80% increase in demand for events featuring meetings, as the economic downturn forces organizers to deliver greater ROI

As the economic downturn worsens, Grip, the leading AI-powered event platform has seen a record 80% increase in demand for events where meetings are a core part of the experience. This is because attendees, sponsors and exhibitors are demanding more value from events they commit to, while organizers want to increase revenue. To meet this demand, organizers are now offering more facilitated meeting programs, like hosted buyer events, to deliver ROI and increase revenue. 

Organizers now monetize their meetings with MustMeet 

In response to this surge in demand for more meetings at events, Grip has today launched MustMeet, the world’s most powerful meeting scheduler for event organizers. 

It helps organizers increase revenue and demonstrate ROI by easily adding transformational meetings to their events with automated meeting schedules. They can now automatically schedule, manage and host a range of meetings for participants at their in-person and virtual events with ease. 

The benefits to participants, like buyers and suppliers, include being able to conduct months’ worth of meetings in only a few days (or less); accelerating their buying and sales process by only connecting the right people; and learning  from leading industry experts and peers.

Helping organizers implement a range of complex meeting formats

Complex meeting formats can now be deployed by event organizers automatically, thanks to MustMeet. Previously this would have taken several hundred post-it notes, spreadsheets and hours of manual work, plus last minute dropouts would have thrown carefully planned schedules into disarray. Additional hours would also be spent distributing, collecting and analyzing participants’ paper feedback forms post-event to assess the effectiveness and quality of organizers’ meeting programs. 

This has now been solved by MustMeet, which enables organizers to deliver the following meeting formats with intuitive, automated scheduling:

• One-to-one meetings: Where two mutually beneficial sides (e.g. buyer and supplier) are matched by Grip’s AI (e.g. as part of a ‘hosted buyer’ event). MustMeet automatically confirms the meeting, puts it in participants’ event schedules (plus work calendars), books the location where they’ll meet (e.g. a booth, table or meeting room at the event), and enables both parties to rate the meeting easily.  
• One-to-many meetings: This meeting format is where one participant wants to meet various people at once. For example, a CEO connects with three different investors during one meeting. 
• Many-to-many meetings: Many Grip customers use MustMeet to host roundtables where 10+ participants join a 90 minute meeting to discuss a hot topic.  An example is where 10 CIOs and two enterprise technology vendor reps meet to discuss hot industry issues. 

Transformational meetings enabled by MustMeet

Examples how MustMeet is being used by participants at leading industry events, include:

• Over 2,000 meetings were booked between TV executives and TV producers looking to sell their programs to streaming providers, resulting in millions seeing their shows.
• Over 400 female founders who met investors to secure funding over the course of 1,800 meetings.
• Hundreds of souvenir manufacturers in the United States  met with airports, zoos and museum gift shops to win new orders and increase revenue.

All these meetings resulted in vital new opportunities created, thousands of additional revenue generated and hundreds of hours saved.

The world’s leading events use MustMeet

MustMeet’s first customers include the organizers of large events like PCMA and the National Retail Federation but also smaller, more intimate events like MIP Cancun, Female Founders Office Hours and m&i Healthcare Europe.  MustMeet was able to cater for all these events, despite the different event formats (e.g. some participants were ‘hosted’ and others were not).

What’s your meeting strategy?

“MustMeet responds to the increasing number of organizers that want to activate their ‘meeting strategy’”,  explained Tim Groot, founder and CEO of Grip. “Often, this strategy is then executed with a ‘meeting program’ where meeting formats are agreed, implemented and made an integral part of their events.  Crucially, organisers we work with see meetings as a valuable component that create new revenue streams, important during this difficult economic period. It also allows them to prove the ROI of their shows to exhibitors and sponsors with robust metrics, like the number and quality of the meetings that took place during the event.” 

The clear business benefits of meetings

By using Grip’s new ‘smart meeting’ software, which is an integral part of its event platform, event organizers achieve record breaking NPS scores, thanks to an improvement in participant meeting quality. Event revenue can be increased by as much as 20%, as more valuable sponsor packages with meetings can be sold. While the time spent arranging meetings is reduced by up to 95%, compared to traditional manual matchmaking solutions. Finally, organizers see a dramatic increase in exhibitor re-bookings as organizers are now able to demonstrate the ROI by showing them the number of meetings they scheduled before, during and after the event. 

Making meetings ‘smart’ 

“The way meetings are scheduled today at events is ad hoc and unplanned, resulting in a poor experience for participants,” said Tim. “For example, many event organizers hope to connect the right participants at their events but they’re not very deliberate about ensuring the right people meet one another. But now, as a result of the global economic slowdown, event organizers are focusing more on ‘interaction-led events’ to deliver greater ROI.”

“In our experience, this is because most sponsors and exhibitors are looking to have more valuable meetings at events. It’s their main reason for attending in the first place. They want to quickly discover and then meet potential new customers at events they invest in.

“Without MustMeet, sponsors and exhibitors would have to reach out to prospects manually via the event app, Linkedin or email, in the hope they will accept a meeting request. But now, with MustMeet, organizers are able to be more deliberate and automatically schedule the meetings for their sponsors and exhibitors with the right buyers, helping marketing teams justify their budgets during this difficult period. Whatsmore, for visitors, we’re seeing organizers leverage meetings as a way to differentiate from their competitors with a more compelling event experience and better return on their time.” 

MustMeet connects Narcos Mexico producers with Netflix and Disney+

MustMeet was recently used at MIP Cancun, the hosted buyer event run by RX France. The software helped connect ‘suppliers’, like the producers of Narcos Mexico, with qualified ‘buyers’ like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max that wanted to acquire new shows. These AI-powered meetings resulted in over 2,000 meetings and a new NPS record for the event (for more, see this case study).

Grip’s team of experts, helping organizers embed meetings into their events

With an experienced customer success and implementation team of 30 experts, Grip ensures customers are supported before, during and after the event so they get the most out of MustMeet and the meetings they arrange. 

‍For more information on MustMeet, click here to Watch the explainer video.