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 business association.

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.

The arithmetic that helps decide the size

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

At a table with S seats, each person talks to S minus 1 people per round. With R rounds, they meet R × (S minus 1) people. For everyone to talk to everyone, you need at least (N minus 1) divided by (S minus 1) rounds.

With 30 participants at tables of 6, that is 5 tables and 5 new people per round. Over 6 rounds, each one meets 29 people, meaning the whole room. With 80 participants in the same configuration, you would need 16 rounds for the same effect, which does not fit in an afternoon.

In other words: a smaller room lets you promise that everyone meets everyone, which is a much stronger sales argument than "80 companies present". See 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 has a number, name, company, role, email, telephone, segment, category, interests, supply, demand, priority, a fixed table for an anchor, restrictions and notes. There is also a company record, with segment, supply and demand.

The schedule is generated with zero repetition as a hard rule, avoiding colleagues from the same company at the same table, and every meeting receives a compatibility score from 0 to 100, explainable, that cross-references supply with demand, interests, segment, priority and history.

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.