In our previous blog, we defined strategic meetings as business to business engagements between executives, SMEs and their target audiences to foster business-impacting results such as partnerships, sales development, investment opportunities, and influence.
Strategic meetings undoubtedly have a definite influence on business growth. They directly impact a company’s top line, and so increasing the number of these interactions and effectively managing them is often the thin line that separates an organization’s success and failure.
There are many venues that enterprises use to engage with their external audiences and achieve certain business outcomes; events, briefing centers, roadshows, press, and analyst meets being a few. And typically, success from these meetings are defined by the influence they create. In other words, ROI and influenced revenue are two of the most commonly used parameters to establish the impact and success of sales development. However, increasing the number and quality of strategic meetings is not as simple as it sounds. Managing a large volume of meetings across the span of a three-day trade show or coordinating multiple briefing programs are challenging tasks by themselves. This is especially so because meeting requestors, executive admins and meeting managers typically using legacy tools or a combination of spreadsheets and emails to manage them.
Related: The pitfalls of spreadsheet-based strategic meeting management
In this blog, we introduce you to a revolutionary enterprise B2B software category that helps with every aspect of automating and greatly increasing the number of strategic meetings to accelerate their business growth.
Meeting Automation Platform (MAP)
MAP, short for Meeting Automation Platform, by definition, is the category of software that automates the workflows associated with pre-meeting planning and logistics, in-meeting management, and post-meeting analysis and follow-up.
Image courtesy: Aragon Research
A MAP not only has a role in all three stages of meeting management (Pre-, in-, and post-meeting) but has impacts across all of the touchpoints like events, briefing centers, training sessions, booth tours, and all other forums that involve strategic B2B meetings. It is an especially valuable platform that displaces the traditional, obsolete approach towards strategic meeting management for enterprises that rely on large volumes of strategic meetings to grow their business.
What makes a MAP a must-have for enterprises?
A recent report from Aragon research states that 50% of global enterprise will have MAP underway or fully implemented by 2021. This is because target audiences are expecting efficient engagements with their suppliers and partners. Ineffective workflow in setting up strategic meetings is becoming a competitive disadvantage. Like CRMs used in sales management, MAPs are highly effective that offer many attributes that are not available using a manual process.
- A MAP can leverage cloud-based deployment that can enable them to scale up to meet the requirements of the large-scale enterprises that schedule thousands and even millions of meetings a year.
- An enterprise-class MAP integrates with the best-in-class marketing and sales software like CRM, marketing automation, event registration, mobile apps, badge scanners, etc., to offer enhanced capabilities and enable the flow of information between systems that otherwise work in silos.
- A MAP offers advanced analytics that can help derive actionable insights from meetings and attribute value to specific touchpoints. This can help paint a clearer picture of influenced revenue and ROI.
Since these processes deal with large-scale data management, it is important that this information is handled securely and supports data protection protocol. This has especially gained significance with the enforcement of GDPR protocol and compliance.
To learn more about MAP and how you can use it to accelerate your company’s business growth, visit www.jifflenow.com or click on the button below to schedule a quick demo.
