Smart Meetings

Interview with Robert Marx

June 2006

Give Me 5

Interview with Robert Marx
Director of Marketing, San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau

What do you think a CVB should do for a meeting professional?
We should facilitate their event planning so it is as simple for them as possible. The process should be customer-centric, so the planner can book San Jose easily, without crawling out of a bunker, without 45 shells flying over their head. When it’s difficult, people are going to look elsewhere.

Similarly, from your experience, what’s beyond the CVB’s call of duty?
You always have the ubiquitous request: they want all of your (convention) space for a minimal investment. It may be just sitting there, but it still costs to use it. It’s the heat, the lighting, the cleaning and maintenance. Also, so much of what San Jose has to offer is spread around the town, so providing transportation is the one thing we get asked for a lot. Whether we do or not depends on what they are, who they are. We can certainly put them together with bus companies, limo companies.

Can you describe the perfect working relationship between a CVB and a meeting professional?
The key word is “talk.” We need to have a dialogue. A lot of things I see come up are details, not conflicts. Details can be resolved. If you want to meet on a Tuesday and we don’t have space, well, maybe the start date doesn’t matter so much if we pick up everyone at the airport. We need to fully understand each other’s pain before we get knee-deep into discussion and see that we can’t make it work. For example, we’ve got really heavy-duty union considerations here that may prevent us from doing something that a non-union city could do.

In what way is your CVB being underutilized by meeting professionals?
What we’re not seeing is the planner using the staff to help them do it all in one place. We manage six venues, all within a two-block space of the convention center, for a total of 243,000 sq. ft. On top of that, there’s a group of rentable theaters—even though they have fixed seating—that’s another 100,000 sq. ft. rounded off. That allows a planner to select a venue that might be basic, as in the convention center, and then add in the California Theatre, which is gorgeous, for a special dinner on the stage. Steve Jobs has used it to do product launches, including the iPod nano. You can do dinner on the stage where Steve Jobs stood, where the opera performs. A planner doesn’t have to talk to somebody for booking each venue, somebody for catering in each venue; our sales manager can handle it all. I don’t know of another CVB that does that. Under our Team San Jose concept, we have a manager in each of those buildings but they’re all on our team. You talk with one person and we can coordinate it all.

Every CVB professes consummate service and friendliness. what is the San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau’s distinctive edge?
Experience. Our sales team, our marketing team, we’re looking easily at a couple hundred years of experience, of having done the same thing at similar or comparable venues like Cornell or Hewlett Packard, for example. I had my own ad agency. Our sales department has three sales people who came from huge properties in Vegas, as well as Hyatt. We’re bringing a lot of corporate cultures together. When you do that, you stir it up; you create this pot of excitement. We’re not all sitting here with Marriott experience or convention experience.

Tell us about San Jose’s new meeting planner-friendly web site.
We’ve been building an all-new web site, literally, from the ground up. We did it internally so that it can be updated hourly, if needed. It will have maps, not just for our destination and its various attractions, but they will be designed so you can click on the map and a box will drop down to tell you what that place does and where it’s located; plus, it will show you that in three-dimensions. Any of our sales managers can then talk about meeting space with a client anywhere, both of them looking at the site simultaneously, and say “Your meeting and general session are going to be in Room J,” while the planner can see exactly what Room J looks like.

What is one promise that you can make to our readers?
That we will listen, we will learn and we will act accordingly. We would expect that our relationship with a planner would be a give and take. We want to teach and we want to learn. We want to take what we have learned and put it into practice, to guide us to be more effective in meeting their needs.