Meeting professionals often tell me that they have a hard time expressing their value—and not just to friends and fam—but within their organizations and most especially to key leaders in the C-suite. My response is always, "Are you positioning yourself as a meeting strategist?" Too often, meeting professionals go straight to planning mode without understanding the bigger picture for their businesses. With this in mind, let's look at the steps that lead to better-organized meetings.
The first step to understanding the critical drivers for your business and how they play into the hosting meetings is asking the right questions to your event owners or stakeholders. The key stakeholders should include anyone with an impact on the success of the event or anyone who may be affected by the event
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Why are you holding this meeting?
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What are you trying to accomplish?
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Is there a central theme? Why?
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As a result of participating in the meeting a) what will people be, know, feel, have, do or think
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What are the essential ingredients or elements of a successful meeting?
These questions lay the foundation for you to determine the obvious—and uncover the not so obvious—goals and objectives, whether it's the successful launch of a new product or service (and what success looks like) or establishing compliance with new regulations (to what measurable degree). Without objectives, you have no filter or lens through which you can design the right-fit experience.
Related Certificate Courses:
Meeting & Event Strategist
Event Marketing Strategist
Certificate in Meeting Management (CMM)
Meeting professionals make progress in understanding the value of their meetings by merely having candid, no-cost discussions about precise expected outcomes and objectives.
The next step is to set measurements to arm yourself with accurate data so that you make better, data-driven decisions that can positively improve your event and the overall strategy or the organization. Identify metrics that align with your meeting goals. Think beyond the obvious metrics, like saving time and money. Identify other, more specific metrics that support those higher-order metrics that you can effectively influence, such as reducing sales cycle time or increasing social media impressions.
Now you can discover the business value of your own events, which will, in turn, allow you to showcase the importance of the role that you play—not just as a meeting planner—but as a business strategist and consultant that drives value for your organization.
