When Your Client Wants to Cancel, Part 1
Although a company may have a perfectly good reason to cancel a meeting, a good meeting planner can often save the day by helping the client find another way to hold the meeting, thereby recovering some of the expenditure by making it productive. This is the first of a three-part series on how to make a canceled meeting work for the client and you.
Solutions. That’s what your clients come to you for. Let’s say one of them recently scheduled a meeting through you, and you have just completed making all the arrangements in beautiful south Florida. However, in a hurricane has just made a mess of the city and your client calls to cancel.
“But this meeting is critical to your company,” you say. “Meetings such as this are very important yada yada yada….” Your client already knows this, so if the answer is still “cancel,” perhaps you need to come up with a way to hold the meeting anyway. After all, that’s your job.
First of all, you need to let your client know that you’re aware of why her meeting was important, and how much she stands to lose by not holding it. How much money is at stake to the company? Will the client or customer base suffer? As you ask questions like this, it will show your client that you care enough to know her business and help you prepare for the second part of the conversation with her: convincing her to hold it anyway.
In the case of the hurricane-ravaged city, there are number of solutions. If travel to, from, and/or within the area will be difficult, perhaps simply postponing the meeting will be sufficient. Be prepared with cost differences for near as well as more distant future schedule changes, and compare them to the costs of cancellation.
If your client happens to be in that hard-hit city, you may be able to handle the problem in a more creative fashion. Watch for the next blogs on meeting cancellations to see how you can use technology, meeting design, and personnel changes to revamp a meeting.
