Study Shows High ROI on Face-to-Face Meetings

At the start of the recession, travel budgets for sales meetings were among the first to shrink. In the last year alone, 51 percent of companies curtailed all business travel, trimming budgets by an average of 35 percent. Unfortunately, according to the results of a recent study released by the US Travel Association (USTA), this kind of cost cutting is a shortsighted solution at best.

The ROI comes down to this: For every dollar invested in business travel, companies realize $12.50 in incremental revenue, and internal meetings pay off at a rate of $4 to $6 in ROI for every dollar spent. Why? As it turns out, there’s a strong correlation between meetings and employee satisfaction. Seventy-three percent of executives believe that regular meetings have a significant impact on morale, professional development, and sales performance.

“Sales meetings are just as important as customer calls,” says Terry Markwart, director of special accounts sales for Canon USA. “Sales teams need tools, support, and motivation before they go in front of the customers.”

Ideas flow two ways, and sales meetings are an essential way for management to get feedback from the people on the front lines. “Salespeople are the ones who see what’s happening or not happening, and why,” says Markwart. “Meetings are the best way to address the issues they’re encountering at the customer level.”

Many companies have replaced in-person meetings with teleconferences. But the virtual experience isn’t always as effective, says David Topus, general manager of executive career branding with ExecuNet. “A lot of information can be exchanged through technology without compromising the quality of the communication or relationship,” he says. “But there’s a chemistry that occurs when you’re all sitting around a table or in that brief, random, conversational exchange you have while walking down a hallway or waiting for the final meeting attendees to show up. Computers and video monitors are great, but somehow the chemistry doesn’t flow like it does when you’re in someone’s presence.”

If you’re still not convinced that sales meetings are worth the time and cost, consider the following three advantages of face-to-face meetings.

Reap Double Benefits
In the USTA study, internal meetings got high marks in the “investing in people” category, but they weren’t considered essential for “keeping customers” and “converting prospects.” You can change that by combining travel for sales meetings with travel to call on customers and prospects in the same area. Bob Calvin, president of Management Dimensions Inc., and author of Sales Management Demystified (McGraw-Hill, 2007), calls these “cluster calls.”

“Divide your territory into geographic grids, and when you’re attending a sales meeting or conference, look for customers and prospects in that area or areas you’ll be traveling through,” he advises. Because attendees will be coming in from different directions, each route can yield customer contact in a different part of the grid.

Outshine Your Competition
When competitors are traveling less often, you get brownie points for booking in-person appointments. Markwart points out that if you “make sales calls at a time when no one else is making calls, the customers know you’re going that extra mile for them. They won’t forget that. Your presence gives them confidence in difficult times and reassures them they’re not in this alone.”

Define Your Purpose
Even if you’re meeting a customer on the fly, every sales call needs to have a purpose. “Make sure that you and the customer/prospect agree on the objective for the call,” says Calvin. “If it’s the sort of thing that can be handled by phone or email, there’s no need to show up in person. Any face-to-face meeting should offer the customer ideas and content that make the meeting worth the time, the sort of extra value that will make the customer write a check.”