New Service Matches Busy Business People with Suppliers

28th March 2006

Everyone has sat in a meeting and known within the first few minutes that the next hour is going to be a waste of time. It would be rude to cut the meeting short and go and do something more productive but there's got to be a better use for that hour than playing buzzword bingo or twiddling your thumbs? There is, and SpeedPitches have found it.

Learning from their own experiences of wasted meetings and difficulty in finding suppliers, the SpeedPitches team have come up with an unique and winning formula that saves time and helps find better business partners. Drawing from the social aspects of speed dating, the SpeedPitches events match clients looking for services with potential suppliers and enable them to meet each other and confirm that these are companies they want to work with before getting down to the more specific details of a contract.

A SpeedPitches evening features a series of five minute one-to-one pitches, over two sessions of approximately one hour each. Breaks for refreshment and more traditional networking provide opportunities for suppliers and clients who have not been scheduled for a pitch to meet casually. SpeedPitches then brokers more traditional meetings between suppliers and clients who feel that they can successfully do business.

Each SpeedPitches event focuses on a particular industry. The inaugural event aims to match business who wish to make their sites rank higher in the search engines with companies that specialize in this practice (commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO and SEM often provide one of the best returns on investment when it comes to advertising.)

"People have applied the speed dating approach to business before", said SpeedPitches' Chris Ridings, author of several SEO Papers and founder of popular SEO Forums SearchGuild.com, "but these events have only had the aim of introducing local business people on the speculative basis that they might be useful to each other in the future. We feel that the concept is far more effective when there is a specific business goal that both parties have in mind".

The ability to meet up to 30 potential suppliers and have informal pitches from 15 in less than two hours is proving highly attractive to local business people, with places for the first event, in Blackfriars London on 18th May, being taken quickly. This doesn't surprise either Chris or SpeedPitches' partner Denise Russell, both of whom give free advice in various SEO forums. "People know they need SEO" says Denise, "but they're also aware that there are huge variations in the quality of the optimization provided and lots of conflicting advice. Business people have good instincts and trust them, they can tell within a few minutes of meeting someone if they could work together and don't want to spend another 30 sitting through a full presentation just to be polite, this is a great way of reducing a long list of potential suppliers to just a couple that you know you'd be happy to work with"

SpeedPitches does not aim to give advice or vet the companies participating at the events, but does provide companies with a basic guide to SEO practices and encourages them to understand the search engine guidelines and ask questions of the suppliers about the methods they plan to use. "We're not judging the methods" says Denise, "simply making the decision making process quicker and easier. But it is important to us that people understand why some suppliers may be better for their sites than others, and why we carefully match our pitchers and pitchees based on the information they give us"

SpeedPitches will be taking the events to other venues around the country in the next few months and intend to expand the concept to other industries by the end of the year. "We're starting with SEO because we know many good SEO companies which will help us keep the standard of introductions at the high level of quality that we want" they say, "but we both have experience in other industries which makes us confident that this idea will also work well for a variety of services. Watch this space"


For additional information about SpeedPitches visit www.speedpitches.com or contact Denise Russell

About the SpeedPitches partners;

Chris Ridings is author of the seminal PageRank Explained Paper and founder of SearchGuild.com forums, he also has a 'real' job.



Denise Russell, commonly known as Gurtie, is a businesswoman and Freelance SEO consultant who is an active participant in various online forums.



Contact:

Denise Russell
SpeedPitches
speedpitches@googlemail.com
http://www.speedpitches.com