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Management BTN 2019 Best Practitioner

Welch Manages Meetings Data to Transform Business

By Elizabeth West / September 23, 2019 / Contact Reporter

As a financial institution, data-driven decision-making is the norm for Wells Fargo. The company has a history of strong meetings management through its different lines of business, but three years ago, it took the leap to creating a centralized meetings and events team—and joining everyone together on a single meetings management technology. Wells Fargo took the opportunity to overhaul its meetings data strategy, as well.

Business initiatives senior manager Meghann Welch led that charge. She cut against the grain, choosing a smaller technology partner willing to take a deep data management journey with the organization. "Anyone who's been through a technology transition before knows it's never easy," she said. That has been true with Wells Fargo's new technology supplier, Aventri, she added, but "they are doing a lot of reconfiguration of their architecture and redefining their road map to accommodate a lot of our requests while still servicing their other customers." That willingness, she believes, could transform Aventri's capabilities and broaden the provider's appeal to large companies with the most mature strategic meetings programs.

The right data capture and business intelligence aren't a given, no matter what technology platform a company leverages to do the job. "Knowing what we are trying to measure, defining that and understanding the story we are trying to tell—that was the hardest part in developing our data strategy," said Welch, giving props to data management lead Rob Jensen, who shaped that path forward. "You need that internal analytics skill and also that passion to work with vendors and partners to push the data and reporting insights to the highest levels."

Currently, Wells Fargo uses five key metrics to track its strategic meetings management program, as well as the performance of each meeting. Volume of work is a key metric for the meetings and events department, with 84 professionals running 3,000 events annually. Internal space utilization looks at how the meetings team partners effectively with Wells Fargo's corporate properties group. Expense management is critical and Welch lauded the meetings team for its "commitment to financial stewardship, while maximizing the attendee experience."

Wells Fargo tracks attendee type to help partners know who is at their events, "what their goals are for being there and how we are meeting those goals," said Welch. Indeed, the company is working to extend these insights and is pursuing metrics that will illuminate "the financial impact on the bottom line based on attendee engagement and lasting behavioral change."

Getting to that point requires dedication from every member of Wells Fargo's meetings and events team. Meetings management companies have noted SMMP's challenge to deliver on the promise of meetings data management and have underlined their role and bridging the last mile of data capture for many clients. At Wells Fargo, the granular level of data has come from embedding the meetings management tool as a true enterprise technology. "It is the starting point and the end point of the event planning life cycle, from the [internal] partner request to engage our meetings and events services, to all the sourcing through the tool, to approvals for spend, to attendee registration and management, to reconciliation and closeout," said Welch.

It can be a challenge to create the right ethos to get that job done. "Data entry is not the most popular thing to do. It's hard to slow down and enter everything into a system so someone else can report on it and manipulate that data. Our planners, though, understand what the data is used for and its value. That allows them to view the data piece as a more strategic task." 

Every team member sees the results—and how they are transforming Wells Fargo's business. "The data enables planners to have strategic conversations. They understand their partners' businesses and provide recommendations based not only on historic data but also from other lines of business that have similar objectives." Even beyond that, the M&E team is transforming not just meetings decision-making at Wells Fargo but providing broader insights. "The way our line of business partners work has changed based on our data," said Welch.

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