The Compelling Logic of Hosted Buyer Programmes

Hosted Buyer Programmes are finally coming of age as a companion to B2B exhibitions and, for smaller gatherings where buyers and sellers come together, as events in their own right.

For exhibition organisers the logic is simple. You hold an exhibition with 300 exhibitors.  You bring 4,500 visitors. Of those, perhaps only one in ten might be considered a "power buyer" that many of your exhibitors would like to meet. Would it not therefore be highly desirable to set up quality appointments between your 300 exhibitors and those specific buyers? Certainly, most suppliers would willingly pay a premium for  15-20 guaranteed meetings with qualified corporate decision-makers.

While only a few exhibition organisers may be ready to replace their exhibitions with hosted buyers programmes, many are starting to run a hosted buyer programme alongside their traditional B2B exhibition. Until now, reticence in the events industry towards hosted buyer programmes has historically derived from two main concerns. First, a fear that any additional revenues or cost savings could be quickly consumed by the additional incentives needed to bring the appropriate buyers to the table; some organisers offer air travel, hotel accommodation and meals. Second, a concern that the work needed by event staff to arrange, schedule and consummate meetings is too burdensome.

I'm not an event organiser and therefore not qualified to contest the first concern. But my gut instinct is that buyers meet suppliers anyway and the opportunity to meet a lot of them in one place in a short period of time is very advantageous. If buyers are planning to come to an exhibition, then most would also participate in a well-organised hosted buyer programme without much prompting. Meanwhile some senior buyers who may not otherwise choose to attend an exhibition might actually be attracted by the opportunity to pre-schedule a full day of qualified appointments with suppliers. For the remainder, it's a cost-benefit judgement the organiser has to make on a case-by-case basis.

As a technology provider whose company has been providing sophisticated one-to-one meeting services to the event industry for over seven years , I do feel qualified to respond to the second concern. Let's start by noting that, with or without third-party technology, such companies as Marcus Evans, Richmond Events, the World Trade Group, Forum2Events and others have being generating healthy profits from exactly this format of event for many years now. Several  years ago, the CEO of one of these companies is alleged to have expressed surprise that he did not have more competitors. This is now changing.

Today, there are a lot of slick software solutions on the market that make it easy for event organisers to provide hosted buyer programmes at their events without a huge commitment of resources. Many software companies offer diary-based meeting solutions. One or two – Delegate Select being probably the first in 2008 – also offer wish list-based solutions to event organisers.

Diary Based Solutions

With the diary-based solutions, buyers and suppliers (exhibitors) profile themselves, telling each other what they are seeking or offering. Buyers arrange meetings with suppliers, choosing a mutually available time. If permitted by the organiser, suppliers send personalised invitations by email or SMS to buyers; the recipient confirms, declines or ignores the invitation.

Not all diary-based solutions are equal. It is worth checking whether the software provider's solution is able to:

·         Permit an exhibitor to hold multiple concurrent meetings and assign individual meetings to other members  of his/her team.

·         Permit a buyer with a confirmed meeting to invite a colleague who is also attending the event to join the meeting.

·         Provide all participants with a bespoke itinerary of their meetings.

·         Update buyers and exhibitors itineraries on their mobile device, i-pad or tablet in real time, should changes occur or new meetings be arranged at the event itself.

Some diary-based software solutions promise to arrange meetings using just the profiles of the two parties. While this may sound convenient, it is not recommended. There are many reasons why buyers and suppliers might not wish to meet.  History, personal relationships, or even the fact that two companies are already doing business may all come into play. Experience suggests that meetings arranged by software systems without direct or even indirect consent of both parties will likely result in a high number of unfulfilled meetings.

Wish-list Solution

With the wish-list solution, buyers and suppliers create online wish lists of who they would like to meet and, if permitted by the organiser, a handful of companies they wish to avoid. Participants arrange their wish lists in order of preference online. Following a cut-off date, the event organiser, at the touch of few buttons, can quickly confirm and schedule hundreds of meetings between the two parties. The organiser has the ability to over-ride or manually supplement the selections made by the system. Attendees end up with personalised itineraries that, to the greatest extent possible, reflect the preferences of both meeting partners.

Regardless of whether a diary or wish-list solution is used, organisers should be sure to check that the solution has been designed responsively and that all functionality is accessible on desk-top and mobile devices alike, without users having to download an app... because many will simply not bother.

Five years ago, the first time one of our wish-list solution clients ran the scheduling for her event, she called me up in tears. "I've just scheduled 800 meetings in less than five minutes. You've saved me three days of my life", she cried. We'd like to think that this is only a fraction of the time that has been saved cumulatively since then by bringing buyers and suppliers together in meetings they were both keen to attend.

Do I need a mobile app for my event (and should I have to pay for it)?

There are a lot of nuances surrounding mobile apps for events. People will tell you “you’ve gotta have mobile”, but in order to decide what you actually need and how much – if anything – it should cost you, requires a little clear thinking. So let’s start with the big question: “What issue am I trying to address?”

Issue 1: People are now using mobile devices instead of (or in addition to) desktop or laptop devices

Nowadays people are increasingly using mobile devices including phones, i-pads and tablets to access the internet and do things they used to do through desktop PCs or laptops. If this is your issue, then the first place to look is your main event website. Does it offer a full range of functionality – registration, delegate profiling, conference agenda, session selection, one-to-one meetings, personalized itinerary, payment and event feedback? If it does, then what you really want is a way of ensuring that all this great functionality also looks good on a mobile device.

This used to be a big issue. Mobile devices have a smaller screen size than desktop PCs and laptops. Software producers had to write separate programs to cater for them.

But thanks to an exciting development in IT called responsive design, websites are now becoming intelligent enough to know what sort of device they are being displayed upon and reformatting themselves accordingly.

So if your event website does everything you want, there’s just one question you now need to ask your IT department or your software solution provider: “Is our event web-site designed to be responsive?”

If the answer is yes, no specific mobile app is needed. All people need is a link to your event website and an internet connection.

Issue 2: There is no internet connectivity at my event but I want people to be able to view certain information on their phone

Of course, if there is no internet connectivity at your event, such as wifi or a mobile internet connection, e.g. 3G, 4G or GPRS, because the local environment or infrastructure does not support it, then it will be difficult for people to view your website at all.

If it is imperative that people see information relevant to your event during the event, then the only solution may be a mobile app installed on their phones. There are some apps out there that do very clever things. But even with these, there are three major caveats of which you should be aware:

1.   If people have not already downloaded your custom event app to their phone before coming to your event, they may struggle to do so at your event and many will fail or give up.

2.   You can display static information and functionality through your custom app, as long as it does not need to interact with a web-server. But if, for example, you wish to allow people to see other attendees and issue meeting requests or make appointments, they will be unable to do so during your event.

3.   Mobile apps are device dependent. All serious app providers will address the both i‑phone and android markets. Not all will go the extra mile to reach users with Blackberry and Windows phones.

Should I have to pay extra for mobile?

If you have a fully functional event web-site built with responsive design, the answer is probably “No”. With internet connectivity at your event, users can do pretty much everything they need before, during and after your event. What else is there to pay for?

A company such as Delegate Select will sell you a complete event registration site with your own branding, delegate profiling, session selection/tailored agenda and one-to-one meeting functionality for up to 500 participants for under £1,250. Now, with the implementation of our new responsive design, your site will run across mobile devices, i-pads and tablets at no extra charge.

However, if you do want a fancy stand-alone app requiring no internet connectivity built for i-phone and android that allows users to see where they are and plan their route to an exhibitor’s stand or the coffee and doughnuts, then expect to pay handsomely for it!

Organizing Stress Free Gala Dinners

Does your company organize Gala Dinners? If so, on a scale of 1 to 10 how stressful is it for those doing the organizing and administration?

If you have sponsors booking tables, it's even worse, isn’t it? Making sure the right person is sitting in the right place and getting served the right food is a bit like driving a car blind-folded with someone in the back seat giving directions.

So what might your perfect stress-free Gala Dinner solution look like? How about this?

·         Sponsors book one or more tables, company representatives book several seats, individual attendees book a single seat

·         Payment is taken online or invoices are issued automatically

·         Everyone who books one or more seats and/or tables is wholly responsible for who sits on their seat(s) as well as their dietary requirements

·         Table sponsors have the additional benefit of being able to arrange the seating around their table

·         The event organizer can place any unassigned persons booked by company representatives or individuals to empty spaces at tables

·         Just before the Gala Dinner, the event organizer prints seating plans and presses a button to send notification by email or SMS to all attendees telling them where they are sitting.

Like it? Want one? Then call us.

Potato Washing Monkeys

Researchers in Japan in the fifties observed that a few monkeys on the island of Koshima, with a taste for sweet potatoes, began taking the mud-caked delicacies they excavated down to the sea to wash before eating. The researchers then observed this custom spread quickly among the monkey population of Koshima and soon to neighbouring islands.

This research was popularized by various writers in the seventies and eighties, including Rupert Sheldrake who saw it as evidence of his theory of morphic rensonance. This he described in his book The New Science of Life as ‘the basis of memory in nature… the idea of mysterious telepathy-like interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species’. An idea similar in many respects to Jung’s “Collective Unconscious”.

Personally, I’m a believer – especially in light of our recent software development experience.

About six months ago, our technology director and I were kicking some ideas around and became very excited about developing a mobile app for exhibitor lead retrieval. Using their mobile phones, exhibitors at events would capture information about attendees who dropped by their stand simply by scanning a QR code on the visitors’ badge. No more charging scanning devices, renting them out, collecting them at the close of the event and downloading data.

Great idea.

We proceeded to design a slick and sophisticated mobile app to run on both i-phones and android devices and oversaw the development of this app alongside a myriad of other tasks.

Finally, the app is ready to launch. We are still excited, but we also note that in the intervening six months, a number of other apps have appeared on the market that do a similar job to ours.

There are both negatives and positives here. On the minus side, we have a lot of competition (though we would like to think that our app has several advantages over those of most of our competitors – such as being multi-lingual and providing automatic synchronization with our registration server).

On the plus side, we feel our vision has been fully vindicated. Without sharing our ideas with others or gleaning theirs from them, we are somehow fully attuned to the direction in which the market is heading.

In short, we are washing our potatoes along with all those other monkeys!  

Inspiration from the Departure Lounge?

LCD screen showing newly scheduled appointments on a rotating loop

A TV screen in an airport departure lounge makes pretty dull reading. Unless of course, you are waiting for information about your flight and then you can’t take your eyes off it.

Perhaps this was a source of inspiration to Elite, a UK-based international careers firm, who organize career fairs with a difference.

How different? First, their career fairs generally take place in distant lands and their event web-sites and communications with participants are in a foreign language. Second, at many of their events, pre-screened candidates engage in face-to-face interviews with hiring companies and contractual arrangements for employment can take place there and then. Third, they use technology brilliantly.

Elite’s whole process can be summed up in one word. Smooth.

The technology behind their process is supplied by us, Delegate Select. If you want to do things differently at your events and are looking for a supplier that can make this happen, drop us a message!

Old Cars and New Websites

Old vs. New

Websites are a lot like cars. No, I’m not talking four wheels and an engine, but rather style and fashion.

We might love our car. We’ve been driving it for quite a number of years. It still runs great, sails through its annual health check and gets us from A to B no problem. In short, it’s entirely fit for purpose.... well, almost.

It’s just that over time it’s become, um, a little dated. Somehow, fashions have changed and our car, once a smart shiny eye-catcher, no longer looks the business. We still drive it happily, but are increasingly conscious of other vehicles on the road with their youthful good looks and smooth contoured bodies. Our eyes are involuntarily drawn to their number plates: BG12, RH60, ER11, KL61... Our FV51 is now a decade away from the action. If the scrappage scheme was still going, our little runner would be a prime candidate.

Websites date in a similar way. It’s as if there is an unwritten consensus of what a modern website should look like. Just as cars benefit from new technologies that reduce carbon emissions and fuel consumption, websites have their own champions with names like Ajax, JQuery and XML. Add to these technologies the proliferation of some excellent design templates and such powerful content management systems (CMS) as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Expression Engine, and it’s no surprise that one finds a certain conformity out there.

So, the time has come for Delegate Select to shed the old website that has served so well over the years and build something new. With the recent addition of a talented and creative young designer to our team, we decided not to go the CMS route but opted for an original hand-crafted product. We think it looks modern and distinctive, communicates the scope and strength of our offering, yet remains true to our core mission – the unyielding desire to provide our customers with a bespoke service at an off-the-shelf price or, using our car analogy, the quality of a BMW with custom trim at the price of a sub-compact.

We hope you like the result!