What is the real value of bringing 40,000 people together in one place? In the third article in a series written by SBC CEO and Founder Rasmus Sojmark, he looks at why business remains fundamentally relationship-driven, even in an increasingly digital world. He explores the commercial value of face-to-face interaction, the role events play in accelerating trust and opportunity, and why the most important conversations are often not the ones you planned in advance.
I’ve spent most of my career bringing people together, and I’m still convinced that most good things in business begin in roughly the same way.
Two people meet, they have a conversation and eventually realise there might be something they can do together.
Everything around that conversation has changed. We have LinkedIn, WhatsApp, video calls, AI and increasingly sophisticated matchmaking technology, but the fundamental way we build trust hasn’t changed very much.
And trust has commercial value. That’s something I think becomes even more important as business becomes more digital. It’s never been easier to identify a potential customer and send them a message. The problem is that it’s never been easier for everybody else to do exactly the same thing. Your inbox proves that every morning.
Face-to-face time is different.
If you’re considering signing a major supplier agreement, entering a market with a local partner or investing a significant amount of money with somebody, there’s still enormous value in sitting opposite them.
That’s why I believe events will become more important to relationship building, not less. Business is still a contact sport.
The challenge for us is making that work with 40,000 people.
You can put all those people in one building, but that doesn’t automatically create good networking. You don’t need to meet 40,000 people in Lisbon. You need to meet the right five.
Maybe one becomes a customer. Another introduces you to a market. Someone else solves a problem you’ve been dealing with for six months. Our job is to improve the chances of those conversations happening.
This year, we’re bringing Speed Networking and Show Floor Tours to Lisbon after trialling them successfully at SBC Summit Americas. We’re also developing more than twenty Regulatory Gaming Meetups with IAGR and IMGL.
I particularly like the meetups because they solve a genuine business problem.
If you’re considering entering a new jurisdiction, you need information, but eventually you also need access to people who understand how that market really works.
Being able to meet regulators, lawyers and local specialists in the same week can accelerate months of research and relationship building.
Sometimes the most valuable question you can ask is simply: “What am I missing?”
I also think we make a mistake when we separate formal business networking from the social side of events.
Some of the strongest commercial relationships I’ve built started over dinner, at a football match or during an evening event. When you spend time with somebody away from a formal meeting table, you learn things you won’t discover from their LinkedIn profile.
You understand how they think. You meet their colleagues. You start building trust.
That’s why the dinners, awards, Festival Square and INFINITY Lisbon aren’t separate from networking. They’re different environments for it.
I’m not suggesting everyone will be signing contracts while Tiësto is playing.
Although, knowing our industry, somebody probably will.
As events get larger, technology will help us become much smarter about making introductions. We can understand why people are attending, which markets they’re interested in and what kind of companies they want to meet.
That can make networking much more efficient.
But technology should facilitate relationships, not replace them.
An algorithm can tell me that two people should meet. It can’t make them trust each other.
And that’s ultimately where the business advantage of face-to-face events sits.
You can have a video call with someone anywhere in the world. What you can’t easily replicate is spending three days in the same environment, meeting their team, seeing how they interact with customers and having several conversations in different settings.
Relationships become deeper much faster.
For businesses operating globally, that compression of time has enormous value.
You might achieve in three days what would otherwise take six months of emails and calls.
And then there are the meetings nobody planned.
We can spend a year organising SBC Summit, build matchmaking systems and create networking programmes, and two people can still bump into each other while waiting for coffee and have the most commercially important conversation of their week.
We may never know it happened.
That’s fine.
Our job was to get them both to Lisbon.
