Pure Michigan Business Connect Case Study

There’s a large demand for PMBC’s matchmaking summits because they save purchasing teams so much time and money in procurement. In the face of this growing demand, the PMBC team is constantly looking towards the future of how business gets done and wanted a tool that would take them there.  

PMBC wants to usher in the next generation of business development

Couldn’t collect data for quality meetings

In order to truly provide value it wasn’t enough to blindly match buyers with suppliers. The PMBC team cares about the quality of their meetings, they want to facilitate interactions that both parties get value from. To do this PMBC needed to collect the right information that would ensure meetings were relevant and important to both buyers and suppliers. PMBC couldn’t ask the questions they necessarily needed to learn about the needs of their buyers because the software solution they were using at the time didn’t have the functionality they needed.

Scattered data collection and storage

A buyer meets with the same supplier they’d met at the previous year’s matchmaking summit. A buyer and supplier meet, but it isn’t clear what they’re meeting about and neither really gets much value. While infrequent, both of these scenarios happened enough to leave some summit attendees frustrated and the PMBC team looking for answers. Company information was scattered across different mediums, so it was difficult to ensure consistency between events and that meetings were of the highest quality. The solution at the time was more art than science.

A missed meeting = A missed opportunity

Things happen, people have family emergencies, miss flights, and more, that’s not the problem. The problem was being able to reschedule those meetings efficiently and in a way that still provided value for both parties. Sure, they could ask a company that was in attendance if they wanted to fill a newly empty meeting spot, but how could the PMBC team be confident that that company could actually meet the needs of the buyer? How would they know that there’s even any interest from the buyer to meet with that supplier? They needed a solution where they could reschedule meetings in real-time with alternatives that were selected by the buyers themselves to ensure the meeting was still valuable to both sides. Again, the quality of meetings is crucial in a matchmaking event.

A poor experience for everyone

Before we partnered with PMBC it took roughly 25 hours to review all of the applications for one matchmaking event. Collecting quality data and keeping it up-to-date were major bottlenecks in the team’s process meant that most of the team’s time was spent keeping up with the flood of information they were collecting and held the team back from providing the complete service they knew they were capable of.

The attendee’s onsite experience also suffered. Storing schedules and registration information in different mediums made keeping track of attendees difficult. Sending updated information to attendees was slow. This all led to attendee frustration as they were left with partial information and empty meeting slots. Curating a valuable and non-stressful experience is key to keeping any movement alive, so PMBC needed a solution that enabled them to provide the next generation of business development.