One of our clients has a new 1-on-1 coordinator scheduling meetings for an event happening at the end of the week. She called today to find out how to do the scheduling in MeetMax. Forty-five minutes later, she had all of her meetings scheduled: 61 attendees, 21 with meeting requests, 6 companies, 54 total meetings. Here’s how we did it:

• Schedule requested meetings for the tier 1 attendees first, using a batch scheduler to make this process quick and simple.
• Repeat for lower tiers of attendees, until it looks like there are no more fillable requests.
• Then go through the list of unscheduled attendees, and use the information provided by the attendee, when they registered, to determine who is willing to participate in small group meetings. Schedule these meetings by combining attendees who have indicated similar levels of knowledge of the company with whom they will be meeting.
• Continue this until you have scheduled all attendees and/or filled up the available timeslots for each company.
• Review the rooms grid to make sure that the number of meetings in each timeslot does not exceed the available number of rooms. Adjust the schedules as necessary.

The secret to efficiently scheduling meetings: Collect information about each request (priority, preferred meeting size, knowledge of the subject) when the attendee registers.

In today’s business environment, everyone is watching their travel and marketing budgets.  Sponsoring or exhibiting at an event is expensive, and even attending one is a commitment of time and travel expense.

But imagine, as a sponsor, if prior to an event you could see a list of attendees and other sponsors, choose which ones you’d like to have a private meeting with, and then arrive on the day with a full list of scheduled meetings, complete with attendee contact details and specified locations.

Imagine also, as an attendee, if you could see a list of all companies and people attending the event, request meetings with those you want to do business with, and come to the conference knowing for sure that you were going to meet them in peace for 30 minutes.

Private, pre-scheduled 1-on-1 business development meetings turn a conference into a business development trip for every participant.   No more chance encounters, no more waiting around hoping to swap cards – instead, scheduled quality time with key business prospects.    And you, the conference organizer, facilitate this relationship building by providing the service to connect and schedule these meetings and providing a room or table for the meeting to take place.

You have turned your conference into an exciting, must-attend event.  You have created a whole new sponsorship category because sponsors have priority status for these meetings.   And you have elevated your own organization into a key driver of business development.

Private 1-on-1 meetings have been a vital part of financial conferences for many years – and MeetMax is the registration system of choice for these events.   Increasingly, other industry conferences are realizing their importance.  Those events that get there first will see the biggest benefit, as they become a magnet for all kinds of business development spending.   And those events that do it best, will use MeetMax for their online registration because of its comprehensive, easy-to-use functionality for managing private meetings.

Click  here to schedule a demo, and use that time to ask us about how private meetings work in practice — we have worked on hundreds of events involving private meetings, some of which have had over 1000 pre-scheduled 1-on-1 meetings.