When
designed right, large group meetings are powerful,
transformational experiences. They can dramatically change
people's feelings, opinions, intentions and behaviors.
National sales meetings, dealer meetings, franchisee and
employee meetings, even recognition events, are a one-time
opportunity to make a powerful impact on the way people
think, feel and behave when it really counts, after the
meeting back on the job and in the marketplace.
For example:
- A national
dealer meeting increased Savin's annual sales by ten
percent when 98% of the dealers signed up for a new
annual purchase agreement at the meeting.
- A national
dealer meeting for Audi transformed a disaffected,
frustrated dealer network into one that was
rededicated and motivated to support the brand by
increasing their inventory investment by 108%. In
addition, 31% of the dealers did not reduce their
purchase of cars at all, as they said they would on the
pre-meeting survey. For the Audi factory, these two
post-meeting shifts represented tens of millions of
dollars in auto sales they would not have had if it
weren't for the meeting's impact.
- A national
sales meeting for a division of Johnson & Johnson
motivated the sales force to achieve 95% of their
retail shelf space goals for a new product launch
within 45 days of the meeting, half the targeted time.
- An
employee tele-conference for Southwestern Bell increased
employees' confidence and belief in the company's future
by 48% and increased their confidence in their
personal futures by 110%.
- A national
sales conference for a division of American Express
produced a 71% increase in those who were very
confident of meeting or exceeding their sales objectives
and a 340% increase in those who were confident the
organization was moving in the right direction. The
meeting achieved the highest attendee satisfaction
levels on record with 89% of the attendees saying the
meeting was effective in increasing their ability to
compete and in providing a highly motivational
experience.
- Coldwell
Banker decided to reinvest in its "Chairman's
Circle" instead of scrapping it when they found
out how valuable it was as an educational experience for
their top producing franchisees.
- A ten-city
series of independent broker conferences for the AIG
resulted in 52% of the 3,500 broker principals placing
new business with AIG worth almost $60,000,000 in
new premium income.
Re-engineering
the meeting process - Many companies have streamlined and
"re-engineered" their business operations but have
done comparatively little to redesign their organization's
communications and their large group meeting process to
achieve similar dramatic increases in customer value and
return on investment.
Companies
invest hundreds of thousands, often millions of dollars,
days of their most valuable peoples' time and energy in
attending large meetings and months of key executives'
preparation. Yet, even with stakes this high and so much
invested, many meetings fall far short of the mark, never
realizing their potential and rarely changing the way people
feel, think and behave.
Many large
group meetings become lost opportunities because they are
not designed to address or satisfy the important relevant
concerns, critical issues and needs of the participants, and
very often as a result, do not deliver measurable, strategic
results which move the organization ahead.
Avoid the
"speaker-driven meeting syndrome" - listen to the
voice of the customer - The most common mistake meeting
managers make is to produce a "speaker-driven"
event instead of a "customer-responsive" event. It
is certainly understandable why this happens. Most of the
time, with corporate meetings, the small group of executive
speakers is the same people who control the meeting budget.
Meeting makers focus on satisfying their clients' needs
first, and predictably, the most satisfied people at the
meeting are often the executive presenters. They got exactly
what they wanted; well polished, well rehearsed speeches
with well-produced speech support visuals. They made their
points well, and they looked good.
But, whether
the hundreds, or thousands, of meeting attendees had their
important needs met, whether they had a highly satisfying,
highly valuable experience and whether the organization
achieved a high return on its meeting investment are very
different and much more significant questions than whether
or not the speakers were personally satisfied with their
presentations.
Very often,
meeting makers do not genuinely seek or respond to the
fundamental, relevant and important needs of their meeting
participants. As a result, many meetings are fatally flawed
from the beginning and cannot fulfill their potential to
powerfully connect with and move people to new feelings,
thoughts and behaviors and do not deliver a high return on
the meeting investment.
On the other
hand, when meeting designers conduct full and legitimate
pre-event research with their prospective meeting attendees'
using professional meeting attendee research methods and
standards, they can acquire a very clear picture of what is
necessary to build a highly relevant, satisfying meeting for
attendees and one which will deliver a high Return On Event
(ROE) for the organization.
Learn the
real truth by creating trust - It is absolutely essential
that people participating in this kind of research fully
trust the researcher to protect their confidentiality.
Companies often use outside research specialists like
GuideStar Communications who can guarantee absolute
confidentiality and anonymity to the people being
interviewed and surveyed. By developing what Kerns describes
as a "cocoon of trust" during interviews and focus
group sessions, outside research specialists often produce
very open, candid, gut-level, real-world information and
insights.
For example,
at a division of American Express, meeting executives were
prepared to duplicate a successful, celebratory national
sales meeting format from the prior year with singers,
dancers, sets and costumes, etc., however, confidential
tele-focus group research and survey findings clearly showed
that the field sales force was not in a mood to celebrate as
they had been facing growing competitive threats, a
downtrend economy and trying to find their footing through
two internal reorganizations.
These weary
warriors wanted a very different style of meeting, one which
addressed their issues and concerns, gave them straight
answers up close and personal from their leadership, which
instilled confidence and trust that their new leadership had
the strategies and competitive commitment to move the
division in the right direction and was providing them with
the tools to meet the competition head on and win.
An American
Express Vice President put it this way, "I think anyone
who goes into a meeting like this and doesn't do a
pre-conference survey is flying blind. You can sit here at
headquarters and think you know what people really want or
what they're like and what the issues are out there, but if
you don't go out and confirm that you do know, you could run
into problems. The productivity process gave us an idea of
which issues were the major issues from the attendees' point
of view, which were really hot and which were not."
Focus your
budget, and decrease meeting costs - First, design the
"must have" elements of the meeting, those which
satisfy the most important attendee needs and address the
biggest opportunities for gain. Then, develop the "nice
to have" elements which directly support the overall
meeting objectives. Other meeting elements can be
selectively eliminated as they are superfluous. These might
be media and theatrical elements, displays and exhibits,
celebrities, guest speakers, executive presentations,
outside seminars, entertainment, etc.
By focusing
with precision on the known essentials, a meeting's budget
can be targeted to achieve the greatest impact on attendees'
feelings, perceptions and behaviors while, at the same time,
reducing costs by eliminating extraneous, gratuitous meeting
elements.
The MPP is a
proven, research-driven process for both designing meetings,
which deliver powerful, measurable results, and for
accurately, scientifically measuring post-meeting results.
It was developed to meet the special needs of both meeting
attendees and meeting managers, and has been utilized in a
variety of businesses to dramatically change peoples'
understandings, perceptions, attitudes, abilities,
intentions and behaviors through the meeting medium.
The MPP is
based on a set of beliefs:
- Organizations
deserve a measurable return on their meeting investment.
- Meetings
should be viewed as powerful, experiential instruments
for communications and change.
- A large
group meeting experience, when designed with precision
using measurable objectives, can effect a specific set
of attendees' personal dimensions; peoples'
understanding, perceptions, attitudes, abilities,
intentions and behaviors.
- Meetings
are most effective when they are responsive to and
satisfy the real needs of both groups of customers of
the meeting experience, the attendee participants and
the organization's leadership.
- Meetings,
which address and satisfy attendees' most important
needs, issues and preferences are able to connect with
attendees at deep personal levels and effect their
feelings, opinions, intentions and behaviors.
A
meeting's effects can be precisely measured using proven
MPP research methods.
How the
MPP works:
1.
Pre-meeting qualitative "pulse" research --
Confidential, in-depth telephone interviews with attendees
and tele-focus group sessions with peer groups of attendee
segments are conducted by meeting research professionals.
Pulse research is accomplished quickly and inexpensively
using pre-established sets of MPP questions and methods to
identify and define prospective attendees' interests,
business concerns and issues and their needs, desires,
suggestions and preferences for the meeting.
Though the
findings of this qualitative research are often enough to
provide meeting managers with the information they need to
design a high-performance meeting, most of the time, a
pre-event attendee survey is also conducted.
2.
Pre-meeting quantitative research - Pre-meeting surveys are
designed to confirm and refine what has been learned in the
qualitative research and, most importantly, to provide a
baseline of information about attendees' attitudes,
perceptions, intentions, behaviors, etc. which will be used
after the meeting to compare with the findings of a
post-meeting survey to develop the Return On Event (ROE).
MPP,
confidential, baseline surveys usually contain 45-65
multiple-choice plus 5-6 open- ended questions and often
utilize tele-communications for rapid, cost-efficient data
collection. One low cost method is the FxTele-Survey.
Questionnaires
are faxed back directly into PC's with software programmed
to read and extract the data thus eliminating weeks of
questionnaire mailback and data entry time and costs.
Another
method is the 800# Tele-Survey which offers respondents the
convenience of using the buttons on their telephone keypads
anytime 24-hours a day during the survey period, to
"touch-tone" in their responses. People's
responses to multiple-choice questions are instantly
digitized. Their spoken responses to open-ended questions
are recorded and transcribed. Snapshot reports can be ready
for review within 24-48 hours of the survey period.
3. Meeting
design - measurable objectives and essentials first - Using
the research findings, measurable objectives are developed
and organized by the core dimensions; understandings,
attitudes, perceptions, abilities, needs and concerns,
intentions and behaviors. These are prioritized, and then
meeting strategies are developed to accomplish the most
important objectives in each category. By approaching the
meeting design this way, from the "inside out",
and focusing first on what is known to be essential, the
trap of imposing superfluous, cliché themes and irrelevant
agenda items is avoided.
After the
core meeting experiences have been designed, then the rest
of the agenda can be filled in to address peoples'
additional needs and preferences with an eye towards how
these can support and enrich the core meeting experiences.
The meeting theme and style will emerge naturally from this
process and should be allowed to emerge rather than be
imposed prematurely.
This design
process also assures that the meeting budget will be
allocated to the most important objectives first so that the
meeting investment is leveraged to achieve a maximum Return
On Event (ROE/ROI).
4. In-meeting
feedback - During the meeting, especially multi-day events,
feedback from attendees can help meeting makers respond to
attendees' needs and concerns which have surfaced during the
course of the meeting. This feedback can be gathered through
a variety of means; suggestion and question cards,
voice-mail, ARS, meal function table discussions, networking
teams, PC-based kiosks, pre-planned debriefing meetings with
small groups of selected attendees, etc.
5.
Post-meeting qualitative "pulse" research - A
series of confidential interviews and/or tele-focus group
sessions are often used to identify and define attendees'
satisfactions and dissatisfactions with their meeting
experience, their perceptions, attitudes, intentions and
behaviors in key areas of concern and interest to management
and their suggestions for improving future meetings.
6.
Post-meeting quantitative research - A tracking survey is
conducted within several weeks of the meeting with benchmark
questions to measure attendees' satisfaction levels with
various aspects of the meeting, shifts in their
understanding, attitudes, perceptions, abilities, intentions
and behaviors and to learn about their suggestions for
future meetings.
Tracking
research conducted 3-6 months after a meeting can determine
sustained results in peoples' understanding, attitudes,
intentions and behaviors as well as the value of the
meeting's contribution to peoples' success in achieving
their business objectives. This extended research often
involves customers, managers, service personnel and others
within the meeting attendees' circle of influence and
engagement.
7. Return On
Event (ROE) - By comparing findings on pre-meeting and
post-meeting benchmark questions, the Return On Event (ROE)
is calculated, both on individual attitudes and perceptions
and across the range of questions to determine the overall
meeting ROE.
Return On
Investment (ROI) - This is a specific financial measure
which is applied in situations where valid quantitative
information, such as sales or distribution figures, customer
complaint ratios, etc. are available and can be linked
directly to the meeting.
Post-event,
meeting managers know exactly how well their meeting
performed, precisely what results it produced and what
specific actions to take in following through to reinforce
strengths, address areas of weakness and plan future
meetings.
As one client
from American Express said, "I think the real value of
using the MPP in both 1992 and 1993 was that after looking
at the 1992 post-meeting survey findings, we could see
whether or not we moved the needle in certain areas, and the
'92 data gave us a benchmark to use as a gauge for the 1993
meeting. Post-conference, the MPP tells us what we did right
and what we did wrong in the meeting and what people will
look for in the next meeting. That's very important
information."
Some research
is much better than no research - Although the MPP is a
process, each of the individual pre- and post-event research
services offers significant stand alone benefits and are
often employed individually. Pre-event research can be
extremely valuable in assisting meeting designers and
organizational leaders to understand the critical needs,
desires and expectations of attendees, while post-event
research provides both an understanding of what was
accomplished and guidance for follow through.
For example,
a national sales meeting post-event survey for a leading
diagnostics health care company examined the effectiveness
of a series of technical product and sales training
workshops. The company had invested a significant portion of
their meeting budget in audience response systems to be used
extensively in the workshops. Among other things they wanted
to assess was the value of ARS as an educational tool at
meetings. Questions on the survey provided answers from each
segment of the sales force. In this case, the application of
ARS received very high marks.
In another
instance, a post-event survey showed that dealers had
nominal interest, low confidence of success and little
commitment to a new business strategy the manufacturer's
leadership thought they had communicated well about and had
gained dealers' commitment to at the meeting. Findings
showed that the seminar on the new business strategy had
been poorly conducted, and the dealers perceived that the
company wasn't serious or committed to the strategy.
Discovering
the truth of the situation within weeks of the meeting, the
company's president quickly held a series of regional
telephone conferences with the dealers to address the
dealers' misperceptions and attitudes and was able to
re-energize the strategy and move it forward with only a few
weeks lost.
In another
situation, pre-meeting focus groups and a survey prior to a
national sales meeting for a very successful, market leader
in the health care industry showed an extremely high degree
of personal stress and frustration throughout the national
sales organization due to abnormally high (average 60+ hours
per week) work loads over many months. Management had
already designed an intensive 2-day, 8-hours a day training
meeting at a resort site in Arizona. Wrong!
The meeting
was redesigned with training time and topics cut back and
replaced with networking, R&R and informal discussion
opportunities with management. The redesign provided
attendees with a much-needed respite from their intense job
stress. The balanced agenda and relaxed meeting style gave
the entire organization a much needed "time out"
and provided the opportunity to step back, look at the
business and personal issues and to talk candidly about how
things might be changed.
The result
was that attendee satisfaction and ROEs on this event were
very high with a 147% ROE on the sales force's satisfaction
that their leadership understands what people are
experiencing and feeling about their jobs, a 90% ROE on
satisfaction that the company is a unified team working
together, 69% ROE on satisfaction with recognition, 62% ROE
on confidence in achieving sales goals, 56% ROE on
satisfaction with morale in the work group and a 45% ROE on
satisfaction with organizational support. (ROE represents
the total percentage shift on a question from pre-meeting to
post-meeting.)
The MPP is
low-cost meeting insurance - MPP service costs average about
2%-3% of a company's total meeting investment. This
comparatively modest cost assures that the remaining 98% of
the meeting budget will be spent effectively and that a high
ROE/ROI will be achieved and precisely measured.
In summary,
large group meetings can deliver significantly higher
attendee satisfaction and a greater Return On Event for the
organization than many companies realize. By employing the
Meeting Productivity Process, or some of its individual
elements, to assure more efficient meeting designs, ones
which are responsive to and satisfy their meeting
stakeholders' most important needs, objectives, and
preferences, organizations can dramatically improve the
return on their Total Meeting Investment.
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2003,
Ira Kerns and GuideStar
Communications. All rights reserved.