The SMM maturity model

Organisations asking whether they need Strategic Meetings Management usually want to know one thing first: is this normal, or are we unusually disorganised? A maturity model answers that. It gives you a vocabulary for describing where you are, and a view of what the next sensible increment looks like.

This is our own framework. We built it because it is a useful way to have the conversation, not because anybody accredits it. There is no certificate attached to any level, no assessor, and no governing body behind it. If you tell a colleague you are “at Level 3”, that means something between you and us and nothing to anybody else.

From the inside, Level 1 does not feel like a problem. Individual meetings go well. The people organising them are capable, they have venues they trust, and nobody is complaining. The absence is only visible from above: no one can answer a straightforward question about total activity or total spend without a project to find out.

What unlocks the move to Level 2: counting. Not restructuring, not policy — simply establishing what happened last year and what it cost, however approximately. How to measure meetings spend covers how, and meetings spend visibility covers why the number matters more than its precision.

What stalls progress here: the belief that measurement requires a system. It does not. It requires an agreed definition of what counts and somebody willing to assemble an imperfect first picture. The second most common stall is that nobody owns the question, so it is asked periodically and never answered.

Level 2 is the frustrating one. You now know roughly what is being spent and you can see the patterns — the same three venues, the same four departments, the same rates being agreed independently by people who have never spoken. Knowing does not yet change anything, and there is a period where visibility feels like it has made things worse.

It has not. It has moved the problem from suspected to demonstrable, which is what makes the next step arguable.

What unlocks the move to Level 3: a single route in. One defined way that a requirement enters the process, so information is captured when the meeting is briefed rather than reconstructed when the invoice lands. That shift — from retrospective data to captured data — is the whole of the Level 2 to Level 3 transition.

What stalls progress here: building better reports on the same retrospective data. It is a natural instinct and it produces increasingly sophisticated descriptions of a problem nobody is acting on. Reducing fragmented event spend is the more useful direction.

Level 3 feels like relief. There is a way of doing this. New starters can be told where to go, sourcing follows a method rather than a personality, and a meetings policy exists that somebody occasionally cites. Most organisations that set out to improve this category arrive here and find it a considerable improvement on where they started.

The gap that remains is commercial. A consistent process does not by itself produce better terms — you can source consistently and still agree ten different rates with the same venue group.

What unlocks the move to Level 4: supplier strategy with teeth. Consolidating repeat relationships into a preferred venue programme, negotiating terms centrally, and making approvals and contracting consistent enough that the negotiated position is actually the one used. See supplier management and the approval process.

What stalls progress here: comfort. Level 3 is good enough to stop the complaints, and the effort required for Level 4 has to be argued for against a backdrop of things working reasonably well. The other stall is a preferred supplier list that exists on paper while bookings continue to go elsewhere, which produces the appearance of Level 4 with none of the benefit.

Level 4 feels like a category being run properly, because it is. Suppliers are managed, thresholds are defined, contracts follow standards, and programme reporting reaches procurement and finance on a cycle rather than on request. This is further than most organisations of comparable size get, and for many of them it is the right place to stop.

The character of the questions changes here. You are no longer asking how to buy meetings well. You are starting to ask whether the right meetings are happening.

What unlocks the move to Level 5: treating the meetings portfolio as something to be planned rather than serviced. That means forward visibility of what is intended across the year, KPIs that describe outcomes rather than transactions, and some attempt at measuring meeting ROI — imperfectly, but consistently enough to compare one year with the next.

What stalls progress here: the owner becoming fully occupied running the programme. Level 5 work is strategic and therefore always less urgent than the meeting happening on Thursday. Without protected time for review, a Level 4 programme runs indefinitely at Level 4, which is not a failure but is a ceiling.

Level 5 is quieter than it sounds. It does not involve more technology or more control. It involves a group of people who look at the coming year’s meeting activity as a portfolio — what is being run, why, for whom, at what cost — and make decisions about the shape of it before the requirements arrive.

The distinguishing behaviour is declining things. An organisation at Level 5 occasionally decides that a recurring event should not run, or should run differently, on the basis of evidence rather than instinct. That decision is impossible without the four levels underneath it.

What stalls progress here: drift. Level 5 is a cycle rather than a destination, and the review cadence is the first thing dropped when the organisation is busy. Supplier arrangements quietly age, the data degrades as processes change around it, and within two years the programme is describing an organisation that no longer exists.

Maturity models invite you to assume the top level is the target. It is not, and pursuing it where the volume does not justify it wastes effort that would earn more elsewhere.

The right level is the one that matches your activity. An organisation running twenty internal meetings a year at a single site does not need portfolio review; it needs a known route and somebody who can negotiate. That is Level 2 or 3, competently done, and it is the correct answer rather than a compromise.

A useful test: what would the next level cost you in effort and attention, and what specifically would it change? If the answer to the second half is vague, stay where you are. Level 4 for an organisation with genuine multi-site volume is transformative. Level 4 for an organisation with eleven meetings a year is an administrative hobby.

Read the level descriptions and pick the one that describes an ordinary week, not your best week. Most organisations sit between two levels, and the honest placement is the lower of the two.

If you would rather answer questions than self-diagnose, the ten-question tool on is SMM right for your business maps to these same five levels and takes a couple of minutes. For a structured external view with evidence behind it, an SMM assessment is the deeper piece of work.

Then look at one level up — not two. The most common planning error we see is an organisation at Level 1 designing a Level 4 programme, complete with governance forum and supplier scorecards, before anybody has counted what is being spent.