Cindy D'Aoust

Meeting Spend: Take stock of how much your company can and does spend on promotional meetings. And look carefully at the effects of new compliance regulations on audience recruiting. Among survey respondents, about half work for companies that spent less than $1 million a year on promotional meetings. The other half spent more, sometimes in excess of $5 million a year. About half of the respondents forecast a 15-percent rise in meeting budgets next year. The other half did not expect changes in the budget.

One legal expert noted that the industry may be divided into two sectors: companies that have CIAs and those that will.

You would think that identifying where a pharma company spends its money on meetings would be simple, but at most organizations, there are no processes or systems in place to track meeting activity.