KARI KESLER
If you’re fuzzy on the definition of Strategic Meetings Management (SMM), you’re
not alone, and Kesler hopes the new certification will help that. She defines SMM as
“a disciplined approach to managing enterprisewide meeting and event activities,
processes, suppliers and data in order to achieve measurable business objectives
aligned with an organization’s strategic goals or vision, and deliver value in the form of
quantitative savings, risk mitigation and service quality.” Kesler elaborates on that definition,
why SMM is important and how the new certification came about.
Q.Tell us a little about your professional background.
A.I started in marketing and sales at a little limited service hotel in
Omaha, Neb. Later I moved to Jacksonville,
Fla., for a job with Omni Hotels and I loved
it. I never had anything to do with meetings.
Ever. I was always working with corporate
accounts and their individual travelers. No
meetings. Never booked one, never planned
one, wouldn’t be any good at it. So it’s ironic
where life has ended up.
cost us? What does our IT staff cost? What
does it cost to do all the travel we do and
plan all the meetings we plan? So I learned
Six Sigma-based procurement practices
at a company that was really cutting edge.
I implemented the same type of thing at
ING. I then helped a friend at Honeywell, on
a volunteer basis, put together her final pitch
for their Strategic Meetings Management
Program, and when they approved the program she hired me. So it’s not been all a big
and some don’t. That’s one of the cool things
and one of the hard things. It can be very
flexible. But because it’s not set in stone, it’s
hard for some people to grasp.
How did the term originally arise?
Well, you wouldn’t by its name think NB TA
is big in the meetings space. But in 2003
NBTA created a Groups and Meetings
Committee because in all the surveys and
feedback that NBTA got from their annual
How did you go from hotel marketing and sales to meetings and travel
management?
I was working at Carlson Wagonlit Travel
and was managing Xerox’s global hotel program when the head of general services at
Xerox asked me to come and strategize their
meetings program. I told her I knew nothing
about meetings and she said, ‘I’m not hiring
you for what you already know, but what
I know you can do.’ And she’s become my
mentor now; she’s fantastic. During my time
at Xerox I went back to school and got two
MBAs, one in international management
and one in marketing. And after spending
all that time and money, you kind of want to
go out and see what those degrees are worth.
So we moved to Minneapolis and eventually
I got a job at ING where I was responsible
for all the travel commodities and all the
meetings programs from a strategy and procurement perspective. I hadn’t realized it at
the time, but Xerox was on the cutting edge
of lots of things, including paying attention
to what they call indirect spend. So not
looking at the widgets that go into a copy
machine but asking: What do HR services
“Strategic meetings management is really about
taking all the meetings-related activity for an entire
corporation and managing that activity ... But because
it‘s not set in stone, it‘s hard for some people to grasp.”
–Kari Kesler, president & chief strategist, KK Strategic Solutions
plan; it’s been hard work and understanding
the benefit of networking and being kind of
an out-of-the-box thinker. I tend to say, ‘If
that’s the way we’ve always done it, well then
let’s do it a different way.’
Can you elaborate on your definition of SMM and why it can be tough
to understand?
A Strategic Meetings Management Program
(SMMP) is not simply a group of planners
becoming strategic about planning their
meetings. I’ve called that strategic meeting
planning and delivering. But SMM as we
originally defined it is really about taking all
the meetings-related activity for an entire
corporation and managing that activity. And
some companies care about the actual execution of the meeting, the planning piece,
convention, and even from the local level,
the same subject kept popping up and that
was: ‘I’m a travel manager; my boss has
now asked me to do something within the
meetings space; help me! My boss thinks I
know how to do this, because meetings and
travel management look similar. It looks like
hotels and airplanes, so they assume I can
do it. But really I don’t know anything about
meetings.’ So the committee needed to start
driving some knowledge and tools to help
our constituents who were, more and more,
being asked to take on this meetings work.
At about the third meeting of the committee, I brought up the issue that I didn’t think
‘meetings consolidation’ was a good term
for what we were trying to do. If you’re a
planner at Honeywell and I come in and say,
‘Hi my name is Kari and I’ve been hired to
