Strategic Meetings Management

Strategic meeting management (SMM) program is a structured, enterprise-wide, disciplined approach to managing and optimizing meetings, similarly to a travel program.

The goal is to achieve visibility, control, and measurable impact across all departments’ event strategy. Key components include budget management, risk management, supplier management, and structured processes that make every meeting purposeful. Find out more here. 

Key benefits of strategic meeting management success include:  

• Strategic planning and more aligned data that contribute to your organization’s strategic goals and overall business strategy.
• Better alignment across teams, consistent processes and assessment of service quality.
• Stronger preferred supplier agreements and greater visibility when it’s time to negotiate contracts, leading to further cost savings.
• A strategy that aligns event management to your risk mitigation strategies, to reduce risk for the business and employees.
• Cost control, and the ability to learn and improve from every meeting and event for further opportunities for reducing costs. 

FCM Meetings & Events provides the people, processes, reporting, and expertise to design and run your strategic meeting management program, while our technology partners deliver solutions for planning, registration, and budgeting. 

Strategic meeting management (SMM) is often the last area of unmanaged spend. Without a program in place, meetings often become unpredictable, hard to measure, and people become disengaged. Implementing a program ensures meetings and event management are purposeful, transparent, and strategically valuable. You’ll gain insight into spend, performance, engagement, and achieve a measurable return on investment. 

Strategic meeting management gives you the tools to track, analyze, and optimize meeting costs. Using technology like event management software or specialized event reporting tools helps reduce event costs and increase efficiency. Regular reporting and attendee feedback also highlight areas for improvement, helping you make smarter decisions for future meetings. 

Implementation depends on your organization’s size and complexity. FCM’s structured approach delivers quick wins early while building a long-term, scalable program. Even multinational organizations can see results immediately, with strategies adapted as the business grows. 

You don’t need to have all the answers before you start. Our tiered strategic meetings management framework allows companies to begin at a baseline level and build from there. The more data you can bring to the table, like current spend, number of meetings, and key objectives, the faster we can pinpoint opportunities and deliver insights. But we also know many organizations have fragmented programs, so we treat it as an ongoing journey.