Being a Hosted Buyer has always been a great way to meet quality suppliers. In the past, the only challenge was managing your connections and making sure you were in the right place at the right time. Now more than ever, simply being where you need to be is not enough. Making the best and most effective use of time at events is what matters and that process starts way before the event has begun and continues long after. It’s all about making the right connections, building valuable relationships and ultimately, delivering ROI.

In the early days of the traditional Hosted Buyer programme, ensuring you met the most relevant suppliers for your business and stayed connected after the event required a certain amount of commitment to research as well as stringent organisation.  Today, it’s not only the organisers of the Hosted Buyer programme themselves who can streamline the process but the sophisticated technology they adopt that helps simplify the buyer-supplier process immeasurably.

Making quality connections

At last year’s edition of ibtm america, in Nashville, Hosted Buyers spent 18 hours networking and made around 50 new supplier contacts. The rise of technology has enabled us to ensure they optimise this time with minimal effort.

With complex supplier and buyer profiling software and Poken, our engagement technology partner at this event, supplier fit is incredibly accurate and lead management is automated.  The objective is to ensure that our elite group of over 160 Hosted Buyers all gain maximum value from attending ibtm america, which this year takes place from 14 – 16 June at the Diplomat Beach Resort, in Greater Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

At ibtm america, as with similar ‘pod’ shows we organise, Hosted Buyers have a schedule of up to 30 pre-arranged appointments over two days, so it’s important to ensure they meet with the suppliers that will be most relevant to them. The event’s sophisticated matchmaking system pairs Hosted Buyers and exhibitors based on their profiles and preferences, then automatically populates their diary with appointments. These can of course be amended and personalised.

Hosted Buyers have complete control. Once the matching process has taken place, they can view all pre-scheduled appointments, make changes and use any remaining slots to schedule meetings with suppliers of their choice.

 Staying connected

To automate networking and supplier contact management, all Hosted Buyers and all exhibitors are given a Poken device. This small USB device enables the exchange of electronic business card information, simply by touching two devices together. The device links directly to your PokenHUB – an online portal that enables you to manage your contacts and download them for future use.

Hosted Buyers at ibtm america will experience a taste of Florida’s legendary hospitality. Along with two days of one-to-one business meetings, the Hosted Buyer experience combines an experiential tour of Greater Fort Lauderdale, a lunch event in aid of ‘Clean the World’ and venue tours of the Diplomat Beach Resort, the luxurious, newly renovated host hotel, which offers over 200,000 sq. ft. of flexible meeting space.