For each decision, there are more people to persuade, many of whom the speaker has no direct access to. That diffusion of decision making will change the marketing approach drastically. In the corporate market, continuous quality improvement has led to increased decisions by committees. With the exception of sales meetings and incentive programs, vendors for customer service, TQM, CQI and other kinds of training are now being selected by education committees. Therefore, they build a linear process designed to remove the guesswork of selecting topics and vendors.
Associations are pros at using education committees, as they have been in place for years.
What's different now is their clout. In the past, the committees would decide the theme or topics and meeting planners would present a slate of recommended speakers. In many cases, the committee would approve the slate unchanged. Association meetings are more competitive than ever, with pressure from declining pools of members because of downsizing as well as more meetings from outside sources. To rise to the challenge, associations are becoming more member-focused in many areas, including programming.