Expert consultants, supplier partners, and everyday attendees tell us what they don’t like about your meetings — and what you can do about it. BY HUNTER R. SLATON
“The easiest thing to prevent is glitches with the PowerPoint or videos. Make sure your speaker does the sound check.” “All too often, planners have a huge social event the night before…and then they have an 8:30 a.m. keynote session, with a speaker they’ve spent $50,000 on—and the audience is either still hungover and half-asleep or they’re still sleeping in. Don’t have one of your biggest speakers the night after your biggest social event. And if you do, don’t make it at 8 a.m. Make it 9:30 or 10 a.m. Everybody tries to maximize the hours at a conference, but if you’re paying big money for somebody, you really want his or her message to resonate with your audience. And if your audience is still buzzed from the night before—that’s a waste of money.”
58 pcmaconvene December 2011 JOHN TRURAN
“Avoid having speakers after a cocktail reception [or a gala dinner]. Unless it’s a humorist, you don’t want a high- content business speaker or inspirational-type speaker after everyone’s had a big dinner and a couple glasses of wine.” “If you sign a contract to give a speaker 45 minutes to an hour, and then in the run-up to the meeting you say to the speaker, ‘You’re only going to have 25 minutes; our CEO really needs time onstage’—you’re making this a less enjoyable experi- ence for your attendees, and depriving your audience of potentially some of the speaker’s best material.” “For many people, speak- ers are the biggest part of the
experience, outside of the city or hotel that they’re in. Your speaker budget might only be 5 percent of your overall meet-