Strategic Meetings Management

I’ve known Louann Cashill, Meeting Services Manager at Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., for several years now and felt compelled to share with you how she’s dealing with the recession and meetings cancellations in a pro-active manner. Her strategy's creating significant cost savings for her organization and allowing her to collect valuable data at the same time. 
  
Cashill has centralized sourcing for about one-quarter of Toyota's meetings via StarCite's technology and is working toward extending it to the rest of the company in North America.  As a direct result of this economic downturn, Louann has become a “hero” to the "occasional" planners across her organization who have cancelled space that they'd negotiated themselves with hotels. Of course, they didn't negotiate standardized cancellation and attrition clauses into their agreements.
 
But Louann is now using the power of her Meetings Services group to contact the properties to re-book contracted space for future meetings and re-negotiate credits. She's confident that a majority of the cancelled space can be re-used for future Toyota meetings and events by the end of her fiscal year. She also notifies the hotels that Toyota, through the use of StarCite's automated RFP module, shops cancelled space first when sourcing for meeting properties. She also "markets" that space internally within Toyota to let the business units know that Meeting Services has hotel credits available that can be used and encourages them to advise her team if they have a meeting that could or will be cancelled. 
  
In an environment where sourcing is only partially centralized, she's come up with a savvy, creative strategy for mitigating risk and dealing proactively with cancellations! 
  
Louann will be my co-presenter in our March 26th Webinar (12:00pm US ET / 4:00pm GMT) , "Where There's Mystery, There's Margin: Uncovering Your Organization's Hidden Meeting Spend. Click here  to register and hear her story!