Annual Fanfare

Every company with a sales force of any size plans a yearly sales meeting of some sort. Whether it’s a blockbuster in Vegas with a show extravaganza capping three days of company messages and meetings or a humble-pie affair after a less-than-stellar year, sales managers admit that there’s just no substitute for getting the whole team together at least once a year. When sales are great and the economy is booming, the annual sales meeting tends to be celebratory. On the other hand, when the economy tanks and sales take a nose-dive, the annual meeting takes on a more low-key tone. At this point, sales managers seem to be thinking that sales are looking up. So meetings are getting back on the faster track.

“We are coming out of the ‘less is more’ thinking. Finally. Companies once again are really paying attention to their annual sales meetings,” says Howard Goldberg, president of Chicago-based meeting planners David Green Organization. The good news – more companies are opening their purses to buy more of a meeting as 2004 nears its end. Quarterly profits are up, the economy is rebounding, and sales teams that have suffered Spartan meetings through the dog days of the recession now are expecting more and, mostly, they are getting their wishes fulfilled. But companies are not pulling 1999 meeting plans out of filing cabinets and simply reprising those events. A new-style meeting is coming together as organizations find creative ways to reconcile what are at first glance mutually inconsistent goals – cost containment, delivering more fun, insuring that there’s a meeting ROI and insisting upon long sessions filled with facts. How can all these elements be sewn into one package? Think outside of the box – meeting designers definitely are – and the result is that 2004’s annual sales meetings are filled with a new character. Read on for insights into how creative meeting organizers are pulling off annual events that deliver on all fronts – and tune in to the sidebar boxes for flash tips on making any meeting more successfully 2004 in design.

Doing Good to Get Better

“Gentlemen, ladies, start your engines.” That could have been the kick-off line for the June ’04 annual meeting of Valley City, Ohio-based MTD Products, a leading manufacturer of lawn care tools from mowers to tillers. MTD’s sales force – about 180 people spread across the U.S. and Canada, with a sprinkling of 20 more in Europe – is tasked with getting more product for sale in more stores (and MTD customers range from giant chains such as Home Depot to small independents). Management believes that a key selling advantage is detailed product knowledge – the more reps know about MTD tools, the more they will sell, thinks senior management – and for that reason annual meetings traditionally have been used to inundate staff with facts and stats. That’s a big push this year in many companies – the improving economy has spawned more product introductions, and so there’s a push to equip reps with the details they need to sell. But there’s one problem: How well do sales executives sit in a meeting room and absorb an avalanche of product info? You know the answer – so zero in on MTD’s brilliant strategy for upping product knowledge in 2004.

“We divided our sales force into four teams of around 50, and each has been assigned a nonprofit to spruce up,” says Roy Keating, an MTD sales vice president. That challenge put MTD sales executives along with around 100 tools – “including some from competitors such as Toro and John Deere,” relates Keating – on the grounds of camps that are owned by organizations serving developmentally disabled kids, the blind, and diabetic children and at a facility that brings together children of many races and creeds for a multicultural experience. These camps get heavy use and, in recent years, at least some maintenance has been deferred, meaning that when the MTD teams arrived they found plenty of work to do in the full day allotted to this beautification project.

“We made it a competition,” adds Keating, who says that prizes were given out for leadership and hardest worker, among other achievements. Teams as a whole weren’t judged one against another because management thinking was that every team was a winner – and so was the company. Keating adds, “We know many of our reps don’t have much time at home for really using our tools, so we wanted to use this meeting to give them the product knowledge they need, but we also wanted to do good for our community. We included a sampling of competitive tools so that our reps could see our advantages in the field.”

Sweetening the deal, when this hands-on product day was over, “we left behind much of the equipment for the charities to keep,” says Keating. “Our culture is about beautifying the landscape, and we want to remind our reps about what makes us different.”

Bottom line: “This isn’t a golf tournament; that’s not who we are,” says Keating. “We don’t use our meetings to include a lot of entertainment. We like to get down to business, and by getting our reps using our tools to help community groups, we believe we are educating our people in a way they will find fun.”

Think Short

Probably it’s the most obvious difference with today’s meetings: “They are shorter,” says Barry Shatoff, GM at the Southhampton Inn on Long Island. Before 9-11 and the nation’s economic downturn, Shatoff’s groups generally stayed on property three to four days. “Now they are here two to three days.”

A word of advice from many meetings experts: Resist the urge to overload a meeting. Planners are united in reporting that, if anything, more senior executives are demanding podium time in ’04, often because meetings were skipped in ’03. So saying no to some senior executives will be necesdsary, but the alternative is to wear out a sales team and send it back into the field more peevish than it was on arrival. That’s a big no-no. “Packing too much into a meeting schedule turns off attendees. It puts them into overload,” warns Joe Clark, executive producer for meetings company Jackson-Dawson. Throw too much at attendees and the rough reality is that little of it will stick.

What’s the trick that will let a meeting cover all the necessary ground, in less time? New technology is letting smart companies do more with less. MaryAlice Colen, a vice president of business development at enterprise conferencing-software developer Interwise, tells how her company keeps meetings short but still hits on all the needed points. And definitely, Cambridge, Massachussets-based Interwise does bring together its 100-person sales team for an annual meeting, despite the company’s focus on online tools for connecting people. “We believe there’s value in face-to-face meetings,” Colen explains. Even so, Interwise wants to break the traditional meetings mold. “We’re trying to create second-generation meetings,” says Colen. “The company makes heavy use of its digital meeting tools: We eat our own dog food.”

For instance, Interwise accomplished most of its product training before the meeting by putting info online and administering online tests to be sure reps were absorbing the needed facts. Interwise also capped formal discussion of revised compensation plans at 30 minutes. “Otherwise it would have gone on for seven hours,” explains Colen, who says sales executives had plenty of opportunity to get details online and also to sit down with sales managers one-on-one.

Throughout the planning process, Colen and her group persistently asked one question: Do we need to do this in person at the meeting, or could it be done as well (possibly better) using Interwise’s tools beforehand or afterward? Whenever the answer was that in-person wasn’t necessary, that agenda item got handled in other ways. “This is how to keep 21st century meetings streamlined,” says Colen.

Every day at the meeting, Interwise used its tools to survey meeting participants on what they wanted more of and what they wanted less of. “We went into this meeting intending to be flexible. We modified the agenda as we went along,” says Colen. “The technology let us check how we were doing.”

Bottom line: “We held a five-day meeting in four days,” says Colen. “We are saving money by holding a shorter meeting, but we also are getting more out of the meeting. This is how more companies will be meeting.”

Go Abroad

A huge change in the 2004 annual meeting landscape: companies are beginning to travel long distances again; indeed some are going abroad. “Our business is significantly up,” says Jean Franken, vice president of sales for Starwood’s Latin America division. Latin America isn’t alone. More foreign destinations, from Vancouver to Singapore, are reporting more sales meetings sponsored by U.S.-based companies, and the trigger is simple: globalization means that companies may be technically headquartered in the U.S. but when they mount significant sales efforts abroad it increasingly makes sense to scout foreign locations. Time and money alike may be saved in this process. Case in point: Chicago software developer ThoughtWorks, which, says vice president, sales Bruce Ferguson, is heading to London for its next annual meeting. “It’s our second-biggest office after Chicago. Last year we met in Chicago, and this year the sense is that it’s fair to meet in London.”

Right there, the concept that foreign meetings are intrinsically boondoggles is exploded. ThoughtWorks is holding a foreign meeting because that is where a large number of its people are stationed, not because the company is planning an exotic golf outing in the moors. “In fact we’ll probably be in meetings about 10 hours a day. We usually meet for two long days and then put our people back in the field so they can start trying out new ideas on clients,” says Ferguson. “Glitz doesn’t work at our meetings. I believe it’s easy to spend too much, and that can undermine the meeting.” Ferguson says that – aside from the London location – his meeting will be stripped down to the functional necessities.

What about putting on the London luxe? Don’t look for it at ThoughtWorks’ meeting. Ferguson allows that he is eyeballing some ways to build at least a little fun into the event – he’s tentatively mulling a guided tour of three or four historic pubs along the Thames, to give attendees at least one night of local color. But for ThoughtWorks, this annual meeting is intended to be a serious look at how to sell more software to more customers. It’s not a party, it’s a business meeting – no matter the location. And that’s a reality more globally minded companies are putting forth in ’04.

Work ’em Hard, Work ’em Long

A shining proof that meetings are back on the agenda is Columbus, Ohio-based Mettler-Toledo, a manufacturer of precision instruments, which this year brought together 650 attendees for a Monday through Saturday meeting in Orlando. Big deal? Absolutely – that was the first all-hands meeting the company had held since 1998, says Cheryl Hoffman, a senior marketing specialist. In the intervening years, smaller, specialized meetings had happened for the company’s four sales units (industrial, retail, laboratory and strategic accounts) but this Orlando get-together represented the first meeting in six years that involved everybody. Probably because this was the first in a long while, Mettler-Toledo ignored the advice to not overload participants. “We had every moment scheduled from breakfast through dinner,” says Hoffman, and these were full business days: no tee times, no spa, no trips to visit Mickey and pals. “Our people learned a lot – we had many new products to introduce,” says Hoffman. Even so, “we got very positive feedback,” reports Hoffman, who adds that participants especially valued the opportunity to “reconnect with old friends, with people they hadn’t seen since the ’98 meeting.”