MustMeet: Exclusive Meetings

Ensure your participants don't waste time meeting multiple people from the same company

This article will walk you through the Exclusive Meetings feature in MustMeet, and why you might want to use it.

What does Exclusive Meetings mean?

How do I set up Exclusive Meetings?

Setup Steps

Examples

Process Diagram

What does Exclusive Meetings mean?

Exclusive Meetings is a specific property that we can apply to individuals in a MustMeet event. When someone is flagged as having Exclusive Meetings, the system will ensure that they won't meet two different people from the same company at the same event.

This can be really useful to ensure that prospective Buyers aren't getting the same pitch from two different people that are working for the same Supplier company. For Any2Any events, exclusivity can be even more important as there is usually only a single group of participants, and there's not much point in two people from the same company meeting each other!

In Buyer <> Supplier events, exclusivity can be set up to function across a mixture of both buyers and suppliers at the same time.

Exclusivity and Sharers

Note that Exclusivity is distinct from the Sharers concept described in this article, and can work alongside and independently of it.

This is because Sharers negate the need for exclusivity, as Sharers are always in the same meetings. You cannot meet different members of the same company individually if they are all set up as Sharers, because you'll only have one meeting - with all of them at once.

When separate members of a single company are not set up as sharers, and so have their own individual schedules, exclusivity becomes very valuable in order to prevent other participants meeting both or all of these company members when they only need to meet one of them.

Exclusive Meeting Example

In the example below, there are two Buyers from the same company and one Supplier. Exclusivity has been set up for all three of these participants, and so only one of the Buyers can meet with the supplier.

Non-Exclusive Meeting Example

In the example below, there are two Buyers from the same company and one Supplier. Exclusivity has not been set up for these participants, and so it's possible for both of the buyers to meet separately with the supplier. This is the default configuration in MustMeet events.

How do I set up Exclusive Meetings?

In order to instruct the system to treat a participant as having Exclusive Meetings, there are two pieces of data that need to be set. This is always done at the individual level with special data fields which are added to each profile.

Exhibitor ID

We need some data to indicate which company the participants work for. Simply relying on the Company Name field would not be reliable enough due to spelling or departmental differences between coworkers.

For this we use the standard "exhibitor_id" field which is the same field used in all events to create relationships between participants and their company profiles. Two or more people that share an exhibitor_id, whatever the ID is, will be considered coworkers.
As this field is already used to create relationships, it's possible for participants like Suppliers who have an associated Company profile, that this field may already be defined and shared by a few profiles. See this article for more details.

wwe_meetings_unique

We need one piece of data to identify which participants will be having Exclusive Meetings.
For this, we use the field: "wwe_meetings_unique" which must contain the value "Exclusive Meeting". They should also have the Exhibitor ID field set up and if they have any colleagues, it should match.

If a MustMeet platform requires the exclusivity function, the data above must be included in users' profiles when you import them into MustMeet.

Generating the meetings

Once the profiles all have the correct field data assigned, you can continue as normal.

To summarize:

1. Ensure that the exhibitor ID and Exclusive Meeting data has been added to the correct profiles.
2. Move the event to the Closed Phase in the Grip dashboard, if you haven't already.
3. Generate the scores in the Grip Dashboard.
4. Import the data into MustMeet.
5. Generate meetings in MustMeet.
6. Approve meetings in MustMeet.

Adding the data to profiles

The best way to add this data to profiles is in bulk, through registration. If you're using Native Integrations or a managed integration with Grip then ensure that you've planned this in advance and discussed with your Grip contacts.

Add the data to a profile via the dashboard

For Exhibitor ID:

• Go to Data, and find the individual attendee in the list
• Open their profile to edit it
• Scroll down to the 'Relationships' section and check the 'Exhibitor ID' field
• If it already contains a value, check other profiles that are part of the same company
  • If the values for those profiles already match one another, no action is required.
  • If they are different, or absent, update the value in the field so that they match.
  • Or, if they match, but you need the profiles to be considered separately for meetings, either remove or modify the value so that they no longer match their colleagues' profiles. You can discuss this with your Grip contact to ensure that you're not going to accidentally break other relationships within the same event.

For the Exclusive Meetings flag:

• Go to the second tab 'Settings'
• Under the 'Unstructured profile data' section, type in the required field key and field value
• Scroll down and click 'Save changes'

Add data via Native Integrations

The two fields required are part of the standard mapping for all Native Integrations - though bear in mind that the Exclusive Meetings field is under the 'Advanced Mapping' section. Simply map the right values to those field for your attendees. See our Native Integrations article for more details.

Add data via Bulk Uploader

Again, Exhibitor ID is part of the default fields in the profile bulk uploader templates. Exclusive Meetings is not however, so you'll need to manually add this field to the downloaded template and then add the 'Exclusive Meeting' value on any row that needs it.

• Start by checking our article on the profile Bulk Uploader.
• After you've downloaded a template for your participants, open it in your spreadsheet editor software.
• After the last column of the spreadsheet, add another column and put the field name (without the quotes) as the column header: "wwe_meetings_unique".
• Fill in the value "Exclusive Meeting" (without quotes) for each participant required on the spreadsheet.
• Upload the file.

What are the requirements to create Non-Exclusive meetings?

No action is required. The MustMeet platform is by default set to non-exclusive meetings. Exclusivity will only apply when the specific data shown above is detected, and only to those people that have the right data.