Kati Quigley, CMP, is now senior director of the worldwide partner group at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Over the past 23 years, she has risen from rank-and-file meeting planner to oversee all aspects of the single most important event Microsoft hosts — its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, which draws 16,000 attendees. She exemplifies the career path many planners now aspire to.

“The big change,” Quigley says, “is that a meeting planner is now viewed as someone with a larger business function, rather than just someone who thinks of it as a fun thing to do and sources the hotel rooms and flights. You’re running a business event now, and it’s about the corporate bottom line. So as a planner, you have to think much more in terms of a process and not just in terms of your event.”

An important related change, she says, is increased fiscal responsibility. “In the heyday of the meeting industry, when corporations spent a lot of money on meetings, your budget really didn’t matter that much,” she says. “And the perception really was about attendees having fun, rather than getting a return on the investment. Now, it’s more about your business acumen than it is your ability to select the right hotel.”

Kelley Butler, director of meetings and events at McDonald’s Corporation in Oak Brook, IL, has risen to a senior position within the company by embracing the evolution from a tactical role to strategic leadership.

“Although I was never actually a meeting planner, everything I have ever done in my entire career really goes back to the essence of what SMM is,” says Butler, who joined MacDonald’s 10 years ago as an event planner and two years later assumed responsibility for all of its meetings and events. “And that is being able to centralize and source, leverage your total spend and protect your brand. And I was doing those things regardless of what my job title was.”

As a result, Butler was in the right place at the right time, with the right perspective, to seize a career opportunity when SMM emerged as a major corporate discipline. She now oversees hundreds of meeting planners and administrative assistants who create thousands of meetings and events under the banner of an SMM program formally implemented in January.

Her message to meeting planners is a simple one. “The guidance I give people — and especially those that are just coming into the meeting business — is that our industry is changing so much and so fast that in order to keep up with it and have value and be recognized within your organization, you have to be at the table,” she says. “And in order to be at the table, you have to get out of the ‘textbook’ side of it and understand what the specific business objectives of your company and your brand are. You have to understand the organization’s strategy and then you have to show how you fit into that. You have to elevate your thinking now. It’s no longer about tactics or sourcing. It’s about corporate strategy and how you can use meetings and events to serve that strategy. And you also have to understand the analytics that are related to all that and what your impact is, not just on the meetings and events, but the culture of the company in general. You have to be a strategic partner, not just a meeting planner.”

The Denial Factor

Unfortunately, however, Sexton says, too many planners have failed to grasp that inescapable new reality. “There are still a lot of planners that are in denial,” she says. “And that’s because historically, an awful lot of the people who have been successful as meeting planners are essentially tactical in nature. So when you ask them to become more strategic, more visionary, and play a role at a higher level within the organization, you often find that they are ignoring the fact that this is the evolution within the industry. They’re very, very busy with the day-to-day details of the meetings, and their focus is on making sure that everything is delivered on time and on budget. And they are also failing to understand that in today’s world, the logistical aspects of the meeting can be outsourced very easily.”

Butler finds a certain irony in the fact that so many planners remain in fear of SMM and what they perceive as its negative impact on their role. And that is that it’s not really such a fearful thing at all if you truly understand it.

“A lot of planners think it’s a bigger issue than it really is,” Butler says. “And that’s just because they haven’t been in the strategic arena before. They’re used to going on site visits and finding out what the newest and greatest dinner menu item is. They’re not used to sitting at the table and talking about what the real business objectives of the meeting are. And one reason for that historically has been that some meetings were being planned years in advance, before anyone really knew what the company was actually trying to accomplish with that meeting. There wasn’t even an agenda yet.”

Now that is changing, Butler points out, as meeting hosts and management executives assess the practical value and bottom-line benefits of a meeting before it is even formally approved.

Facing the challenges of such a changing world, says Cari Strouse, CMP, CMM, meetings, events and tradeshows director at CH2M HILL, a global project delivery firm located in Englewood, CO, planners who have long been in a tactical or sourcing mode must learn to think and act differently; they must think and act much more strategic. For planners who want to survive and prosper in this new environment, Strouse says, the message is you must be seen as a strategic advisor, not as someone who books hotel rooms and decides what’s for dinner.

Strouse practices what she preaches. And as a result of her own initiative, she now oversees an ever-growing SMM program.

“When a meeting request comes in the door, the discussion her assigned planner has with the internal business partner sponsoring the meeting begins with a consulting meeting,” she says. “We ask what the meeting is about, what the objectives are, what the meeting is actually trying to accomplish. In today’s market, any person can call a hotel or get online and do an electronic RFP and easily get the basic data on what the initial meeting will cost. But the process should start with your client base and what they are trying to accomplish — not just how many hotel rooms you need or what those will cost. You must act as a strategic consultant, not just continue in a traditional logistics manner. It’s more than bringing together a certain number of people for a certain number of days in a particular destination. It’s much more than that, when your organization is spending money on a meeting.”

A New Career Strategy

Given such a quickly shifting landscape, Strouse says, traditional minded meeting professionals must grow and evolve. “What I say to meeting professionals who are considering a career in the meetings industry, you have to continue your growth with education, but also figure out how you are going to demonstrate the metrics of your value to the company,” says Strouse, who co-chaired a PCMA panel discussion on the topic at its annual convention this year. “You have to be able to demonstrate hard metrics and share the dashboards on your meeting spend/savings and what the organization is actually accomplishing from that spend. You have to learn to take all of that information and put it into a form that clearly demonstrates your value as part of the overall process.”

Strouse did just that several years ago when she took the initiative and proposed a centralized SMM program for the company. “I created a business case,” she says, “and presented it to my executive leadership.” She asked for the opportunity to handle a couple of the company’s training programs to document the cost savings. “Once the data was presented and the savings put on paper, it started a solid path forward for our growing SMM program. I was very fortunate, because I had executive buy-in very early in the process,” she  notes.

Strouse says she ended up with the opportunity to move forward and organically grow the overall program of CH2M HILL’s meetings, events and tradeshows team.

Butler concurs in that assessment. “The first thing you have to do is your due diligence, so you can find out what the people who have gone before you have done,” she says. “You have to step back and listen and learn. I think a lot of planners are afraid of the word ‘strategy.’ They really make more out of it than what it really is. It’s just a matter of taking the time to sit down with each one of your meeting owners and understand what their objectives are and how you can help them think through what the end result of their meetings should be. Then you just have to show them how to get there. It’s really just a matter of learning how to formulate the right questions, then come back with the right answers.”

Quigley agrees that planners simply have to think and act differently, but that the change is easy to make. “Some planners just get too caught up in thoughts about how their budgets balanced and so therefore, it was a great event,” she says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a great event, because it might not have had any real relevance to actual business objectives or the company’s bottom line. And if it hasn’t been relevant in that sense, then it’s a waste of time and resources.”

Many veteran planners, Quigley says, still judge the success of a meeting by post-event surveys that show how many attendees liked the hotel or the dinner menu. That, she stresses, is no longer a viable measure of success. Now it’s about whether the sales goals were met or customer service improved as a result of the training. “That’s where the typical planner needs to shift their thinking,” she says. “That’s where we have shifted at Microsoft and where more companies are shifting. That’s one of the things that has grown out of SMM that I’m not sure was there at the beginning. It started off being about whether our meetings are efficient. Now it’s evolved into asking whether they are being effective.”

Get Educated

Although ongoing education has always been an important part of a successful career path for planners, today it is more important than ever.

“My team is required to do 40 hours of education, either internally or within the industry,” Butler says. “They’re also encouraged to join meeting organizations and get involved on a committee, because I feel that unless you really get involved with an organization, you don’t really benefit from your membership.”

Butler has led by example, serving on a PCMA educational committee. “And you learn a lot from that kind of involvement,” she says. “You also identify peers within the industry you can learn from.”

For example, she says, with a little research, any planner can find a mentor who has already successfully gone through exactly what he or she is going through now.  And the available resources are expanding almost daily.

PCMA has created a new corporate meeting task force that will work to develop more specific educational programs and opportunities for corporate planners. And one track, Sexton says, will be teaching general business acumen and leadership skills.

Without such ongoing education and the development of expanded skills, traditional planners will eventually render themselves obsolete, Sexton says. “And part of the reason for that is that your CEO or the V.P. of marketing is not going to pull you up,” she says. “You have to raise your hand and volunteer to take on these new areas of responsibility. You have to show initiative. You have to show leadership skills. And if you don’t do that, you’re not going to be heard, because in the minds of so many executives, meeting planners are people who make sure there is the right number of chairs in the room or that there’s enough coffee. And when I go out and talk to CEOs, one of the things I hear over and over again is that they think their meeting planners are not strategic or visionary enough. And too many planners are just burying their heads and worrying about today’s details of a meeting and hoping the rest of this stuff is going to go away. But it’s not going away.”

In fact, “The State of Strategic Meetings Management 2013,” a new survey issued by the Global Business Travel Association, reports that more than half of the respondents work for companies with an SMM program in place or in development. Most respondents say SMM is a beneficial program that increases their control over cost savings (76 percent); streamlines meetings and event processes (76 percent); and helps better allocate resources and savings (67 percent). Out of those without an SMM program, 41 percent believe a program will be implemented by their company within the next three years.

The good news, Strouse says, is that the most powerful tool for career advancement is simply a demonstration of initiative. “That’s what I did,” she says. “I walked into my CFO and said, ‘I know this is crazy and that we don’t centralize a lot of things, but here’s the value of doing it when it comes to our meetings. And this is something I believe in. Here’s what we need to do.’ And that’s how I ended up getting a promotion into my current job.”

Butler has a similarly simple message for planners who want to get ahead rather than fall behind in the era of SMM. “Don’t be afraid of what’s going on,” she says. “Get in there and learn how you can make the most of it.” C&IT