficiency
Technology has evolved so much that we now have access to thousands of hotels at our fingertips and these SMM tools help us, as a planner and customer, to contact hotels around the world. They can also look at integrating internal approval processes, speeding the approval process, getting it to the right person with the right budget to actually sign off on an event.
Data management
The beauty of technology is that it gives us access to information quicker. By utilising SMM technology you can have real-time access to information around your meeting spend; your supply split, even your RSVP list.
Procurement does have a role in the space of events. This may appear controversial from the perspective of some stakeholders, but procurement’s role in this is not to detract from the essence of creative events. They need to work side by side to enable a company to continue to stage its events. We do events for business and for fun. Ultimately our events play a strategic role within our organisations.
To improve your business’s effectiveness with meetings, find a senior executive who will champion and SMM programme. They will help ensure the value is communicated to the business, driving and influencing its adoption, and taking you where you want to go with your events.
Fernando Lonergan, Senior Director, Asia Pacific, at BCD M&I
This was first published in issue 75 of CMW. Any comments? Email Antony Reeve-Crook
