Your audience at a business matchmaking event

Filling a room is easy. Filling it with the right people is the whole job. An event with 80 participants who do not buy from each other delivers less than one with 30 well chosen, and it costs a great deal more.

This article is about how to define and find the audience for a business matchmaking event.

Start with the question that defines everything

Before announcing anything, answer: who is going to buy from whom in this room?

If you cannot name at least five plausible buying pairs, the framing is wrong. A room where everyone sells to the end consumer and nobody buys from anybody generates cards and no sales.

Framings that work:

• A production chain. Suppliers and buyers from the same sector, with buying anchors. See anchor companies.
• Services for companies. Accountancy, legal, IT, printing, uniforms, cleaning, marketing. They all buy from one another.
• Territory. Companies from one neighbourhood, industrial estate or business park. Proximity is the argument.
• Complementarity. Companies serving the same customer with different products. It is the most reliable basis for recurring referral.

The written profile, on one page

After the framing, write the profile precisely. Four items:

1. Size and approximate revenue. A room with micro businesses and multinationals frustrates both sides.
2. Who the person coming is. The owner or whoever is responsible for purchasing. If people without authority come, the event becomes leaflet collection.
3. What that company buys. Write it in categories, not in generalities.
4. What it sells. The same.

Items 3 and 4 become the supply and demand fields on the registration, and it is from them that the building of the tables comes.

How to find those companies

Start with your own client base. Accountants, coworking spaces, associations and event venues already have the list. If you have 200 clients, 30 registrations come out of two weeks on the telephone.

Use the first registrants as recruiters. Whoever has already paid has a direct interest in seeing the room full of complementary companies. Ask each one for three referrals and offer a condition to whoever brings someone.

Go to sector events. Trade fairs, meetings of trade bodies and association gatherings are where your audience is already assembled. See business matchmaking at a chamber of commerce.

Do a short survey beforehand. Five questions, by telephone or message, to thirty companies of the profile. Ask whether they would go on a weekday or a Saturday, what they would pay, what they sell and what they intend to buy in the next six months. The last two are the ones that reveal whether business is possible.

Use targeted advertising in moderation. Social media serves for reach, but registrations for a matchmaking event usually come from direct contact. Advertising brings the curious; the telephone brings the buyer. See marketing your event to the right audience.

What helps decide the size

The size of the room is not a preference, it is a consequence.

The organizer decides the experience: a smaller room, where each participant meets nearly everyone, or a larger one, with more variety and less chance of meeting everybody. They also decide the speaking time and whether the event is open or sector-specific.

Each round, everyone else at the table is a new conversation, and the bigger the room, the more rounds it takes for each person to meet a large part of it. The number of rounds comes from the design: how many people attend, how many tables fit and how many seats each table has.

In other words: a smaller room lets you promise that each participant meets most of the room, which is a much stronger sales argument than a long list of companies present. But only promise it after checking: if the format does not close, participants sit again with people they have already met, and the promise turns into frustration.

In the demo, the software shows what your room can hold, with your own numbers. See also how many rounds fit in your event.

Mistakes in defining the audience

• Accepting any registration to hit the target. A company outside the profile takes the seat of one that would generate business.
• An audience with no buyer. Plenty of supply and no demand is the framing that frustrates most.
• Too many people from the same segment. Ten accountancy firms in the same room cancel out each other's value.
• Not asking for supply and demand at registration. Without those fields, building the tables is a lottery.
• Inviting whoever does not decide. An intern or an assistant without authority closes nothing and takes up a seat.

How the registration determines the result

In Rodada de Sucesso, each participant's registration records what their company offers and is looking for, along with restrictions such as who should not meet or which anchor stays at a fixed table.

The schedule is generated with zero repetition as a hard rule, avoiding colleagues from the same company at the same table, and every meeting has a compatibility score: the software brings sellers and buyers together, and you can explain to each participant why they sat with that company.

In practice, that means the quality of the registration determines the quality of the table. If you accept a record with "various services" in the supply field, the build has nothing to cross-reference. Insist on it being filled in properly in the preparation message.

The list of registrations comes in by importing a spreadsheet in xlsx or csv, with a check before saving, which handles the case of anyone who already collected registrations through a form.

Afterwards: the audience that comes back

The most valuable audience is the one at the second edition. They already know how it works, arrive prepared and bring people.

To get there, send the participant list within 48 hours, collect feedback and announce the next date while still closing the event. See what to do after the event and curating participants.

The right audience is not the largest. It is the one where each person has, in that room, at least five concrete reasons to talk.