It takes exceptional service, great communication, and modern facilities to score your venue highly with event planners. But, no matter whether you’re overseeing one or many events and venues, keeping everything running without a hitch can be challenging.
Our guide on what is venue management provides advice to get you on top of your game. Learn how to increase sales, drive repeat business, and be a constant value-add to clients.
What is Venue Management (explanation for Event Pros)
Venue management is the activities and responsibilities associated with running an event venue, for example, a restaurant, brewery, or hospitality center. The duties typically involve booking and scheduling clients, managing finances, venue marketing, event oversight, administrative tasks, maintenance, and HR.
Carrying out these tasks and heading up a venue management team is the venue manager. These professionals communicate and coordinate with clients, vendors, contractors, and their teams to ensure that events are flawless.
Key Tasks in the Venue Management Process
Below is a list of tasks that venue managers take care of as part of the venue management process. Rest assured, there is never a dull moment with logistical, administrative, and creative responsibilities to cover in both the front- and back-of-house.
Daily Operations
Event venues rely on venue managers to manage daily operations. This includes overseeing and coordinating the teams that take care of security, cleaning, stocking, and general maintenance of the venue.
Event Coordination
The manager oversees bookings and works closely with internal teams, outside vendors, and other industry experts to ensure events run smoothly. Additionally, they handle all the client requirements around specific requests and venue services. This could include hiring equipment, organizing additional security, and helping with menu planning, among other tasks.
Finances
Financial administration is a crucial component of running an event venue. Management is involved in financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Venue managers will also handle discussions around contract negotiations to ensure the financial viability of booked events.
Staffing Requirements and People Administration
Venue managers train and supervise in-house staff, and strategically plan teams for events. Furthermore, some managers make decisions regarding the hiring and firing of staff, as well as handle payroll.
Marketing
No one will know about a perfect venue or event space if it isn’t being marketed correctly. Venue managers are often in charge of spreading the word about their venue and events through different marketing channels, like social media or local advertising.
Communicating With Clients
Venue managers are often tasked with responding to inquiries from potential clients. This includes creating and sending proposals, invoices, contracts, and statements. On the event day, they may be the point of contact if a dedicated concierge hasn’t been assigned.
Exclusive Tips For Successful Venue Management
We’ve written a comprehensive guide on event venue management tips here. However, let’s quickly recap some of the main ways to supercharge your value-add to clients:
Be On the Ball With Communication
Event planners want to know they can contact a venue representative who can solve problems and answer questions at any moment. From a potential client’s initial outreach to the post-event debrief, it's critical to respond to them quickly and accurately. This will help to assure the person they’re in capable hands.
Appoint an Event Liaison
Each event should have an event concierge or liaison. Event planners can't be everywhere at once in the midst of the chaos. Give them a hand by designating a liaison to help with setup and takedown, owning event tech, and coordinating housekeeping and the kitchen.
On the actual occasion, they can gauge the temperate of the guests to determine how the event is going. If anything needs rectifying, they can action it accordingly.
Establish Connections With Event Planners
It helps to forge professional connections with event planners in your area. If you know off-hand how busy they are, what they look for in a venue, and general venue pain points, you can work on offering solutions to suit them. This will help you secure new sales or encourage repeat business.
Fortunately, numerous ways exist to initiate and develop these connections over time. You can:
- Attend industry events to meet event professionals
- Keep your communications transparent and authentic at all times
- Ask event planners what they consider to be potential venue value-adds
- Conduct top-drawer site visits
Use CRM Software to Manage Customer Relationships
To have a successful event venue, you must communicate intentionally with customers. Sending the right messaging at the right moment can help move leads down the sales funnel and bring them closer to booking your space.
A CRM automates communications and helps you manage crucial early touchpoints. It also helps to keep your venue team moving in the same direction across your properties. With customers’ data on hand, you can set sensible priorities and boost sales.
Build a Strong Vendor Network
Establishing relationships with catering companies, AV companies, and other local event service providers will help you become a trusted supplier resource. This is something that event planners look out for and might be a tipping point for securing work.
Grow Your Venue Asset List
Your amenities play a significant role in establishing your space as a dependable and popular destination. Are the acoustics in your banquet room outstanding? Do you have enough guest bathrooms? Is there HVAC available?
Adding to this asset list over time can help drive sales demand and establish your name as a preferred venue.
Using Event Tech to Improve Venue Management
As you know, technology can significantly improve how you work. When it comes to venue management tech, there’s something for everyone. We recommend reading our guides on the best venue management software and free venue management software to learn more about what’s currently on the market.
How Does Venue Management Tech Impact Events?
In today’s tech-driven world, using software can give you a leg up on your competitors. Software, such as Perfect Venue, handles your busy work and supercharges your event management. It leaves you free to focus on more critical tasks, such as relationship-building and creating a desirable venue.
Below, we’ll look at how these platforms can eliminate admin while boosting operations.
Process Payments Securely
The right software will enable you to receive and manage payments securely. For example, on Perfect Venue, you can quickly provide a guest with a link to their portal where they can conveniently and securely pay their deposit online.
Going this route, you can expect to pay substantially less than keying in the card through your POS system. This is because rates for all cards, including Amex, start at 2.9%.
There’s no need to worry about PCI Non-Compliance Fines either. Find out more by reading our post on credit card authorization forms.
Access Professional Documents
Creating professional documents can take up a lot of time. Unfortunately, it’s time you don’t have if you want to respond promptly and give your venue a viable shot at winning event contracts.
When using venue management tech, you can access a library of professional-looking built-in document templates. Typically, you’ll find templates for proposals, invoices, contracts, and a free BEO.
With various professional templates to choose from, you can enter data and send emails up to three times faster than creating them from scratch.
Monitor Event Analytics
No doubt you’ve set specific goals for your events venue. It may be a target sales revenue, a target number of events, or an optimal number of booked seats per event. Keeping track of these metrics helps you make informed business decisions and drive success.
Most software offers vital event analytics data. With this data, you can monitor your progress and adjust your strategy to meet your goals.
Easy Overview of Events Through a Booking Calendar
A built-in calendar view on your dashboard lets you track upcoming reservations. Clicking the event from your calendar will give you a complete overview of all the pertinent details in one place. It also prevents frustrating errors from occurring, such as double-booking dates or event spaces.
Manage Multiple Venues
Managing multiple venues means more tasks and complexity in the organization process. In turn, meeting the expectations around customer satisfaction, personnel, and event professionals can quickly become a mammoth undertaking.
With venue management software, you can create tasks and allocate teams to each venue. This will help keep everyone on the same page and aware of what’s required leading up to, during, and after your events.
Conclusion
So, what is venue management? The short and simple is it’s the processes involved in running and upkeeping a successful event space.
Being a venue manager means you’re in charge of many mission-critical tasks that can impact event success. We hope our insights and tips will help you navigate this journey. Luckily, there are tools to help you manage your venue and events like a pro.
Perfect Venue’s event management software will save you time and increase sales. Grab a free trial today to see if it’s the right fit for your event venue.
