What should employees actually bring back from a major industry event? In the latest article in a series written by SBC CEO and Founder Rasmus Sojmark, he looks at why the value of attending should extend beyond meetings, leads and commercial opportunities. He explores how practical education can create a different kind of ROI, helping people return to work with new skills, better ideas and knowledge they can put into practice immediately.
Companies spend a lot of money sending people to major international events. There are flights, hotels and tickets, but perhaps the biggest investment is taking talented employees away from their normal jobs for several days.
Understandably, businesses want a return.
Historically, we’ve tended to measure that return commercially. How many meetings did you have? How many leads did you generate? Did you meet a customer or find a supplier? Those are important questions. But I think companies should increasingly ask another one.
What did you learn?
Education is one of the five pillars of an SBC event, and whenever I talk about it, there’s an obvious question: isn’t that what the conference is for? Not quite.
For me, the conference should help you understand what’s changing and expose you to different ideas. Education should give you practical knowledge you can actually use.
If someone spends two hours learning about AI with us in Lisbon, I don’t just want them to leave thinking AI is interesting. I’d much rather they go back to work and use something they learned to save time, improve a process or make a better decision. That’s a measurable business benefit.
I think this will become a much bigger part of the B2B events industry over the next few years because information itself is no longer scarce. You can learn an extraordinary amount without leaving your desk. There are videos, podcasts, webinars, reports and online courses, while AI can now provide personalised explanations of complicated subjects almost instantly.
So if we’re asking someone to fly across the world, we need to offer forms of learning that are difficult to replicate online. For me, that means participation.
Don’t just tell somebody how you’re using AI. Show them. Let them ask what went wrong, what it cost and whether it genuinely produced the results being claimed. Let people facing the same problem sit together and compare approaches.
That’s the thinking behind Education+ and the Tech Academies we’re running at SBC Summit. We’re focusing on AI, marketing, Web3 and Player Experience, with presentations where they make sense, but also case studies, AMAs, Q&As and interactive discussions. Alongside those Academies, we’re running specialist masterclasses for betting and casino professionals.
The subjects are important, but the bigger change is the mindset. I want people thinking about an event as an opportunity to develop their teams, not only their sales pipeline.
Imagine sending five employees to Lisbon, and each comes back with one practical improvement they can introduce into the business. Perhaps someone learns to use an AI tool that saves them five hours every week. A marketer discovers an approach that improves campaign performance. A product manager sees a gamification technique they can adapt, while someone else learns from another company’s expensive mistake and avoids repeating it.
The financial impact of those things can easily exceed the cost of attending. And unlike a lead, the benefit isn’t necessarily one-off. A new skill stays inside the organisation. That’s particularly important now because the capabilities companies need are changing so quickly.
AI alone is forcing almost every department to rethink elements of how it operates. Marketing is changing, technology is changing and consumer expectations continue to evolve. Companies can’t respond to every development by recruiting somebody new.
They need to develop the people they already have. I think this is where major industry events have an opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to become more valuable.
When 40,000 people from across an industry come together, you have an extraordinary concentration of expertise in one place. Using that only to exchange business cards feels like a missed opportunity.
Of course, I want people doing deals at SBC Summit. But I’d also like companies to look at the event and think about which members of their team could come home better at their jobs. That’s a different kind of ROI, but it’s still ROI.
And I suspect we’ll see businesses becoming much more demanding about it. They’ll want learning that is practical, relevant to specific roles and capable of producing an identifiable benefit once somebody returns to work. That’s good. It forces us as organisers to raise our standards too.
So if you attend one of our Academies or masterclasses in Lisbon, I’m not particularly interested in how many pages of notes you take. Ask yourself something a week later. Did I actually use any of it?
If something you learned saves your company time, makes money, improves performance or helps you avoid a mistake, then the answer to whether attending was worthwhile becomes considerably easier.
