Strategic Meetings Management: Benefits of an SMM Program

Strategic meetings management is a process by which you reduce the total meeting costs for your business, while also streamlining all other meetings and event-related procedures.

An event planning or meetings committee might implement such a process themselves or rely on strategic meetings management programs (SMMPs) and software. In either case, the core principles of strategic meetings management remain the same: provide a consistent template for meetings, communicate clearly with participants, and offer any information that might be relevant to those in attendance.

Strategic meetings management enables you to reduce your own event team’s workload while streamlining all your internal and external events. It can be easy to get caught up with the busy work of planning meetings and events from scratch; however, it’s possible to templatize and automate parts of the process to cut costs, save time, and improve the meetings and events themselves.

There are quite a few benefits to taking a strategic meetings management (SMM) approach to both your internal and customer-facing events. Here are just three pros to consider:

1. 1. Better risk management: When you provide every meeting participant with all the information required to safely attend an event, you perform your duty of care and increase risk mitigation. While this might not be entirely necessary for off-the-cuff meetings for small teams, it’s especially essential to enumerate safety requirements for larger planned events.
2. 2. Improved event management: Using SMM programs or software helps you keep attendees informed, streamline the invite acceptance and cancellation process, track and send out meetings data, inform all stakeholders about meetings policies, and perform other related processes. By getting this information out of the event management silo and into the world, you can run your events more efficiently.
3. 3. Reduced costs: Strategic meetings management will help improve your company’s bottom line by generating a return on investment (ROI). When you utilize SMM software, you allow automation to take over some aspects of the event planning workflow. The subsequent cost savings provide a worthwhile business case to encourage buy-in from the executive team.

Here are three examples of how you might put strategic meetings management principles into practice:

• A client outreach meeting: Suppose you want to facilitate an outward-facing client meeting to discuss benchmarking for an upcoming white paper marketing project. Rather than start from scratch with each meeting, you can utilize software to create an agenda and make and send out invites. If the client uses the same software, they can input necessary data, too (as well as their availability).
• A nationwide conference: To meet your overall business objectives, sometimes you need to reach out to a wide array of people. Event planners can scale up their planning capacity to include nationwide conferences. Strategic meetings management software can assist with venue sourcing and procurement, as well as ensuring each guest is aware of all safety requirements to attend the event.
• An all-staff internal meeting: An event planning team can reduce internal meeting costs by usng some common sense business intelligence and an SMM program. By ensuring all employees and stakeholders utilize the same meeting software, they can plan and execute meetings with far less effort than they would have previously.

Get the MasterClass Annual Membership for exclusive access to video lessons taught by business luminaries, including Howard Schultz, Chris Voss, Robin Roberts, Sara Blakely, Daniel Pink, Bob Iger, Anna Wintour, and more.