Why do we work for nothing?

are supposed to just notch it up to experience and walk away. Why?

The simple answer is that there are too many so-called practitioners, many of which don’t have the necessary experience (although they will tell clients that they do) who won’t charge for work to try to convince clients to give them their business because they feel it would be a disincentive. Well maybe, but because of on-line event management systems that will apparently do it all for you - and the ‘you’ in this case includes your clients - some companies feel it’s the only way to compete.

I’m not suggesting that meeting planners and incentive practitioners should form a cartel. This is both illegal (but so is accepting hidden commissions but we all know this is alive and well in our industry!) in Australia and uncompetitive. I am suggesting that industry members charge a reasonable fee to cover the work that goes into producing a proposal if they are unsuccessful in their pitch. This assumes that a pitch is requested and not merely sent as a sales opportunity.

It should also be a precondition of providing a proposal that the vendor’s intellectual rights to the proposal contents should be respected. How many times have we seen original ideas passed on to competitors and even suppliers while we’re left twiddling our fingers…and fuming?

2017 seems to be the year for meeting and incentive practitioners to raise the thorny issue of payment for providing quotations. At a number of events I have attended this year, including overseas trade shows, there is a lot of suppressed (and some not so suppressed) anger at clients who ask for a proposal and then simply send what one practitioner provides onto another (or several others) to provide a so-called ‘competitive price’.

This ‘competitive price’, of course, does not take into account the fact that the time and effort as well as the expense of providing the initial proposal doesn’t have to be included a second time because the work has already been done!

Advertising agencies have no qualms about charging their clients for a pitch. Ask your lawyer to give you a proposal for legal advice and somewhere in the quote there will be a paragraph or three (lawyers are never short of a few words, particularly when someone is paying for them) which tells you that if you do not wish to proceed you’ll receive a bill for the quotation.

Plumbers, electricians, computer technicians, builders, doctors of all disciplines, bankers, even travel agents have been known to make a charge for their services if the client doesn’t proceed with whatever project they originally approached them about. And yet in the meetings and incentives industries we