Back to doing sales in the Coffeehouse
By Koen Vanderhoydonk, CEO at The Connector.
Six months into the year, I have reached a conclusion that would have unsettled me a decade ago: sales, as most of us were taught to practice it, no longer works.
We spent the first half of the year where the industry gathers, which was valuable, and my colleagues came away with the same impression I did. The large stages still matter; they are unmatched for visibility and for gauging a market's temperature in a single day or week. What has changed is what happens after the handshake. The people who matter come with less time and more guardedness than before, and beneath the event sits a quiet fatigue, with being sold to and the word "AI" affixed to every booth, every lanyard, every opening line. The floor still draws the crowd. It has simply become harder to turn that crowd into a conversation.
The instinct in our field is to answer this with more: more automation, more outreach, more noise. I have come to believe the answer runs the other way. To understand where business is going, it helps to look at how it was actually done before any of us had a CRM.
For most of commercial history, business was not transacted on crowded floors. It was convened in small, deliberate rooms. In the 1680s, the people who insured the world's shipping did not meet at a trade fair. They met at Edward Lloyd's coffee house in London, drawn there by something specific: Lloyd kept the best shipping news in the city. The information brought the right people through the door, and the conversations did the rest. What became Lloyd's of London began not as a marketplace but as a room with good content and a careful guest list.
The same logic shaped the Parisian salons of the following century, where a host gathered a handful of guests around ideas worth discussing, where a circulated pamphlet or a new manuscript set the agenda, and where reputations and collaborations were made in conversation rather than in pitch. Nobody in that room was being prospected. They were being invited. It shaped the Hanseatic merchants centuries earlier, whose trade across Northern Europe, including the kontor here in Bruges, rested not on cold approaches but on trust built slowly inside a known network. In each case, the structure is identical: a curated room, a reason to gather, and relationships that compound over time.
None of this is nostalgia. It is the most durable operating model commerce has ever produced, and it has simply been obscured by two decades of cheap digital reach.
Looking back at our own last six months, I realise we have been quietly rebuilding exactly this. Our Table of Ten dinners in Brussels and Amsterdam were not events in the conference sense; they were rooms of ten people with a genuine reason to talk to one another. Our private roundtable on agentic payments, convened with partners in Brussels, produced a white paper not because we needed an asset, but because the conversation in the room was worth recording. The content did not follow the sales motion. The content was the reason the right people sat down together.
This is exactly what The Connector has become. Not a marketplace, and not a stand on a floor, but the coffeehouse, the curated room where buyers inside financial institutions and the innovators who serve them actually meet, in numbers small enough for trust to form. The draw is the same as it was for Lloyd: content worth showing up for, and a conversation worth having once you arrive. We convene through ideas and through people at the same time, which is something a single exhibition hall was never designed to do on its own.
None of this is an argument against conferences. The large events remain the best way to be seen, to meet someone you would never have found otherwise, to feel where an industry is heading. But visibility is not yet a relationship. The private room is where an introduction made on a busy floor becomes a real conversation, which is why, for us, the two now work best stacked together. The conference creates the surface area. The smaller room, organised around content people genuinely value, creates the depth.
That is the half-year lesson, and it is also an invitation. We are still learning how to do this well, how to choose the right ten people, how to let content lead rather than chase, how to make a room worth someone's scarce attention. If that is a problem you are also turning over, I would love to compare notes.
After all, the coffeehouse was never really about the coffee.
Enjoy your holllidays.
