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Be Upfront About Budget
July 2010
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Francine Miller, Senior Manager Event Planning at Scotia Capital
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By Hayley Mitchell
Francine Miller, Senior Manager Event Planning at Scotia Capital says that good negotiation and working closely with your vendors is the main thing her and her team have been doing to get more out of smaller meetings and events budgets.
“We work very closely with the supplier, more so than before, and our negotiation process is a bit more intense,” says Miller. By creating a better relationship with your suppliers and vendors, you will often get better pricing and can ask them to be more creative in what they can offer you. She suggests not just looking at a menu or a location package and accepting that as the be all and end all; she will ask those suppliers to get even more creative and ask them what is the best they can do for the budget she has. “We are not shy to tell the supplier, ‘this is the budget we have, what can you do?’”
If you speak openly about the budget at hand, and tell your supplier upfront the amount you have to spend, then negotiations can go more smoothly and the process can be a win-win for both you and your supplier.
Miller says she has also seen many suppliers doing new things to get the attention of meetings planners, such as packages that are geared toward smaller budgets than before. Do your homework, says Miller, and shop around on the internet to see what type of deals you can come up with and what is being offered out there in the meetings and event space. But be careful about anything that sounds too good to be true or just doesn’t measure up, especially if you are looking at new vendors or locations that you have not dealt with in past. According to Miller, when dealing with anyone new, “getting good references is also very important.”
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