Is Strategic Meetings Management right for your business?

Strategic Meetings Management is worth doing when meetings and events are being bought in enough places, by enough people, that nobody can see the whole picture. Where that is not true, it is overhead.

The questions below are the ones we would ask in a first conversation. Answer them honestly — about an ordinary week, not your best one — and the result will place you against our five-level maturity model with a suggestion of where to start. Nothing is submitted or stored.

The five levels are descriptive rather than graded. Most organisations sit between two of them, and the useful placement is the lower one, because that is where the next piece of work actually is.

A score is only useful if you understand what each answer costs. Here is what a “no” actually means in practice, in the order the diagnosis usually matters.

Does the organisation know its total meetings and events spend? Without a number, meetings are not a category — they are a collection of unrelated transactions. Nothing follows from a figure nobody has: you cannot negotiate on volume you cannot evidence, you cannot prioritise, and you cannot demonstrate improvement because you have no baseline to improve from. This is the question that gates every other one.

Are different departments sourcing the same venues independently? Where they are, the organisation is competing with itself. Two departments approach the same venue group in the same quarter, each presenting as a single small booking, and each agrees a rate accordingly. The venue knows the aggregate; you do not. That asymmetry is the most reliably expensive thing on this list.

Does procurement see requirements before suppliers are selected? If procurement first sees a meeting at the invoice, its influence is limited to querying something already committed. Everything that matters commercially — competition, terms, cancellation exposure — was decided by somebody who was trying to book a room quickly. See meetings procurement.

Are meeting contracts managed consistently? Venue contracts carry cancellation schedules, attrition clauses and liability positions that are routinely accepted by people with no authority to accept them and no training in what they mean. The cost is invisible until an event is postponed, at which point it becomes a single large number that nobody budgeted for.

Can you identify your most frequently used venues? If not, you cannot consolidate, and you are almost certainly paying transactional rates to suppliers you use often enough to have negotiated with. The most common finding in a first data exercise is that three or four venues account for a substantial share of activity and none of them has a rate agreement.

Can you see meeting and event activity across departments? Without cross-departmental visibility, duplication is undetectable — two teams running similar events for overlapping audiences six weeks apart, neither aware of the other. There is also a duty of care dimension: if you cannot see the activity, you cannot say with confidence where your people are.

Are preferred suppliers actually being used? A preferred list that exists but is bypassed is worse than no list. It creates the belief that the commercial work has been done while the volume continues to leak elsewhere, and it makes the next negotiation harder because the committed volume never materialised.

Is there a consistent process for commissioning meetings? Where there is not, every requirement is organised by whoever raised it, at whatever standard they happen to apply, at the cost of their actual job. That last part is the hidden expense: senior people spending hours on venue logistics is a real cost that never appears as one.

There are organisations for which a programme would be a net negative, and it is worth being direct about which.

There is also a partial case worth naming. Some organisations have a real fragmentation problem in one area — conferences, or training, or client hospitality — and no issue anywhere else. The answer there is not a full programme but better buying in the one place it matters, which is closer to venue procurement than to Strategic Meetings Management as a discipline. SMM versus venue finding sets out where that line falls.

If you are somewhere in the middle — enough volume to be uncomfortable, not enough to justify enterprise machinery — that is the position mid-market Strategic Meetings Management is written for.

Nothing dramatic, and nothing expensive. The next step is a conversation about what your answers actually describe, followed by measurement — because the first real decision, about ownership and scope, is much easier to make when there is a number on the table.

The sequence from there is set out in implementing Strategic Meetings Management, and the anatomy of what you would eventually build in the SMM programme. If you need to argue for it internally first, building the business case is the relevant page.