Looking with dread at the year ahead? You're not alone. Your peers also are canceling programs, losing meeting team members, and trying to stay positive in an industry that's gone very negative when it comes to meetings. At the same time, many planners are reminding senior executives of their value, and finding that value in their strategic meetings management programs. In March 2004, the Groups & Meetings Committee of the National Business Travel Association released a white paper called “Building a Strategic Meetings Management Program,” which remains the standard framework for an SMMP. (Find it at www.nbta.org.)

Not that everyone uses the term. Dan Young, CMP, director of event planning and field recognition at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans in Minneapolis, has been guided by strategic meetings management principles since 2002 — before SMMP was common parlance. Last year, Young reported $1 million in cost savings due to the company's negotiating leverage. That's impressive no matter what you call it.

Launching an SMMP, Step by Step

1. Define Your Current Situation

   “Any SMMP starts and ends with data,” says Lisa English, CMP, CMM, director of operations at Concepts Worldwide in Carlsbad, Calif. That means figuring out how many meetings your company books and who is booking them.

   Tamara Gordon, global travel and meetings director at UnitedHealth Group in Minneapolis, joined the company when many of the 800-plus meetings already were being professionally planned, but without real strategies in place. “My first challenge was to find out what was out there. This is difficult in any large company if your meetings are fulfilled by several third-party suppliers and internal planners,” she says. “The methods I used included pulling the invoices of third-party planners. With these, I came up with a calendar of events as well as the contacts managing those events.”

   Gordon is part of the procurement area and had access to payment information such as purchasing card and corporate card records, which yielded more clues on who was booking meetings. Another step she took was to be made point of contact for approval of T&E suppliers being added to the company's vendor database. “Requests are routed to me,” she explains. “If it looks like a meeting, I contact the requester and educate them on our process.”

   Gordon also asked peers in other areas of the company to “keep their ears and eyes open” and let her know about any outlying meetings expenses. Finally, she met with American Express Corporate Travel, UnitedHealth's travel management company, asking them to alert her if anyone planned meetings outside her department.

   For Paul Vandevere, conference and event planning manager at Lincoln Financial Group in Radnor, Pa., meanwhile, the situation was a bit different. Meetings were planned internally and already had been consolidated when he joined the team. However, there was no cohesive technology, no mandate for using the department, and no platform to capture data and spend. “There were 400-plus meetings on the calendar,” he notes. “It was quite a large animal. In order to leverage our spend, we needed to start gathering data.”

   So now it's time to look at the numbers.

2. Calculate What You Spend on Meetings.

   Listen up: Kate Lastinger, CMP, CMM, is about to save you a lot of time and effort. “The current mode for SMMPs is someone goes on a treasure hunt for meetings spend, which takes tons of time and is rarely accurate,” says Lastinger, founding partner of strategic meetings management consultancy The Metaphrasis Group, in Atlanta. “Back when SMMPs started to take hold, the treasure hunt was the only way to do it.” But she sees a better way.

   “If you have a strong meetings department, take the amount of your meetings spend, which you know exactly, and bump it up to the industry standard, which is 1 to 3 percent of a company's revenue,” she advises. Meeting managers should weight the average based on their overall meetings profile: pharmaceutical companies, for example, will shift toward the 3 percent figure. “The difference between the spend you know for sure and the industry standard gives you a good idea of what you're going to uncover as unmanaged spend.” Since it's tough to be accurate with your treasure hunt anyway, this formula can save you months of work.

   You need to come up with a number for total spend in order to make your case for managing that spend. Which leads to your big opportunities …

3. Identify Opportunities.

   “Launching an SMMP involves an internal sell,” says Lisa English of Concepts Worldwide. “Especially now, because of the economy, you need to be clear on what the payback will be.”

Fortunately, an SMMP can bring major payback:

• Risk mitigation through centrally negotiated contracts

• Cost savings through professional negotiation and increased negotiating leverage

• Process efficiencies

• Meeting and branding consistency

You want to trumpet all that potential, but don't overpromise, English advises. “We know from some benchmarking that an SMMP can save 10 percent to 15 percent of meetings spend. But you won't get there in the first year and maybe not in the second year. Set achievable goals so you don't get the plug pulled,” she says. “Understand what the C-level needs to see to allow you to keep moving. Set incremental goals. The first year will be discovery (plus the benefit of risk mitigation). The second year you will save 3 percent to 5 percent. Make sure you will meet or exceed the goals you set.”

Among the opportunities that Tamara Gordon has identified is simply getting all the business units under one umbrella. “There is cost-savings potential when we consolidate our spend across the enterprise. Right now this spend is often recognized only at the [individual business unit] name, and not rolled into UnitedHealth Group,” she explains. “We have not been leveraging the spend across the entire business.” She also expects to realize savings from managing cash flow — that is, not sending money out sooner than necessary — and by shifting all payment to a meetings credit card.

Other benefits stem from the greater visibility of meetings under an SMMP, notes Todd Zint, CMP, CMM, vice president, meetings and event marketing, at NFP Insurance Services Inc., in Austin, Texas. A corporate meetings calendar, he says, “allows each new meeting request to be reviewed for audience overlap, holiday schedules, industry conferences, and potential use of a canceled meeting credit.”

The biggest opportunity for planners lies in the cost savings and avoidance they can show senior management. “We put a dollar value on all the concessions we negotiate. That's cost avoidance,” Zint explains. “And we consider everything we negotiate over and above what an admin would get when booking the same meeting as our true organizational value-add. That's the confidence we are building in our service, so the company knows it has the systems and the people in place to get the job done.” The bottom line: “Strategic processes and measurable results equate to job security.”