Strategic Meetings Management Consulting
Why is an SMM Program important?
A lot of companies don’t know how much they are spending on meetings because the charges are scattered across travel, marketing, and individual expense reports. An SMM Program helps clients align their meetings with their business goals by producing greater visibility into meeting spend and reduces liability and redundancy.
By creating standardized policies and procedures, centralizing sourcing across all departments, and placing the responsibility in the hands of experts, a company can reduce their meeting spend by as much as 10 – 25 percent.
Benefits of an SMM
With a strategic meeting policy in place, a company will minimize its financial risk and overall meeting spend by:
- Reducing redundancy among many departments
- Increasing program transparency and budget compliance
- Reigning in travel expenses
- Managing regulatory and duty of care compliance
- Increasing buying power
How Thallo Helps You
Managing hotel contracts is often assigned to people who have little experience with how to effectively negotiate, manage attrition, or minimize a company’s risk. Having a person who is experienced in hotel contracting and negotiations is essential to a good strategic policy.
Consolidation can also increase buying power and reduce costs. Hotels and other vendors will often provide deep discounts for volume business. Without a centralized system, meetings are scattered among many vendors and organizations reducing the potential leverage. In a situation where one department cancels a meeting, but another is in the process of procuring one, it is possible the canceled meeting can be replaced with the new. If no centralized system is in place, one department is unaware of another’s need and is therefore forced to pay damages on the canceled program.
Centralization also reduces the potential of booking two meetings over the same dates where some of the same participants are required to attend.
Thallo can help your company create a custom SMM program that will help you centralize meeting procurement producing quantifiable data, consolidate spend, leverage your buying power, reduce redundancies, and standardize budgets and processes in order to attain quantifiable savings and mitigate risk.
Whether you want to jump all in, start gradually, outsource the entire process, or keep everything in-house, Thallo will guide you through the process. We’ll recommend the best service providers and resources to achieve your objectives. We do not believe there is one organization or resource that excels at everything. As consultants, our job is to manage the process while connecting you with the best resources in the industry.
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