Making Money from Meetings at Events

You want to add value for participants at your event. You understand that one-to-one meetings can do that. Ideally you would like the solution to add so much value that it becomes a source of additional revenue rather than a cost. If that’s the case, it’s important that you choose the right meeting solution for your event.

Here are three different implementations you might want to consider. There are others.

1.  Buyer-supplier wish-lists. This format is becoming increasingly popular for B2B events with between 20-100 suppliers and 30-300 buyers. Here, buyers and suppliers profile themselves separately. Buyers create wish-lists of, say, 20 suppliers they wish to meet and arrange their selections in order of preference, by dragging and dropping them up and down the list. Suppliers create a list of preferred buyers in a similar manner.

Through a powerful administrative desk, the administrator can quickly instruct the system to arrange optimal itineraries for all attendees based on their stated preferences. Through the same desktop, the organizer can drag and drop buyers and suppliers, who were not scheduled to meet each other in one-to-one meetings, into other group activities or onto lunch and dinner tables.

Clearly, if you have the right buyers in the room, suppliers will be willing to pay a premium for a full itinerary of meetings with people who have a strong desire to meet them.

2.  One group of attendees – with upsell of extra meetings and dedicated meeting place to sponsors.  If there is a desire among delegates to meet other delegates as well as sponsors, then the organizer might want to enable everyone to request meetings with everyone else. The amount of requests can be capped by default, but adjusted case by case. The person receiving the request is able to confirm or decline (or ignore) it. On confirming a request, the user is presented with a list of mutually available times. One advantage of this implementation is that sponsors don’t immediately stand out as attendees who want to sell to others and may actually end up with more meetings.

There are two ways to effectively monetize this solution. The first is to permit only a few requests per attendee at no cost, but then sell individual packages permitting more requests. The second is to sell sponsors a dedicated meeting place ­– a table or a room of their own where all their meetings will take place. While they stay put, others will need to move around from meeting to meeting.

3.  Two groups of attendees. This works well for conference/exhibition-style events where there are exhibitors with stands and the organizer is primarily interested in facilitating meetings for them with delegates. Attendees are separated into two groups, labelled as desired – delegates and sponsors, visitors and exhibitors, etc. Both can be profiled differently. For example, exhibitors may indicate products and services offered; delegates may indicate the size of their company, their purchasing budget and areas of interest. Delegates get to book appointments directly into the diaries of exhibitors or, alternatively depending on how the service is set up, request meetings which the exhibitor should confirm or decline.

Shortly before the event, the organizer can extend the service so that exhibitors can invite delegates to meet them. If sponsors have multiple personnel on their stand they are able to schedule concurrent meetings and manage the diaries of each individual staff member. Optionally, the service can also be opened for delegate-delegate meetings close to the event.

When the program is run well, exhibitors can end up with appointments with dozens of “power buyers” before the doors even open. That will bring them back, again and again.

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Lastly, there is a great sponsorship opportunity in all these solutions for a company that would like to have its name and logo on all communications send out through the meeting service.

If you are wondering what is the best way to add meetings to your events, we are always happy to offer advice.