Getting people to say what they came for

Every matchmaking system in this industry has the same failure mode, and it is not the algorithm. It is that six hundred people typed “networking” into a box marked objectives and the engine had nothing to work with. You cannot rank a room that has told you nothing about itself.

The good news is that this is a form design problem rather than a data science one, and form design problems are solvable in an afternoon.

Ask for direction before you ask for detail

The single most valuable thing you can know about somebody is which way they are facing. Buying or selling. Sourcing suppliers or finding distributors. Raising or investing. Hiring or looking.

It costs one tap, almost nobody skips it, and it does more work than any other field on the form — because it lets you avoid the single most embarrassing thing a matchmaking tool can do, which is introduce two people who both came to sell the same thing.

Five multiple-choice answers beat three paragraphs, because far more people will actually give you five multiple-choice answers.

Then ask for the one specific thing

After direction, the highest-value question is some version of what would make this trip worth it. One line. Not a biography, not a company description — the thing they would say to a colleague on the way to the airport.

Good answers look like:

• “Retrofit automation for two chilled sites near Rotterdam. Budget signed, decision by Q1.”
• “Distributors for the Nordics. We have the UK and want to stop saying no to enquiries.”
• “Somebody who has done a cutover without stopping the picking line. I want to hear how it went wrong.”

All three are specific enough to match on and short enough that somebody wrote them without resenting the form. That is the whole target.

Ask at the right moment, which is not registration

Registration is when somebody is committing money or time, and every extra field there costs you completions. Ask for the minimum to let them in, then ask the interesting questions in the two weeks before the event — when the trip is real, the diary is filling, and answering is suddenly in their own interest rather than yours.

The framing that works is not “complete your profile”. It is “this is what decides who we put in front of you”. People will spend two minutes on that. Nobody spends two minutes on a progress bar.

Show them what it bought

The moment somebody answers, show them the difference it made — a better list, a stronger match, a name they recognise. An intent form that disappears into a database is one people fill in worse every year, because nothing ever came back.

What good looks like

• Direction captured for nearly everybody, because it is one tap at registration.
• A specific line from more than half the room, collected in the fortnight before.
• Nobody asked twice for something they already answered.
• Every question you ask visibly changes something the attendee can see.

In B2Pair this is what the registration questions and the intent form are for, and why the matching engine says which of your answers it used for each suggestion — an attendee who can see their words being used fills the form in properly next time.

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