By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

How to schedule meetings at a conference: use the event’s booking platform two to three weeks out, send each request with one specific reason, and cap the day at 10 to 15 meetings with gaps between them. Text the people you already know directly. They answer a text faster than an app.

The rest is knowing how each room books.

You have seen the other version. You request 30 meetings the week before. Eight accept. Three of those are vendors. Meanwhile the banker you actually wanted already filled Tuesday with people who asked a month ago, with a reason, by text.

Meetings at a deal conference are not first come, first served. They are first relevant, first served.

How do meetings get booked at deal conferences?

It depends on the event. The big middle market conferences run their own platforms. Smaller events leave it to you. Here is what the official sites say, checked October 28, 2026.

Event	How meetings get booked	Who meets whom	Source
ACG DealMAX, Las Vegas	ACG Access: browse the attendee list, book one on one meetings, manage your calendar. Open tables in the Lounges.	Everyone in the room	dealmax.org
ACG CapCon27, San Diego, March 10 to 11, 2027	DealSource: pre scheduled one on one meetings, described as the heart of the conference	Investment banks and private equity firms	acg.org
AM&AA Winter Conference, Fort Lauderdale, January 28 to 29, 2027	Deal Connect: 20 minute meetings at designated tables during set time slots	PE professionals and middle market intermediaries and bankers	amaaconference.com
SMBash, Irving, Texas, April 21 to 22, 2027	The official site does not list a meeting app. Book your own coffees before you land.	Searchers, operators, lenders	smbash.com
IBBA Conference, Orlando, May 21 to 23, 2027	The event page does not list meeting scheduling. Receptions and meals do the work.	Brokers and the people around them	ibba.org

Two notes on ACG. DealSource is a CapCon27 program on the ACG San Diego page. DealMAX books through ACG Access. Do not assume one event’s format carries to the next. Check the official page each time.

Why the request message matters more than the platform

Because everyone else is requesting too. ACG reported that at DealMAX 2026 more than 3,500 attendees requested more than 140,000 one on one meetings through ACG Access. Spread across the room, that is roughly 40 requests per attendee. Illustrative math, but it tells you what your request is competing with.

A blank request reads like a pitch. A request with one real reason reads like someone who did the work. Here is the template I would use. It fits in a platform note or a text.

Hi Dana. We buy industrial services businesses, $3 to 10M EBITDA, Southeast. Saw your firm closed the Atlanta HVAC deal. Would value 20 minutes Tuesday morning at the Lounge.

Four parts, under 40 words:

1. What you do, in their terms. Sector, size, geography. Brokers and bankers sort by buy box.
2. One thing you know about them. A close, a mandate, a post, or where you last met.
3. A specific time and place. “Tuesday morning at the Lounge” gets a yes or a counter. “Sometime” gets nothing.
4. No attachment. Send the deck after the meeting, if they ask.

Names and numbers above are illustrative. Use your own.

How to schedule meetings at a conference with no app

You book them yourself, by text, before you land. At events like SMBash or the IBBA Conference, where the official pages do not list meeting scheduling, the meetings that happen are the ones someone set up in advance.

1. Two to three weeks out, text the people you already know who will be there.
2. Use the meals. Breakfasts, lunches and receptions are fixed points in the schedule. “Grab a seat together at Thursday breakfast” is easy to say yes to.
3. Pick a meeting spot you will be near all day, so a 15 minute coffee does not cost 30 minutes of walking.
4. Book one dinner with three or four people who should know each other. You become the connector at the table.

For the full list of rooms and who each one is for, see which M&A conferences are worth it.

How should you build the day?

Build it around memory, not volume. A meeting you cannot recall on Thursday cannot be followed up on.

Block	What goes there
Morning	The two or three meetings tied to a live deal or mandate
Late morning	People you already know. Reconnects are short and high value.
After lunch	New intermediaries and capital partners
Late afternoon	Open slots for people you met in the hallway
Evening	Receptions and one dinner you organized

Leave 10 minutes after every meeting. Use it to capture what they said and what you promised, while you walk to the next table. By the fourth meeting in a row, the first one is gone.

What to do the day you get home

Book the next meeting from this one. The conference meeting is a first meeting. The second one, a call or a coffee in their city, is where a mandate actually moves.

Rank the meetings by what can move a deal and text the top group inside 48 hours with the detail from the table. DealMAX follow up shows that ranking for the biggest room, and the conference follow up system runs the whole before, during and after.

Here is how I would run it

The platforms handle the calendar. They do not tell you which of the 3,500 people you already know, or remind you which broker you have not talked to since last year.

FRONT OF MIND does that part. Ask Liala out loud, “who do I know that is an M&A advisor,” and get the right people and why. In the room, snap a badge or a business card, say a name and a sentence out loud, or take a selfie together, and it is filed under the event. After, it opens on your 10 minutes for today: each person with a one line reason and a drafted text, 40 words max. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits.

It runs in your phone’s browser, no native iPhone app yet, and you can save it to your home screen. Contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them.

Booking works best when the list is already built. Start with how to prepare for an M&A conference, then capture everyone with a badge scan into your phone.

Start free with your first 25 contacts and see who comes up before your next event.

See how it works