Not all meeting management companies are pharma industry, technology, and strategic meetings management experts. To many of its clients, that’s what separates McVeigh Associates from the rest.
Take the PhRMA code guidelines. With over 22 years in the healthcare industry, McVeigh Associates has become a leader in compliance standards, mandated legislation, and implementing clients’ corporate directives.
“When we started working with some of our clients, there were no pharma guidelines—imagine that. We could stay at the Ritz if we wanted to,” says Michelle Heller, senior vice president, strategic meetings management, at McVeigh. “When the pharma rules and regs came out, there was a lot of retooling. We work in the same capacity with many pharma companies, and we have been able to bring their best practices to our other
client companies.”
It’s the same story regarding technology expertise. Recently, a global Fortune 500 pharmaceutical client tasked McVeigh to help expand use of its Web-based meeting technology platform globally. McVeigh was able to provide the client with the ability to warehouse and analyze meeting data in order to look at global meeting trends, spend, and cost savings. After this initial success, McVeigh enhanced the technology to capture physician spend at meetings, ensuring compliance with upcoming legislation and adding dashboard reporting for senior-level executives.
This tech expertise extends into McVeigh’s SMM consulting arm. It recently assisted a client company through an acquisition in which meetings volume increased by 45 percent, with no additional resources for the headquarters meeting management division. McVeigh helped develop meeting standards, communicate them to all stakeholders, and work through a supplier consolidation process.
Another pharma client, who asked to remain anonymous, sums up McVeigh’s strengths: “There are agencies that can plan logistics and are excellent at the tactical part. But we needed to keep the internal group more strategically focused, and effectively and efficiently manage a large volume of meetings, and work with a partner who was already expert at SMM. Not all agencies are like that, but McVeigh is.”
