Plan Your Meetings

Making the case for meeting

Although the perception of meetings is not as big a concern as it was a few months ago, the intense scrutiny the industry experienced in 2008 and 2009 will continue to influence how meetings and events are designed in 2010. Budgets will remain tight, there still will be fewer perks for attendees, and planners will continue to downscale F&B, entertainment and activity expenditures.

But some planners may be facing a different, and more intimidating, challenge: Making the case to reinstate meetings that were canceled due to the economy. And, although there has been a lot of talk about the “green shoots of growth,” there is a very real possibility that the economy will take years to rebound. But that doesn’t mean that companies should continue to cancel meetings.

“Tough times are a great time to renew trust,” John Baldoni wrote on his Harvard Business Review blog Leadership Matters. “When customers and employees see the leadership team standing front and center and delivering the message, it demonstrates that management cares about them and considers them essential to weathering the storm. Canceling such meetings, except when there are no other alternatives, sends the message that employees and even vendors and customers are expendable.”

In the past year, two major studies were released that prove the value of face-to-face meetings, show that business executives support the need to meet and illustrate the dangers of not bringing employees, clients and customers together. They offer great talking points planners can use in discussing why meetings should be reinstated as soon as possible.

Consider the following findings from September 2009’s Oxford Economics Study, which defines “business travel” as including sales trips, meetings, conventions and incentive trips:

• Both executives and business travelers estimate that 28 percent of current business would be lost without in-person meetings.
• Roughly 40 percent of prospective customers are converted to new customers by a face-to-face meeting. Without an in-person meeting, the conversion rate is only 16 percent.
• For every $1 a company invests in business travel, it will experience an average $12.50 in increased revenue and $3.80 in new profits.
• The average U.S. business would forfeit 15 percent of its profits in the first year of eliminating business travel, and it would take more than three years for profits to recover.
• Executives cite customer meetings as having the greatest return on investment (ROI), in the range of $15-$19.99 generated per every dollar invested.
• Executives identify the average ROI of trade show participation as generating between $4 and $5.99 per every dollar invested.
• More than half of business travelers say that 5 to 20 percent of their company’s new customers were the result of trade show participation.
• 85 percent of corporate executives perceive Web meetings and teleconferences to be less effective than in-person meetings with prospective customers, and 63 percent believe virtual meetings are less effective than in-person meetings with current customers.
• According to executives surveyed, companies would need to increase an employee’s total base compensation by 8.5 percent in order to achieve the same effect of an incentive travel program.

“In order to grow, businesses have to invest,” stated Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, which commissioned the study. “This study shows that face-to-face meetings and incentive awards to top performers are among the smartest investments companies can make.” The study took 13 years and covered 14 different economic sectors. Read the full report at meetingsmeanbusiness.com.

During the recession, the use of technology-enhanced and other virtual meeting alternatives has skyrocketed, so Forbes conducted an insight study with more than 750 business this past summer to see if Webconferences, videoconferences and other virtual meetings could replace the need to meet face-to-face. Their study, “Business Meetings: The Case for Face to Face,” found:

• More than 8 out of 10 of the executives said they prefer face-to-face contact to virtual meetings.
• The top three reasons those executives preferred face-to-face meetings were because they build stronger, more meaningful business relationships (85 percent); give them the ability to read body language and facial expressions (77 percent); and there’s more social interaction and ability to bond with co-workers and clients (75 percent).
• The less than 20 percent who favored technology-enhanced meetings did so because it saves time (92 percent); saves money (88 percent); and offers more flexibility in location and timing.
• When asked to choose the meeting method most conducive to fostering specific business actions or outcomes, executives overwhelmingly preferred face-to-face meetings for achieving almost every business objective, including persuasion (91 percent), leadership (87 percent), engagement (87 percent), inspiration (85 percent), decision making (82 percent), accountability (79 percent), brainstorming (73 percent) and strategy (73 percent).
• Webconferences were preferred only for data presentation (44 percent) and information dissemination (43 percent), although it held less than a 10 percent margin over face-to-face meeting in those two areas. Roughly 27 percent favored teleconferences for matters of urgency, but otherwise, the percentage of executives preferring the use of teleconferences or videoconferences to achieve business objectives was negligible.
• 87 percent of the executives agreed with the statement “There are tangible business benefits to in-person, face-to-face meetings that outweigh the cost savings of alternative, technology-based meeting methods such as Webconferencing or videoconferencing.”

According to John Russell, chief executive of NYLO Hotels and former chairman of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, who was quoted in the report, “People don’t want to sit in their office looking at each other on computer screens. That personal interaction — getting together to talk over dinner, drinks or a cup of coffee — is the foundation on which business relationships are built. It’s what drives business.”