Certainly the words “strategic meetings management” have been on the radar of every meeting professional for years. Whether you’ve been looking for that seat at the table,

Kari Knoll Kesler is president and chief strategist for KK Strategic Solutions, Strategic Solutions for Meetings, Travel and Sourcing Driving Business Innovation. kariknollkesler@gmail.com, 952-445-6111

participating in education tracks or struggling to understand your role in this phenomenon, everywhere you turn, SMM keeps popping up. So what does it mean and why does it matter?

SMMP Defined

Long ago (six years) and far away (a meeting room in Philadelphia, PA), a group of starry-eyed middle managers sat brainstorming a term to replace “meetings consolidation.” Their charge: to develop resources and education for the constituents of the National Business Travel Association (NBTA), traditionally travel management pros, who were being asked by their leadership to manage meeting spend. After all, they had already proven their worth by successfully driving efficiencies in travel management through the application of sound business principles and progressive procurement practices — why not meetings? The natural starting point was to clearly define the subject and then deliver content in a well planned and progressive manner.

After several hours of lively debate, the term Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) emerged victorious and the seeds of NBTA’s “Framework for Success” series of white papers were sown. There was no talk of competitive posturing, no talk of controversy stirring, just a focus on the task at hand and doing well for the association and its members.

Forward

Today, you can walk the halls at any industry-related conference and take classes on SMM — SMM Basics, SMM Implementation, SMM Policy, SMM Payment Solutions. Unfortunately, more often than not, the content is rudimentary at best, delivered by meeting professionals with negligible SMM experience and a vague understanding of the actual discipline. This is not good for the audience or the industry. As industry associations struggle to keep their content and education on the cutting edge, the pressure to produce something, anything SMM related is unyielding.

In addition, as suppliers in this space attempt to compete for their share of the Fortune 500 customers, they are similarly pressured to become educated and appear “expert” in SMM. They offer strategic consulting, program design, operational excellence, and any other service that may get traction related to SMM. Yet they remain only as experienced as their customer’s programs and often leave behind their focus on solid execution.

Where Are The Experts And How Can You Tell The Truth From The Fiction?

The truth is that Strategic Meetings Management is a disciplined approach to managing enterprise-wide meeting and event activities, processes,

The truth is that Strategic Meetings Management is a disciplined approach to managing enterprise-wide meeting and event activities...

suppliers and data in order to achieve measurable business objectives that align with the organizations’ strategic goals/vision, and deliver value in the form of quantitative savings, risk mitigation and service quality.

What SMM Is Not

• A single planner or group of planners becoming strategic about the delivery of their meetings.
• Strategic Meeting Planning & Delivery (SMPD).
• Meeting Architecture.
• Meeting procurement/sourcing.

Another critical truth is that there are very few experienced SMM experts — if you define an SMM expert as an experienced strategist in designing, deploying, implementing, maintaining and continuously improving an enterprise-wide program. The majority of these experts are still working for the company where they first deployed SMM. This speaks to the infancy of the discipline rather than the lack of available talent.

The first fiction is that every meeting planner can and should get that seat at the table and start their own SMM. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting a seat at the table, but it’s not nearly as exciting as you may believe. More important, all the time spent focused on securing that seat could have been better spent achieving measurable successes and letting your results speak for themselves. Trust me, C-level executives live and breathe results often to the exclusion of other important items.

The other fiction (and I cannot possibly name them all, so these are just today’s top picks) is that because you’ve heard of/read up on/learned about SMM, you can teach the subject. With all due respect, this is as unsuitable as having a travel manager try to teach meeting planning skills. As mentioned above the content would be rudimentary at best, delivered by professionals with negligible experience and a vague understanding of the actual discipline. Surely this is not good for the constituents or the industry.

Certification Is A Reality

It begins with a shared definition of SMM upon which professional certification is developed, delivered and maintained in a world-class fashion. This brings us back to the halls of NBTA.

At the NBTA International Convention & Exhibition in July 2008, an unlikely group of three dozen professionals from all corners of the meeting and

This maturation of our industry is truly the birth and official recognition of our work as a career — and our career choices are expanding.

travel industries gathered to build the foundation of the industry’s first certification in Strategic Meetings Management (SMMC). Over the past year, a core task force of 14, with the help of a few academic types, has delivered SMMC in a record 12 months.

The pilot program will be delivered prior to the 2009 NBTA convention later this month. This certification will qualify graduates to develop and deploy an SMM program, promote it within their company and engage in continuous improvement for continued success. Each graduate will be well versed in creating and maintaining SMM programs to drive the greatest value for meetings with an enterprise-wide approach to evaluating meetings activity, spend, processes and data. These will be bona fide SMM experts.

Why The Truth Does Matter

This industry as we know it continues to change at a rapid pace. The once-centralized role of meeting planner as the content architect, marketer, event planner, procurement professional, money manager, travel planner, menu designer, attendee coordinator and onsite expert is fragmenting. This role has, and continues, to diverge into specialty skills such as SMM Strategist, Meeting Architect, Event Marketing Expert and Onsite Travel Director. This maturation of our industry is truly the birth and official recognition of our work as a career — and our career choices are expanding.

Soon you will be able to match your top skills with a specialty area and track your successes through mentoring programs. You will expand your options through professional certification and college education. You will respond to job postings that actually list your profession in the title rather than as a sub-bullet toward the bottom.

The truth helps us all be more articulate about the value of meetings and our own professional value proposition.

The fiction perpetuates confusion and leads to a lack of clarity at a pivotal time in the maturity of our industry.

If we can, as an industry, have a shared vision of this challenge and an intentional strategy about how to succeed in delivering relevant and clear content, all of our constituents will benefit. Certification in SMM is just one important step in this process.    C&IT