2026 is off to a great start for Pomona, though we know the picture for you all is somewhat more mixed. We’re seeing that some of our speakers are struggling, and some of our speakers are really busy. This creates a weakness for us as a business as our success is balanced precariously on the continuing demand for a small number of speakers. And obviously it’s bad for some of you, because you want (need) more bookings.

Our response to this is two-fold. We will continue to exhort you to do the things that the Talent Map and our advice suggests. There are no reliable shortcuts to success and if you want to build a sustainable speaking career, you have to do the hard work of building and continuously optimising your Proposition, Profile, and Performance. We can give you the tools but this work is down to you.

What we can do is ramp up our own efforts to generate leads. This started with our switch to an in-bound focus nine months ago, which is already showing dividends. The most recent big step is the move to our own web platform, now integrated with the platform you’ve all been using for the last year or more.

Our new web platform gives us the control and flexibility we need to compete with other agencies for search traffic, and attract enquiries from people that maybe aren’t even finding the traditional speaker bureaux. We can optimise both content and code to appeal to both search engines and large language models - a growing source of enquiries for you and us.

Part of this is our newly flexible and low-overhead ability to generate landing pages around every possible specialism and niche. Once we have a few speakers who can cover a particular subject, we can now much more quickly generate a targeted landing page. We can do the same for campaigns around specific issues - like our unique data on the lack of representation of women on certain stages, or events like International Women’s Day.

But part of it also comes down to you maintaining your profiles. There is now a 1-1 connection between what you post on your Pomona Partners profile, and what appears on your online profile with us. The only thing between is a simple approval process so that we can make sure nothing untoward slips through.

We urge you to make your profiles as rich as possible. And we will be adding more features over the coming weeks and months to assist with that. We’ve just improved the presentation of your books, for example - and will be enhancing it again. We’ll be adding a richer gallery function, better ways to present your media clippings, and we’re open to you ideas about other changes we can make.

The other way we can increase the number of enquiries we bring you is by opening up new propositions beyond speaking. There are two clear opportunities: consulting and campaigns. 

With consulting, we don’t want to tread on your toes. But we are looking for opportunities where we can bring you additional work. This begins with a new partnership with OpenIntro, a new online directory of experts that brokers fee-based access for researchers and executives seeking advice. If you’re interested in getting on board with them, complete the form linked below and we'll get you signed up. 

The other proposition we're looking to promote more is Campaigns: the opportunity for you to create content for, and front, marketing campaigns for brands. This is something that already represents a significant proportion of our bookings and now we want to actively promote it for all of the speakers who are keen to take part. If you want to be involved - or excluded - you just need to make sure you have ticked or unticked the relevant boxes in the Propositions section of your profile.

It will take us a little while to get the proper pages worked up to promote this as we're working on multiple things at the moment. But watch this space. It will be a big focus later in the year.

Just five places remain as I write this on the first Pomona Plus training event, focused on your online profile and marketing. Pomona Plus is a phrase you will start to hear more. It's what we're terming training and support opportunities that go beyond what we can do within the limits of our subscription or booking revenue. For example, this one-day, hands-on, limited-numbers course. Booking available at the button below.

Talent Sites/Speaker Sites (naming TBC) is exactly what it sounds like: websites for speakers that are powered by the Pomona Platform. That means they're designed with speakers in mind, with all the features you need - blogs, email newsletters, podcast hosting etc. And you only have to update your information once to keep your Pomona profile and personal webste up to date. Plus they will be integrated with features like the Feedback Engine to make it easy to show your great testimonials on your website with minimal effort. We aim to have beta sites live in Q3 and have this generally available towards the end of that quarter or into Q4.

Speaker CRM is an extension of our CRM platform out to you, giving you one place to manage all your contacts and enquiries, sharing as much or as little with us as you like. The specs for this are still somewhat embryonic but we want to streamline your speaker operations, further pursue our goal of transparency, and provide some very neat integrations with Speaker Sites - e.g. rich analytics on all your interactions with prospects across your communications platforms. We're aiming for end of Q4 or more likely Q1 2027 for this.