Guide to Strategic Meetings Management in Business Travel

Driven by the need for communication and strategic planning, regular meetings provide a way for your business to ensure alignment on key issues. Wherever team members gather, whether it’s for an internal catchup or international conference, these meetings foster a collaborative environment where all voices are heard - essential for a cohesive company culture. 

To maximise these benefits, planning meetings goes beyond mere scheduling to involve aspects of business travel management, financial compliance, and risk management – all while taking ROI into account to deliver results.

It’s a delicate balance that requires high levels of coordination across multiple departments, so how can today’s planners and PAs make sure everything goes to plan? 

This is where comprehensive strategic meetings management planning can help. By centralising meeting planning, you’ll be able to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the overall value of meetings and events. Read on to learn how it all works.

What is strategic meetings management (SMM)?

Strategic meetings management, or SMM, is a structured approach to managing an organisation’s meetings, conferences, and events. It involves aspects of planning, sourcing, and measuring the ROI of events, ensuring that all spend aligns with business objectives. 

This type of strategy will cover all types of meetings, with typical examples including: 

• Training sessions and workshops
• Conferences and exhibitions
• Team offsites and incentive trips
• Product launches
• Partner events 

Without a strategic meetings and events structure, planning for each of these events is often left up to individuals or departments. By contrast, SMM centralises the process for greater control, visibility, and reduced risk. 

But while this general definition applies to organisation-wide meetings, what is SMM in relation to business travel? Successful event management integrates meetings with business travel programmes for full visibility over travel spend, while ensuring compliance with policies. You’ll be able to specify approved suppliers and platforms for booking both travel and events, consolidating purchasing while averting risk. 

Strategic meetings management also involves using data to capture attendee feedback and other performance metrics, to continually approve processes with ROI in mind. 

What are the benefits of SMM for businesses?

When meetings are managed informally and without centralised standards, it can lead to untracked spend and inconsistencies in event experiences. Plus, meeting planners may miss opportunities to save through negotiated rates. With a well-planned strategic meetings and events programme, the benefits are many. 

• Cost control: Increase bargaining power with suppliers by booking higher volumes of events, rather than case-by-case, individual meetings. Putting rate caps into place limits spending to stick within budget, and centralising the process gives full visibility over spend.
• Improved efficiency: Streamline planning by using approved event and travel management platforms that keep all details in one place while automating approval workflows. 
• Increased ROI: Gather and evaluate data for quantitative evidence of each event’s success, including attendee engagement, feedback, cost-per-attendee, and other metrics. 
• Duty of care: Build booking guidelines into event planning workflows to ensure all parties are complying with travel and risk management policies.
• Consistent experiences: Provide a consistent, reliable experience across your organisation’s events and meetings, reducing stress for attendees and managers. 

What are the elements of strategic meetings management?

Every business has different needs when it comes to scheduling meetings and events. While some may focus on regional gatherings for different branches, others run regular training workshops or plan large-scale, corporate conferences. As a result, strategic meetings management is highly adaptable. 

Yet there are a few core components that typically go into strategic event planning, like the following. 

1. Event planning guidelines

As with your company’s business travel programme, SMM requires clear guidelines to follow. This should include a framework that lists all rules, regulations, and policies involved with planning and managing meetings. 

2. Budget management 

One of the primary SMM benefits is cost control, but this only works if you make budget management a key component of your strategy. Determine how you’ll track and approve expenses, set rate caps, and negotiate prices with suppliers. 

3. Supplier management

Working with the right vendors goes together with compliance and cost control. When planning a typical meeting, conference, or workshop, you’ll need to liaise with numerous providers, from audiovisual and technology experts to venue managers, caterers, and hotel companies. Determine how you’ll source the best venues, suppliers, and industry contacts to strike the perfect balance between cost and quality. 

4. Digital tools

Today’s technology puts all aspects of event planning in one place, like sourcing venues, tracking spend and analysing data. The right event management software is essential for efficient planning, providing a central registration portal for team members and outside guests. 

When your meeting requires offsite travel, it’s also worth using all-in-one solutions like Tripeden.com for Business that let individuals book and manage their own business flights, hotels, and hired cars within approved guidelines. 

5. Risk management

Planning an event means considering all aspects of risk management, both for your company’s attending employees as well as any invited guests. Incorporate risk assessment guidelines into your strategy, considering destination-specific and venue-specific risks as well as industry-specific ethical guidelines. 

6. Data management

Optimising the benefits of SMM means gathering and analysing data at every stage, tracking volume and value to continuously improve the ROI of meetings. This includes looking at what went right, and what’s gone wrong, after each meeting. From attendee feedback to per-head costs, track the most useful metrics and use them to fine-tune your strategies for future events.

How to build your SMM strategy

Successful strategic event planning includes the core elements listed above, but how do you put them to use? Here’s how to design a tailored strategy that aligns your programme with organisational goals, step by step. 

Step 1: Analyse your current strategies

The first step when developing any new initiative is to look at your current meetings and event needs. 

• How much is your current annual spend? 
• What are your current meeting volumes? 
• Who currently plans events?
• Which tools are used for meetings and events management?

Look at the planning, sourcing, and approvals processes to identify any inefficiencies or missed opportunities, using these challenges as the foundation for solutions going forward.

Step 2: Gather input from key stakeholders

Once you have completed your investigation of the current event management landscape, the next step is to communicate with all relevant stakeholders. This doesn’t mean immediately pitching your ideas to corporate executives. 

Even in a small organisation, meetings and events impact a wide range of different groups, including HR, marketing, finance, and legal professionals. You’ll need to know who is involved with meetings and events, and what they’re seeking in an ideal SMM programme. 

Step 3: Create your core policy

Using all the data gathered from analysis and stakeholder input, you’ll be ready to shape your core strategic meetings management policies. When crafting a programme, consider drafting individual policies in the following areas:

• Budgeting guidelines
• Venue sourcing rules
• Preferred suppliers
• Travel booking process
• Risk management protocols
• Sustainability requirements 

When put together, these individual policies should form a full roadmap containing everything needed to successfully plan events within company guidelines. 

Step 4: Select the best SMM digital tools

Event planning technology allows businesses to streamline, automate, and optimise the process. You’ll need digital solutions that not only help with pre-event planning, but also in-event management and post-event accounting. Features should include things like:

• Venue sourcing
• Event registration
• Attendee data collection
• Corporate travel planning
• Interactive event apps

Strategic meetings management software includes comprehensive options like Cvent that comes with budget management, compliance, and venue sourcing tools. For executive meeting management, Fellow offers AI-powered features to help improve productivity and set agendas, while cross-functional projects are best managed with collaborative event management tools like Monday.com.  

You can also turn to all-in-one travel management solutions like Tripeden.com for Business for managing the logistics of offsite event planning, handling group travel bookings and comparing rates from top flight and hotel suppliers to save on business travel. 

Step 5: Evaluate and optimise your strategy

Strategic meetings management is an ongoing process. You should be checking in with stakeholders and event attendees to find out what’s working, and what could be improved. For the most reliable results, track quantifiable data that provides a clear picture of emerging trends and company spend. That way, if there’s a lag between projected costs and real-life spend, you can pinpoint areas in need of improvement. 

How to demonstrate value and improve SMM ROI

According to the Business Travel News Europe’s Business Travel Buyers’ Handbook, here’s how much a typical company can save through a well-optimised strategic meetings management programme. 

• 1.5% to 8% on policy modification and compliance like moving to hybrid meetings, setting spend thresholds
• 4% to 12% on strategic supplier sourcing, including using a travel management company for group bookings
• 3% to 6% on process automation including using automated software for end-to-end meetings tasks and online travel bookings. 

Overall, it’s estimated that a business transitioning from disorganised meeting and event management to a streamlined SMM can reduce costs by up to 20%. 

But beyond these basic savings, it’s also important to think about SMM ROI in terms of how meetings add value to your business. Training sessions upskill workers to improve satisfaction and productivity, while conferences and seminars can improve customer relationships and translate to higher sales volumes. 

Strategic meetings management case study: 

A success story published by event management provider Cvent gives an example of how a well-crafted SMM can save money. A US-based large financial/insurance company hosting over 1,000 meetings and events annually was originally using a decentralised sourcing process with ad-hoc approvals and a lack of spend visibility. 

To improve these processes, the company hired a dedicated SMM manager, created a clear definition of qualifying meetings and events, and started using a centralised venue sourcing process involving automated workflows and industry benchmarks. 

Within five months of the programme launch, the company saved over $600,000 in meetings and events expenditure – illustrating how quickly strategic event planning can yield results when implemented thoughtfully. 

The bottom line: Streamline travel and events with strategic meetings management

Meetings are a regular part of everyday business activities, and as a company grows so too does the complexity of its meeting and event needs. With higher volumes comes the need for a streamlined strategy, which is where strategic meetings management can help. 

The most successful strategic meetings and events programmes work as a comprehensive ecosystem merging travel and events planning. With tools like Tripeden.com for Business, you’ll be able to book and manage travel to meetings from a central dashboard for full visibility over itineraries and spend. 

Aligning travel and meetings policies encourages compliance, particularly when choosing hotel and conference venues that fall within budget. And with full data visibility throughout the process, you’ll be able to stay on top of key performance indicators to ensure SMM initiatives are delivering optimal value at every stage.