Fashioning a
New Meetings
Strategy
New work models transform meetings
management models, perhaps permanently.
The travel and meetings program at Indianapolis-based health insurer Elevance Health has been combining transient travel with meetings for 11 years—at least from a sourcing perspective.
“When we negotiate our annual RFP for hotels for transient, we also push out our meeting information in the same RFP. So, everything is pre-negotiated and contracts are pre-set,” said travel and events director, Cindy Heston. “Everything is signed, sealed and delivered, and we're not adding any additional work to our [internal] stakeholders” when they reach out to a preferred supplier to initiate a meeting or event.
Since the pandemic and the onset of remote work, however, the needs of Elevance’s business have changed. It’s not now all about gathering people together to meet somewhere offsite.
“Prior to Covid, I would say having your meetings in the office was the antithesis of what we wanted to do. We wanted to go offsite because [people] were in the office every day,” Heston explained. “Now, people are in the office maybe two or three times a week and so we’re building out a program around small, simple [meetings] that is based around our offices. We have the infrastructure built up around that and, fortunately for us, the hotels are already built into that process.”
A number of newer meetings platforms have enabled corporate clients to aggregate office locations and meetings spaces into their tools to make them part of a single workflow stream for potential bookers. Hubli, last April, announced its Office Connect module, which puts internal office space side by side with hotels and other external venues in the search and booking process.
Hubli CEO Ciaran Delaney told BTN more companies than ever want to leverage their internal spaces to the point where the Hubli sales process increasingly engages with facilities managers and corporate real estate teams as well as travel and meetings managers to support new policies that preference those internal spaces.
Heston works with simple meetings technology provider Bizly, which offers similar capability. She also said her team is now “working collaboratively” with Elevance’s corporate real estate team to support onsite meetings and update stakeholders on office makeovers that enable more functional meetings. Office listings in the Bizly tool include photos, layouts and even local catering recommendations.
“Our offices have become very much like hotels. We have individuals on site that are basically supporting meetings in the conference centers at our offices, which have all been redone.” It is so similar in function and format, she said, that “we really do call it ‘hoteling.’ ”
Heston has designed a workflow for simple meetings that directs stakeholders to Bizly, where they can “seamlessly” make a request for availability at preferred hotels and office spaces—a process she said “worked really well.”
In terms of external venues, it’s not an RFP or an instant booking, at least not in major markets, Heston reiterated, “because our prices are pre-negotiated."
Self Service, Help Service
Elevance uses a number of meetings technologies, including Cvent and Lenos. Stakeholders are required to complete a meeting request form linked to a budget owner and cost center for any event that will exceed $5,000. “That data is fed into our expense tool, which has a check to ensure the budget owner has signature authority and the cost center is a real cost center,” she explained. “So, everything is transparent.”
Cost isn’t the single factor to determine whether the meeting is directed to a self-service tool or routed to a more full-service model, she said. That depends on the level of the attendees and the complexity of the event. Elevance relies on Meetings & Incentives Worldwide for outsourcing services and support for the in-house meetings team—and the firm may be called in for meetings with an executive footprint, no matter what size. During peak demand, M&IW works “across the whole gamut” of events, from small client meetings to large multi-day events. The outsourcing team will use Bizly but also ramps up to Lenos or Cvent for more robust or customized needs.
Self-service models have become a viable meetings solution in recent years, thanks to this spate of simplified technologies like Bizly, Groupize, HRS, Hubli and others. Not all companies want to use them. Only 12 percent of BTN survey respondents said their companies contracted with such tools.
One buyer speaking to BTN on background trialed a self-serve meetings tool and called it “a mess” in terms of policy and compliance in their complex and layered organization. Additionally, that company shied away from implementing a secondary technology to their Cvent platform to handle simpler meetings because it risked “fragmenting the data picture” for the buyer’s meetings management program.
Heston hasn’t found that to be the case, but she supports the self-service route with what she calls a “concierge service” wherein the Elevance travel and meetings team provides a link at the bottom of the company’s meetings request form that enables meeting owners to ask for logistical and planning help. “It’s really just knowledge sharing at that point because everything is there for them in the Bizly system,” she said.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Heston isn’t working on program improvements. Currently, she’s working to streamline the meetings payment and expense process through Emburse Chrome River, with a customized solution using American Express virtual cards within the Bizly environment.
“Our objective is to set up a virtual card for a particular meeting and let the stakeholder—not my team—run the expense through the standard [reporting] process” through Emburse, she said. This way, all the relevant meetings costs are reconciled to the event automatically and meeting owners take advantage of the existing transient expense reporting process.
Starting from Scratch
At software firm Dynatrace, smaller ad hoc meetings have increased across the company since the adoption of a hybrid working model. Global travel and events manager Karen Heslin conceded that getting teams together “can be expensive,” especially with travel cost increases over the past two years.
Heslin joined Dynatrace in 2022 and spent her first 18 months building a cohesive travel program for the company. Now, her efforts are focused on meetings activity.
“Sourcing and contracting are the biggest things to capture [to make] sure we're minimizing risk and showing savings,” she said. “But I can't just press a button and say, ‘every event over 10 rooms needs to come through [the travel and meetings team],’ because we don't really have the resources to support that.”
Heslin largely will lean on policy guidelines to drive process change. “You have to create a policy and train people to do their own things,” she said. But rather than by spend or attendee volume, she is considering implementing policies that pertain to event types, such as internal meetings or customer-facing events.
Her biggest challenge is “trying to figure out where to start” amid “all the different kinds of events.” Heslin chose to partner with internal stakeholders responsible for the lion’s share of training and product meetings—human resources and marketing—to gain greater visibility over spend.
And she played one of the most influential strategic meetings management cards in the process: delivering a “what’s in it for me” moment.
“If I can help them get reporting on what kind of meetings they’re doing and what they’re spending, and they can present that to their own leadership, that also helps them look good,” she said. And once they start to look good, stakeholders will trust the process, which admittedly is a light touch, at least for now.
Heslin isn’t looking at any specialized tools. She’s leaning on existing travel booking and spend management platforms like Egencia and ZipHQ. Egencia will capture air spend through the transient online booking tool by utilizing reason codes already tagged to known, repeat events. Zip holds the purchase order records and payment data that will tell the rest of the meetings story.
For savings, Heslin is in the process of mapping hotels close to Dynatrace office locations with the view to place smaller groups at preferred transient hotels, a strategy she implemented during her 19-year tenure at insurance giant Metlife.
Burn Down Traditional SMMP?
Estée Lauder global head of travel and meetings Jami Stapelmann told BTN that new work models, Teams and Zoom, combined with simplified meetings booking tools have convinced her that traditional, centralized command-and-control strategic meetings management programs are a thing of the past—at least for her company.
“Strategic meetings management is old-fashioned. Done. Finished. There are no longer separate work streams for meetings and corporate [travel]. We're all one,” Stapelmann said. “There's a lot of [simple meetings activity] that can move right into our corporate travel program. If it’s just catering and a few sleeping rooms, that doesn’t require meetings management at all.”
All that said, Estée Lauder has a mature meetings program—for Stapelmann, moving beyond that means decentralizing the logistical function to respective non-professional meeting owners but maintaining a tight data and reporting game with the help of technology and simplified processes.
“I'm looking for [a tech solution] to fit payments, booking and reporting, but I'm combining corporate and meetings together… [and] tying all of the metrics to corporate travel to provide a full reporting package.”
She’s not interested in getting her hands into how each of Estée Lauder’s brands wants to present itself or execute meetings on the ground.
“We have a mature program with processes in place to operationalize across 40 brands. How each brand wants to execute [and] what they need to bring their meetings to life, I don't get involved with that. There would never be a policy around it,” she said.
She does, however, want to address the reality of how Estée Lauder business and business travel is evolving toward smaller groups and meetings.
“We need visibility into everything because now we're traveling in groups, smaller groups, and we need technology to support that."
The Vision
Stapelmann has identified three types of meetings: “Big meetings of 500 attendees or more,” for which Estée Lauder requires project-based RFPs; internal meetings, which “should all now be via Teams or Zoom,” she said; and “external-facing meetings,” for which Stapelmann is looking to deploy a specialized self-service meetings tool for non-professional planners.
“I really just want two booking pathways: One they can ‘instant book’ a meeting at our preferred hotels [and another where] they can be diverted to do an RFP,” she said. "But we want to set up the system with a meeting request form so we can see the size and scope and then build the components to steer them in the right way.”
Said in that way, Stapelmann’s post-SMM vision sounds similar to Heston’s current reality. Yet, the beauty company and health insurance businesses certainly have different requirements—and that may free Stapelmann to push the envelope a little more.
For her business, she said, “There's no need to keep a meetings management [professional] on payroll for events that happen once every two to five years.” Those less frequent, larger events are ripe for full outsourcing. And, Stapelmann posited, “anyone can plan a simple meeting” given the right content and technology support.
To that end, she’s looking at “all kinds of small meetings technologies” to simplify and streamline her program. In her eyes, any platform that requires training is a strict no-go, and she doesn’t want to waste time or resources on RFP processes for small meetings either. Instead, Stapelmann is treating such meetings much more like corporate travel.
“I'm looking for [a tech solution] to fit payments, booking and reporting, but I'm combining corporate and meetings together … [and] tying all of the metrics to corporate travel to provide a full reporting package,” she said.
Estée Lauder is beta-testing a solution that offers instant booking capabilities across preferred hotels in locations close to retailers or offices since, according to Stapelmann, most meetings will be in office locations.
Stapelmann would like to see the next round of meetings innovation involve the request form itself: “That’s where I’d like AI to take over,” she said, to create an “on-demand” system that allows “anyone, anywhere” to execute a simple meeting to support an Estée Lauder brand.
That kind of simplicity, it should be noted, doesn’t come from magical thinking. There’s a deep foundation required.
“Behind the curtain, we have a single global agency, a single online booking tool and single meeting request form. That consolidation has already taken place. So, we're really just tweaking it now to find out better ways to work together,” she said.
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