Directions Conference and Incentive Management (DCIM)

BACKGROUND

Directions Conference and Incentive Management (DCIM) is a three-decade-old, third-party event planner headquartered in Australia that offers a wide range of services in meetings, corporate incentives, conferences, and exhibition management. Their services span across event management and travel logistics, marketing, branding and production. 

GOALS

Restricted options due to traditional process 

Earlier, DCIM followed a traditional venue sourcing process, where their three-person team searched for event venues on the internet and also leveraged their contacts and affiliation with local hotels. They didn't have the tools to quickly check availability and get initial rates from venues. Director of Sales & Product Michael Walker, who is responsible for negotiating DCIM’s conference and incentive programs, recounts, “We used to spend quite a lot of time writing up venue brief for sourcing, followed by a lot of research to find the right person we need to contact, while also trying to work out whether the hotel was a good option for our client or not.” He adds, “Naturally, it was hard to find new options for our clients, especially for a destination we hadn't been to before.” Because of this, the team was restricted to a small pool of properties, which primarily consisted of those that they had visited personally or had already established relationships with.

APPROACH

Using technology to fuel business growth

After experiencing the inadequacies of a manual sourcing process, Michael’s team decided it was time to adapt to technology as a solution. DCIM signed on Cvent to transform the way they sourced their venues. The team began using Cvent’s Meeting Request Forms as their internal briefing tool to help them save time spent creating briefing documents. Michael explains, “If a new client was coming in, generally it's me that's completing that form, or if it's an existing client, then the event manager that manages that client will complete the meeting request form, and then that comes through to me to start sourcing.” The team would then use the Cvent Supplier Network (CSN) to automatically pull the data from the Meeting Request Form to create their RFP and send it out to multiple properties and destinations. The DCIM team found CSN’s filters especially useful for special requests, as they allowed them to easily narrow down the choice of hotels based on what the client’s needs were.

Michael further describes their current sourcing process: “We start by searching, maybe, half a dozen venues, which we then shortlist down to two or three to present to the client. For this, I use the Shortlist option in CSN quite a bit actually. Once I get all the quotes back in, I will decline suppliers at that stage if they're not fitting the brief, or the budget, or whatever the case may be. Once the shortlist is presented to the client, a decision is taken. If that decision is made on destination, quite often there's a site inspection run, so the clients will go and check out the hotels that were presented, and then make a decision on which hotel to select, at which stage we then award the business through Cvent, and contract with the hotel.”

His team now also saves all their local and global sourcing data into the CSN system, making their job easier when locating contacts. “Earlier I kept all that on an Excel spreadsheet, and what wasn’t on that was inside my head! So it helps to have all data centralised in a single system.” 

RESULTS

Time Saved, Stress Reduced

Michael claims Cvent has considerably shortened the time his team spends on sourcing. “Depending upon the intricacies of a particular event, sometimes it could take me a full day to do briefing of for one particular event. With Cvent, for a simple event, I’m able to complete the task within half an hour. And even for a complex event, even though I’d be relatively spending more time in the system building the RFP and then choosing the type of hotels – but now I’m spending just a couple of hours in this process as opposed to a full day depending on the level of requirements.”

But what DCIM finds best about using CSN is the reduced turnaround time for sourcing requests. “These days, time is the stress. So the more time we have the better. What Cvent has enabled us to do is to be able to get back to our clients a lot quicker with answers. Whereas earlier, we had to make our client wait for, say, 2 weeks before we got back to them, to let them know we can't do that destination or that property.”

LOOKING FORWARD

DCIM now confidently discovers unknown destinations, acquires new clients and grows its business, while Cvent technology backs them up with key information about the venues they are looking for. It’s been more than 6 years since DCIM partnered with Cvent, and they continue to ardently use CSN at different stages of their business and work. Their reliance on CSN confirms a long-lasting alliance between the two.