Bizly's Ron Shah discusses:
- Bizly's integration in Cvent's marketplace
- Indirect and direct cost-reduction tactics
- Upcoming AI platform
Meetings technology provider Bizly recently became the first small
meeting planning app listed in meetings technology giant Cvent's App Marketplace. Bizly now is looking to AI for the company's next frontier. Founder
and CEO Ron Shah spoke with BTN's Elizabeth West and Angelique Platas about the
company’s next steps, business model, technology innovations and event trends.
Edited excerpts follow.
BTN: Bizly recently announced participation in the
Cvent marketplace. What was the process there? Is that a new strategy, or has it
been in the works for a while?
Ron Shah: We all recognize, especially with Cvent’s
acquisition by Blackstone, they are a giant in the space. Ever since we
started in the enterprise space, all our customers had Bizly and Cvent. [Bizly]
kind of rigged a way to [integrate] even before this announcement. People were
using Cvent and then punch out to Bizly, and we were kind of connecting the
data. But when the opportunity arose to make it official and make it even
easier and more seamless—it was an opportunity we could not give up.
As of today's date, we are the first and only third-party small
meetings solution fully integrated into Cvent. I use “fully” a little lightly
because right now I call it “bookends.” The front end is the meetings request
form and the back end is the data. There's lots of other touch points that we
plan to build over time.
BTN: How are small meetings through Bizly different from
larger meetings working through a more centralized process or platform?
Shah: Bizly launched on the idea, “Can we empower any
person to be able to do the entire journey of building a meeting?” The biggest
lesson in our first two years was that you can't solve this problem sourcing
venues alone. You have to have some way of doing registration, understanding
the attendees, their needs, if they are coming virtually or in person. … So we
learned early on that you had to do lightweight attendee management.
Even before the pandemic, small and simple meetings were
considered to be 50 to 60 percent of overall volume. That number has increased
a lot with how distributed teams and workforces are [now]. So we really stuck
to what we're good at, which is helping individuals [build meetings]. Now you
have your program manager saying, “I need to do ‘central decentralization’—I need
a way to let all these people do their thing, but I still want to see the data.”
Our biggest lesson this year is about how enterprise
managers are looking to optimize their entire worldview. It's not just about
what's the best product. There's pressure to reduce costs [and] to consolidate.
The lesson is, [driving] a total solution that reduces costs for programs—how
do you streamline it? That's why the connectivity makes sense because now you
can have this home base, which could be your [Cvent meeting request] form and
then you can punch out to a Bizly. Then connecting the data together, you have
the best of both worlds. You have a centralized program, centralized visibility
and then decentralized usage and capabilities. That's the hybrid world we're
creating.
BTN: You rightly point out that cost will continue to
be a factor for all meetings, including small meetings. How are companies
leveraging Bizly to reduce costs—not just facilitate more small meetings.
Shah: Offices are running at 40 to 50 percent capacity.
We see a big push to use these as venues, so people don't book off site. Bizly
was the first platform that allowed you to actually put office locations in the
platform and use that office location as a venue. We did that pre-pandemic, and
we have enhanced our capabilities. You can also leverage your preferred venue
programs and preferred rates [through Bizly], which achieves about a 20 percent
reduction in actual costs. There's also indirect savings.
BTN: Like what?
Companies [often] staff a Cvent product with full-time
employees—both internally and sometimes travel management companies they use
for staffing. Bizly reduces that [for simpler meetings]. We have an optional offering,
Support Plus, that we'll do some of that human touchpoint, such as contract
review and negotiation, routing for signature, and making sure the right
payment is being applied and getting that final spend. We're adding all those
things to the mix right now to drive total overall spend reduction, both direct
and indirect.
Support Plus will do commissions reclaim as well—and this is
new. Many small meetings have room blocks, and those rooms are commissionable. There's
a way to put [a program] together that is cost-neutral. Everything is covered
through commissions recovery. That's the total solution. [Editor’s note: Shah
is referring to Bizly platform and program administration costs, when he refers
to “cost-neutral” programs, not the cost of the meetings themselves.]
There's a business model innovation [when] putting all the
pieces together [to] help clients reduce cost: use onsite [office] venues, use
preferred venues, reduce full-time employees, and get commissions back. Those
are the four pillars that drive cost reduction.
BTN: Did you go this direction of Support Plus
because of the labor shortage? Did you see a void that you could fill with the
service that you already had and build on top of it?
Shah: Prior to us having a fully developed product,
we actually started with a full concierge [offering]. Then we built
self-service capabilities and stopped offering it. More recently, people are
saying there's a labor shortage, so that led us to actually bring back the
concierge and help customers with the pain they're facing around staff.
BTN: In terms of that commission-funded business
model, is that still viable given the commissions reductions trends on the
hotel side?
Shah: For now, it is. Hotels are still offering
something. While the game is still being played with commissions, there's a
huge ecosystem of companies that live on that model. So we are going to play
with the ecosystem as it exists today.
BTN: How will Bizly invest in the product or business
for the remainder of the year?
Shah: There are a few big investments and
optimizations for this year. We became a lot more global in our scope. Now we
have Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, and Asia-Pacific. It's completely a global platform. We also
added language translations for eight languages—mostly the European languages,
but we've had multiple clients expand to EMEA and other regions as well.
We are also going to be the first platform in the market to
have a full AI capability. You'll be able to use natural language to say, “Hey,
I want to do a meeting for 30 people in Denver and I want to do workshops
during the day, then we want to have a fun lunch. We want to kind of wrap up
and then we want to do a dinner and then we need 10 guest rooms.” You should
just be able to write that in natural language and Bizly will generate the
registration, the agenda planning and shortlist the venues to use. That's going
to be the big thing we launch this year.