These days, more and more corporate events give a place of importance to business networking in their scenario of operations. This trend is due to the obligation, for the event planner, to create profitable events with a high level of satisfaction – supported by measurable outcomes – in order to satisfy the host companies and their targeted audience.
Consequently, a majority of business networking events now use B2B networking platform to facilitate exchanges between participants and create flourishing business discussions.
These platforms often offer slots favouring meetings of 15 minutes. Investors love this format because it allows seeing four companies in one hour while avoiding having to shorten an unaffiliated encounter according to their vision.
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs can find this format less practical if they’re not prepared consequently. Here are some useful tips to help all concerned companies’ representatives to better tame this formula.
1. Prepare yourself in advance
The vast majority of networking platforms allow scheduling business meetings during the same event.
Ask upstream about the people you are going to meet. Browse their company’s website and visit their LinkedIn pages.
Also, as the duration of the meetings will be communicated in advance by the event planner, prepare a presentation that will respect the imposed time limits. For a 15-minute meeting, the trick is to give a dynamic, interesting and a promising preview of what your company has to offer. Avoid at all costs superfluous details. Give enough information to vehicle great ideas while addressing the most obvious key points and concerns, and that’s it.
If a participant does not respect the time slot assigned by the event company, schedules of many other participants will be jangled, which can cause a lot of frustration.
Try to share in a minute or less the overall idea of your business: services and products, targeted audience, price range, business model and competitive advantage. At this point, the other party should quickly understand how he can participate in the conversation.
2. Arrive on Time and Regularly Check Your Business Calendar
A 15-minute meeting goes fast. If you arrive 2 minutes late, this will prevent you to adequately elaborate on the message that you want to pass. In addition, it is disrespectful to the investor or another party with whom you have made an appointment.
Don’t forget to check regularly your platform’s business meeting calendar. Some meetings can be cancelled by the other party. Take advantage of these occasions to send additional requests. Or else, validate non-responded invitations from your part.
3. Adapt to Your Audience
The purpose of a business meeting is that the person in front of you ask questions about what you are trying to sell. Manage efficiently you right to speak and be on the lookout of your audience’s reactions. Take breaks, ask questions and choose dialogue versus a passive presentation. Be clear and intelligible and use fewer technical terms as possible.
4. Have a Demo
Once your main ideas are quickly explained, continue with your products or services demo. This demo should never last more than five minutes. Practice in advance and time yourself! Once again, you have to be concise. Don’t get too technical.
5. Present Your Accomplishments BEFORE Discussing Your Future Plans
Talk about concrete results, achievements, and significative projects. You will thus build up your credibility and when you’ll talk about your future programs, your audience will be more receptive.
6. Back Your Words with Concrete Data
Find out about the domain targeted by your products or services using statistics, data or studies. This will demonstrate the relevance of your project and support your credibility. Limit yourself to the most relevant.
7. Take Care of Your Business Presentations
Presentations should have the single purpose of supporting your words with images. What you say should not be detailed in them. Also, presentations are the reflection of your professionalism. Choose a nice design and make sure the quality of the language is impeccable.
8. Learn How to Answer the Questions That You Can’t Answer
Regardless of the time you spent to prepare, these questions will be asked. Don’t lose your temper, take a sip of water and take advantage of this short moment to think. If you don’t find an answer, be honest and explain to the person you’re speaking to that you will come back to him quickly.
Finally, if you have breaks between meetings, take notes about what worked well, and less. It is essential to evolve your presentations and to improve them using a corrective feedback based on the remarks and reactions of the people met.
We hope that these tips will be useful and we wish you the best of luck during your next business event!
Sources :
http://www.guilhembertholet.com/blog/2008/09/22/prsenter-sa-startup-en-10-minutes/
