MCLEAN, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cvent, the world’s largest provider of online event management, meeting site selection and web survey solutions, has co-sponsored a new study from The Aberdeen Group, titled “Strategic Meetings Management: A View into the Best-in-Class Strategic Meetings Management Program,” that identifies emerging best practices for Strategic Meetings Management Programs (SMMPs) and provides a framework for readers to assess their own SMMP processes and goals.
Based on Aberdeen’s research on more than 115 enterprises, the report explores pressures that businesses face when managing a modern SMMP; current trends related to SMMP deployment; the role of technology in supporting SMMPs; and the best practices of companies realizing cost savings and improved efficiency from their SMMP.
“Business meetings and events are directly linked to corporate performance, and must be strategically planned, executed and evaluated with revenue and risk implications in mind. Through our work with dozens of enterprises—from Fortune 500 to mid-tier companies that are using our SMM technology—we know that SMMP best practices continue to emerge and evolve,” said Anil Punyapu, Vice President of Enterprise Sales and Partnerships at Cvent. “The practical guidelines and current analysis of industry trends in this study provide meeting managers with actionable intelligence they can use to build or derive more value from their own SMMP.”
In particular, the study highlights how leading companies are leveraging technology solutions to enhance their SMM processes, drive down costs and improve the quality and effectiveness of their corporate meetings.
Key findings of Aberdeen’s study include:
- End-to-end SMM solutions (i.e. technology) help companies achieve over 30% higher cost savings than companies not currently using an end-to-end SMM solution;
- Organizations that look to supplier networks for meeting and event management have been able to identify over 54% higher cost savings than organizations not currently leveraging supplier networks; and
- Companies’ meetings and events are 26% more likely to either meet or exceed pre-defined goals, objectives and expectations when the company uses an end-to-end SMM solution.
"Technology is a key component of the Best-in-Class Strategic Meetings Management Program," said Christopher J. Dwyer, Research Analyst at Aberdeen. "End-to-end solutions are crucial in addressing and automating the core processes in the modern SMMP and assist organizations in not only driving cost savings and managing more meetings at or under budget, but also enable the necessary analytics and reporting to gain visibility into event spending and provide true SMM intelligence to executives."
The study complements Aberdeen’s 2010 research report on Strategic Meetings Management, which addressed specific aspects of the typical SMMP and indentified inherent “weak links,” by expanding upon key SMMP attributes and directly applying a maturity framework to link top-tier performance to reliance on core SMMP attributes.
A copy of the research report can be downloaded for free at http://www.cvent.com/en/sem/aberdeen-strategic-meetings-management-report-2011.shtml.
About Cvent
Founded in 1999, Cvent is the world’s largest meetings management technology company and has over 800 employees worldwide. Cvent offers web-based software for meeting site selection, online event registration, event management, e-mail marketing, and web surveys, and helps over 90,000 users in 40 countries manage hundreds of thousands of events, surveys and e-mail campaigns. The company has processed over $2 billion in online payments and has managed over 30 million event registrations and survey responses for its clients. A leading authority on Strategic Meetings Management (SMM), Cvent has implemented SMM programs for more than 40 corporations over the past year. For more information, please visit www.cvent.com.
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