Case Study: Curated Meeting Solutions at Buyer/Seller Events

The Requirement

A very profitable event format is one where sellers (sponsors/solution providers/suppliers/exhibitors) pay the organizer in order to have meetings with high quality buyers. If this can take place within a 1- or 2-day event held in a hotel, rather than at a costly tradeshow, then so much the better. The challenge facing the organizer is how to attract a significant number of buyer delegates and oblige them to meet the sellers. Often too, at such events, the organizer may be contractually obliged to provide sellers with a minimum number of meetings.

The Solution

Delegate Select has seen clients grappling with this challenge over the years and has developed some unique solutions. While every event is different, our sophisticated curated meeting service offers an award-winning process that has proven extremely effective. Here is how it works:

• The organizer puts together a well-crafted program presenting information/educational content that buyer delegates will find attractive.
• Buyers then go through a registration flow where they enter/update their contact details and profile data.
• Optionally, if required by the organizer, prior to choosing program sessions to attend, the buyers are obligated to add a select number of sellers to their wish-list and rank these in order of preference.
• The number of obligatory meetings can be set by the organizer. For each meeting partner added, the buyer delegate may add a reason for the selection.
• Prior to the event, sellers can see the profiled buyers and create a wish-list of their own. They can also see buyers who have selected them and drag them onto their own wish-list.

Following the profiling of attendees and the creation of wish-lists, the organizer now has various tools to use within the platform when it comes to matching attendees and scheduling meetings. A standard sequence might be:

• First, exact matches where both parties expressed a desire to meet each other
• Second, unmatched buyer selections, where the buyer ranked the supplier in its top ten…
• Third, unmatched supplier selections, where the supplier ranked the buyer in its top ten… 
• Further steps: repeat steps 2 and 3, but with higher rankings, e.g. top twenty etc.

For those who have been slow to fill out wish-lists of their own and have not attracted many suitors, the organizer has a fallback option of matching participants based on profile scores. This can be effective if the profiling questions are well structured. But, matching on profiling information in buyer/seller events – often the mainstay of our competitors’ so-called ‘AI matching systems’ - should be the last resort, not the first.

Benefits

There are two major benefits.

First, at an event, some suppliers or buyers are going to be highly prized meeting partners, and some are not. Our ordered wish-list selection process is by far the most effective and fairest way of arranging prioritized meetings and giving the least popular suppliers their contracted number of meetings, while ensuring that buyers receive an agreeable itinerary.

Second, because the buyers have had active input into the meeting process – and some client events will only permit buyer-led meetings – the drop out/no-show rate is extremely low. Moreover, when they do meet each other, buyers are fully engaged, and sellers routinely give positive feedback.

For event organizers who have used Delegate Select’s curated solutions, the results speak for themselves. They come back year after year.