The best MIPCOM meetings start before the buyer arrives. How leading distribution sales teams use buyer behaviour to walk into Cannes with evidence, not guesswork.
There are two ways a MIPCOM meeting can begin.
The first is the one happening in most of the Palais, most of the time: "So, what are you looking for at the moment?" It's a perfectly professional question. It's also an admission. It says: I've prepared my slate, but I haven't prepared you. The next fifteen minutes are then spent on discovery that could have happened before anyone flew to France, and the pitch, when it finally comes, is the same pitch the buyer will hear at the next stand, and the one after that.
The second kind of meeting starts somewhere else entirely: "Last time we spoke you were after returnable factual for early peak, I noticed your team has been looking at that space again, so I want to show you two things before we talk about the new slate." Same thirty-minute slot. Completely different conversation. The buyer leans in, because the meeting is about them, and because the distributor has demonstrated, without saying so, that they pay attention.
The difference between those two meetings isn't talent, and it isn't relationship years. It's preparation, and specifically, what kind of preparation. For decades, preparing for a market meant knowing your slate cold: every logline, every episode count, every territory still open. That's now table stakes. Every competent team does it. The preparation that separates the best teams is no longer knowing your catalogue. It's knowing your buyer.
Here's what most distributors overlook: in the weeks before MIPCOM, buyers tell you exactly what they're interested in. Not in emails, in behaviour.
They log into your screening platform and watch forty minutes of a screener. They search for "true crime" three times in a fortnight. They open the collection you sent and ignore the hero title but screen two library titles you'd half forgotten. A second person from the same company appears and watches the same programme, which usually means it's being discussed internally. They download a press pack, which buyers rarely do idly; they do it when they're preparing to make a case to someone.
Every one of those actions is a meeting brief, written by the buyer themselves. A buyer will be diplomatic in a meeting, they'll tell you the slate looks strong and they'll be in touch. What they chose to watch at their desk last Tuesday is what they actually think. In a business this relationship-driven, that behavioural signal is the one honest channel you have, and most sales teams sit down in Cannes having never seen it.
Picture the same buyer meeting, prepared the second way. Before Cannes, the salesperson spends ten minutes per priority buyer reviewing three things:
What they engaged with. Which titles this buyer (and their colleagues) viewed, screened and downloaded in the past two months, especially anything watched deeply or returned to. A deep screener watch is the strongest pre-meeting signal there is: it means evaluation has already started, and the meeting's job is to advance it, not to open it.
What they ignored. Just as telling. If you sent a curated selection and they engaged with none of it, the meeting should not lead with that selection. Something about the brief has changed, find out what.
Where they wandered. Buyers who browse beyond what they were sent are showing you their real shopping list. The buyer who entered through your drama campaign and ended up in factual didn't get lost. They're telling you which meeting to have.
None of this requires a data science team. It requires the activity to be visible, and a sales team in the habit of looking, ten minutes per buyer, the day before the meeting. The relationship still does the selling; the rep still reads the room. What changes is that judgement now starts from evidence instead of memory.
When a sales team prepares this way, the meeting itself sounds different. "What are you looking for?" becomes "I saw your team spent time with [title], what would help you take that internally?" The pitch narrows from forty titles to the three the behaviour points at. Follow-up gets agreed against something real ("I'll send the delivery specs you were looking at") rather than the ritual "I'll send everything over."
And there's a quieter benefit: prioritisation. Every team at MIPCOM has more meeting requests than hours. Behavioural signal tells you which lukewarm-sounding buyer is actually warm, the one who's been quietly screening your catalogue for three weeks, and which enthusiastic meeting is a courtesy. That's the difference between a diary built on seniority and one built on intent.
There's a catch, though, and it's a big one. The buyer's most serious evaluation often hasn't happened yet when you sit down at the Palais. It happens in the quiet weeks after the market, when the noise stops and the screeners actually get watched. Most teams stop looking precisely when the strongest signals start arriving. That's the final piece in this series.
ONE surfaces real buyer behaviour, what each buyer watched, searched for and shared, so sales teams walk into every market meeting prepared. Book a discovery call.