Twenty minutes across a table. The whole event turns on who is sitting there.
Les Entrepreneurs Haute-Garonne builds its convention around Speed Business: 209 members, seated, short back-to-back meetings. The format only pays if the person opposite is the right one. Sena spent the week before the event finding out what each member was actually hunting.
99 of 143 members completed a full discovery with Sena before the tables were set: what they do, what they want, and who they need to be sitting opposite. A trade tells a matcher almost nothing. A stated target tells it everything.
What the registration form knew
- Name
- Company
- Trade
Nothing about who they wanted to meet, or which way round the meeting had to go.
What Sena knew before the seating
- Looking for companies with staff who need an employment lawyerin their own words, unprompted
- Target: owners of businesses with ten or more employees
- Region: Toulouse and Occitanie
- Direction: selling, not buying
One real member, anonymized. The right-hand column is what a matcher can actually seat on; the left is what it had before.
The setup
Speed Business only works if the person across the table is worth the twenty minutes. The form knew each member's name, company and trade. It did not know who they were hunting, and a trade is not a target.
The organizer put the opt-in on the registration form and pushed it in the run-up. Sena then held a conversation with each participant before the doors opened, and the seating had that to work with instead of a job title.
What Sena put into the match
The discovery was not a form in disguise. Median conversation was 5 messages, 55% ran to five or more, the longest to 22, and 16 members answered in voice notes, 58 of them, describing their business out loud while walking.
Bar widths are proportional. Percentages are of the members Sena actually spoke to, not of the 209 who signed up for Speed Business.
The counterpart members described was strikingly consistent, and it is the most useful thing the organizer now owns: owners of companies with ten to fifty employees, HR directors, local Occitanie businesses. That is a ticket-sales brief for next year, written by the room itself.
"Je souhaite rencontrer des chefs d'entreprise ayant au moins 10 salaries"
I want to meet business owners with at least ten employees.
Client acquisition, the largest segment
They were also preparing seriously. Members asked how long they would have to speak, how many people per table, whether they would get a stand. One in five, 26 members, asked some version of a single question: who am I going to meet? It was the most common request on the whole deployment after basic logistics, and it tells the organizer exactly what members want the format to hand them.
What the room was actually made of
The discovery also answered a question the organizer had never been able to ask: who is actually in this room, and what are they here to do?
Most of the sellers were B2B service providers chasing the same person: an SME owner with staff. That single fact reshapes how the next edition gets sold: which members to recruit, which to court as buyers, and how to seat the tables so the two sides meet. It came out of conversations, not a survey, and it is the organizer's to keep.
The numbers
What this took to run
From the organizer: the opt-in on the registration form, a push in the pre-event emails, the programme and the partner list. Sena handled the rest.
The 76% is not the agent's doing. It is what happens when an organizer puts the opt-in on the registration form and tells members to expect the message. That push is the one thing we need from you, and it is what separates a deployment like this one from a quiet one.
Running a seated networking format in the next six months?
Fifteen minutes. Bring your attendee list and your format. We will show you what the room wants before you seat it.
Book 15 minutesor read more at sena.so