A B2B networking event is so much more than just one-on-one meetings between professionals and brands. A truly valuable and high-quality interaction involves a careful matchup between the networking needs of your attendees.
Discover below the details of our intelligent algorithm-based matchmaking feature.
I- The meaning of Intelligent algorithm in matchmaking
When attending a networking dynamic, your guests have a specific agenda:
Some want to sell their services and focus on finding promising prospects. Others want to buy certain products, so their goal is to evaluate different brands and choose the one that suits them best. Some attendees may be looking for funding, while others will be searching for potential business partners.
Although the content and focus of every single event and networking dynamic are different, the core of B2B interactions involves providing a safe environment where the match between the offer and demand integrates your attendees’ interests.
To make sure you’ll achieve this goal, we have built a matchmaking system that will help you gather important information about your attendees’ networking preferences, categorize them into different business groups, and then empower them to decide their own agenda, requesting meetings with people or brands that suit their needs.
The matchmaking feature is based on an algorithm and works by automatically matching supply and demand, taking into account the data your participants have previously provided.
II- How it works ?
Below are the steps to follow to enable and configure the B2B auto-matchmaking feature that is algorithm-based and works by automatically matching the offer and demand, taking into account the data your attendees previously added.Step 1: Define the Networking profiles
- As the organizer, you can decide what types of attendees you’ll be matching at your event. You can go conventional and establish two business categories as networking profiles. For example, vendors and suppliers.
For more details about the Networking profiles, check this article. - You can also organize your attendees by tags we call Attendee categories, which will help you to later find the necessary information quicker and easier.
Step 2: Configure the rating system
The beauty of our auto-matchmaking option involves a star-rating system. Normally, when setting up a B2B matchmaking dynamic, you’ll ask your attendees to request meetings with people who interest them the most.
However, with algorithmic matchamking, things work differently.
Every attendee will have the possibility to rate other guests using a one-to-five star system, with one star meaning the attendee has very little interest in meeting the other attendee, and five stars meaning that he or she has a high interest in scheduling a meeting with the rated guest.
You’ll decide how many stars your attendees will be able to give.
For example, you can set up the system so that people will be able to assign one, two, three, and four stars just once, and the five stars rating twice. This will be their way of saying, “I’m interested to meet this person or brand.”
In other words, you’ll have the power to choose how many stars each attendee type can assign to other guests listed in the networking agenda.
To set this up:
- Enter your Networking session and in the General information tab, make sure to select Algorithm as the Sceduling mode
- Once you click on Save, you will see the Algorithm Settings tab. Enter this tab.
- In Settings, you can define how many times the attendees can use the ratings (1 star to 5 stars). Here, we can see that the Providers can rate up to 2 participants with 1 star and up to 5 participants with 5 stars.
- Click on Save to apply
Note: Your guests aren’t required to use all the stars they have.
Step 3: Decide the threshold
- Next, enter the Executions tab
- Click on the Three-dots button on the right, then New
- Then, define the Threshold.
The Threshold is defined by the minimum "points" you allow the participants to meet each other.
For example, a buyer gave a provider three stars and the provider gave that same buyer a 4-star rating.
Multiply 3 by 4 and you’ll get 12 points.
If you set the meeting threshold lower than 10 points, the system will automatically generate a one-on-one meeting between the two attendees (because they reached the threshold). If you set a higher threshold, then they won’t meet at your event.- After that, once you click on "Execute", you can see a running statistic which will say, for a given threshold, how many meetings will be scheduled, and for how many participants.
NB: You should execute the algorithm only once your attendees have given each other ratings.
Step 4: Filling the gaps (empty slots)
- After running the algorithm, it is possible that not everyone will end up with full agendas, so we give them the chance to fill the empty slots. This happens by adding random interactions.
- In order to do that, click on the three-dots button on the right and then on New.
- Keep the Threshold as you liked it but check the option Fill remaining empty slots with random meetings to allow random meetings for empty slots. Then give priority to one of the participant types.
III- Download the agenda
You can download a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet with all the one-on-one meetings so you can see the names of the interacting attendees, the time, date, and status of the meeting, and the location (if you previously assigned one).
- To do that, go to the Networking module, select a networking session, and then go in the Scheduled meetings tab. Click on Actions and on Print Agendas to get a pdf, or Export to excel.
- One of the reasons why we decided to design this option was to simplify your work and automatize some of the planning processes.
- However, we soon discovered the potential that lies under the simple layer of automation and how we could use intelligent algorithms to actually provide an even more accurate matchup to improve the quality of your attendees’ networking experience.
Give it a try, and if you need help on anything, don't hestitate to reach out to us at help@eventtia.com