BULLETIN

What Is Strategic Meetings Management and How Can It Benefit You?

It’s not uncommon to feel disheartened at the idea of another meeting. Often business meetings can be long, tedious and of little interest to all the participants. In any successful business, you are going to want to make sure that your employees and coworkers are engaged and enthusiastic during meetings. This is where strategic meetings management (SMM) comes in.

The concept of strategic meetings management is simply a disciplined approach to event planning and managing meetings. Every aspect of the meeting is taken into consideration during this planning process, including cost-saving and risk mitigation, to ensure that the event itself goes exactly to plan and all the participants get the most they can from it.

Benefits of strategic meetings management

You would be surprised how much valuable time is spent organizing the many aspects of an event or meeting which could be streamlined with strategic meetings management. From sourcing a venue for an event to signing contracts and processing payments with suppliers or clients, you can streamline each part of the planning process so that you can concentrate on your business goals.

When it comes to payment solutions, we at JCD compile expenditures and supplier data to make payment processes transparent. This means you know exactly how much you are spending on meetings and promotional events and can factor this into your overall profit.

The benefits of strategic meetings management include 10-25% savings on business expenses, time and resource-saving, and mitigated risk during your meetings and events as well as in contracting and payments. What’s more, we can help to attract more people to your events and make your meetings something that your employees and coworkers actually look forward to attending. This promotes productivity and enhances your business.

When it comes to developing policies, strategic meetings management is used to standardize the process and make everything more efficient. This means that when you are closing the deal with a client, you don’t need to worry about any of the technical details. This includes developing a ‘Life of a Meeting’ process map which you can use to impress all your stakeholders.

How we tailor strategic meetings management to you

We know that strategic meetings management isn’t a straightforward process and works differently for each of our clients. With this in mind, we create strategies that are tailored to your company’s goals. We work closely with clients to get an idea of where you are in your business plan and create a step-by-step process to get you where you want to be.

The value of your plan will be made clear to stakeholders with engaging scorecards and data analysis showing where you are now as well as gap analysis that will demonstrate how you are going to reach your goals. With these impressive analytics, you’ll be inspiring everyone at your next meeting.

Of course, engaging stakeholders is a major part of our strategic meetings management programs and is key to getting your business to thrive. We will develop an engagement strategy which includes short- and long-term plans, providing communication templates and working with you to develop program launch workshops. By engaging stakeholders, you will be able to integrate your strategic meetings management program into your company and really impress them.

We also know that having the latest technology can really boost a company’s efficiency. Part of our management includes assessing and optimizing your current technology and helping you to decide where to invest. We use an intelligent matrix to compare suppliers and make sure that your new equipment can run the programs and processes you are used to with configuration assistance. This way you can update your office without any of the processes slowing you down. We recently teamed up with Cvent, Inc. to deliver the best event technology has to offer for our clients and set up our own digital team to support the Japanese market. Read more about this in our bulletin entry introducing our digital team! Click here to read more.

The power of JTB

When it comes to making a strategy for supplier management, the fact of being a part of the JTB Group (JTB is the largest travel agency in Japan), gives us negotiation and buying power when we engage with accommodation and transportation. Thus, combining our strengths and consultation abilities to make strategies for all your meetings and events. In this way, we can deliver a great experience and efficiency to our clients.

While SMM always looks at almost every meeting and event dealing of our clients and we optimize on how to approach, when it comes to event planning to each event itself, we have been in the market for over 40 years and achieved many successful events. Take our special event for corporate clients for example. We knew that we wanted to make this event memorable for attendees and wanted the venue to emphasize the theme of a traditional Japanese temple festival. So, naturally, we hosted this event in a famous temple.

Our strategic meetings management means we look at both meetings and travel spend. We use our travel partners to identify opportunities to save when you are traveling for meetings or hosting an event in an important location. We focus on this making sure your attendees are always having a good time, while you save on potential costs and are prepared for anything. For example, the temple event was held outside and we had to keep sudden weather changes in mind. For this, we maximized our JTB group synergy to have 50 buses at constant standby for if the attendees had to suddenly be relocated to another location.


At JCD, we focus on making your meetings enjoyable for all of your attendees. There are a number of factors that come into making a meeting effective, including the quality of material, speed, and visibility of your presentation. Through our work with CWT Meetings and Events, we have analyzed a range of data which we will use to keep your meetings and events running as smoothly as possible.


Just like with your meetings, events, and conferences, you will want to take strategic meetings management into consideration for reaching your business goals. When promoting a product or businesses services, it’s important for your event to appear professional and well planned, to retain the interest of customers and clients.

We have experience in planning promotional events that are popular amongst all attendees. For example, as a way of promoting Japanese cooking products, we have hosted events with cooking demonstrations and seminars that engage a range of people. Of course, these kinds of demonstrations need to be risk assessed so that we know they are safe for participants and staff during the event, which is a big factor in the planning process.
Another aspect of this strategy comes into tailoring the content of your event to your audience. We make sure that each part of your event is specific to your audience and the entire event is an easy and stress-free experience for attendees. Of course, making sure that there is a smooth stage flow is essential, and our staff worked tirelessly to ensure no problems arose during this three-day promotional event.

At JCD we aim at delivering the best, be it in organizing your events and conferences, to managing your meetings. For both aspects, you can contact us and get going on making both your events and your meetings well organized and thought through. With our specialists at your side, your business goals will be in closer reach.


For any questions or requests, please feel free to contact us: here!

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