Being the most efficient and transparent speaker agency: CRM
We’re taking a big step here at Pomona Partners today. We’re shutting down our off-the-shelf customer relationship management (CRM) system and moving to a fully bespoke one as part of the Pomona Partners Platform. This is all part of fulfilling our goals of being the most efficient and most transparent speaker agency.
The new system allows us to capture the information critical to each opportunity for our speakers in a way that no other system we found could. With it we can cut down the admin overhead for handling each lead, and capture much more useful data that allows us to better understand and optimise our business - and help our speakers to optimise theirs.
The new system also lays the foundations for us being able to share opportunity data in real time with our speakers, something we plan to offer in the near future. We believe our speakers should be able to see the work we’re doing on their behalf, without having to call or email their agent to check in. We work really hard on our speakers’ behalf and we want them to be able to see that.
Not on the market
Building our own bespoke platform, for speaker management, speaker training and development, and now CRM, is not a decision we took lightly. When I started Pomona Partners, I searched everywhere for an operating platform for the agency that would allow me to capture the information we need to handle leads and speakers, share that information with the right people, and systematise processes in a way that would allow us to scale. I looked at off-the-shelf CRM systems, platform for individual speakers, even apps designed for running modelling agencies. I couldn’t find anything that was quite right.
There are lots of great CRM platforms of course. But the scale and cost of customisation that would be needed to make them do what we needed, meant that building our own platform became the most cost-efficient and time-efficient route. So we set out on this journey.
Learning from history
This isn’t my first experience with bespoke software. When I ran a digital agency we built a range of apps for clients, from online competitions, to operating platforms for estate agents, to the complete customer interface for a very large financial institution. Then I co-founded a software company and we built and sold our own web analytics platform.
That’s not to say I’m a software developer, even though I tinker. But I know the process well enough to take our needs and pursue a process that sees them translated into systems. Systems that are constantly evolving in response to our own needs, and the feedback of our speakers and customers.
More to come
I’m extremely proud of the Pomona Partners Platform and what we’ve built so far. But our roadmap stretches well into 2026 for new features and upgrades. More tools for our agents, and our speakers. Ways to help us better find, engage, and serve the bookers who come to us for our expert speakers.
We’re motivated by our own business success to make these investments. But that success comes only through the success of our speakers, and the good experience of the events organisers we work with. So that’s the real goal here: we keep investing to ensure that we are the most efficient, most effective, and most transparent speaker agency to work with, as a speaker, or as a booker.