Welcome back to Business Talks with Business People for Business
People, where we talk business talks
about business people. This week we're taking a
deep dive into the digital transformation in
a post pandemic post SaaS landscape.
My next guest needs no introduction, but I'm going to spend the next four
minutes doing so anyway because that's what we do on
B2B podcasts. Cut.
Cut it. The whole thing. Cut, cut.
Nobody will buy from you with this podcast. You've just made
something tedious. Barely anyone will listen and watch.
Welcome along to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neal Veglio,
the founder of Podknows Podcasting, a podcast
agency which helps brands and
solo operators, solopreneurs, whatever you want to call them,
lonely old business folk so they can get better results from their
podcast. All right, let's have a grown up conversation
here about something I see people commonly
kind of approaching wrongly. It's something which sabotages
podcasts for many years. If you don't identify the
problem and get on top of it really quickly, it's
labeling your show a B2B podcast. I
know. Bit of a weird thing to pick a fight with, isn't it? Especially as
this show is called B2B Podcasting Insights.
Trust me, that's a search friendly
term only for this show. And I'm gonna get to
exactly why that is in a moment, so stay with me.
Now, somewhere along the way, B2B
podcast stopped, meaning a
podcast made by a B2B business for B2B buyers.
And it actually started meaning something a little bit more
specific. It started meaning a podcast
where someone, probably a founder, will sit down and either
share insights in a monologue or interview other
B2B founders and talking about industries in a
very polite way, not particularly meaningful, but
very balanced, very considered, very press,
sound bitey. And during those shows, under no
circumstances do we ever mention that
we'd like the listener to buy from us, because that would
be gauche. I love the word gauche. Wonder what
the color of gauche would be. Anyway, that's not a B2B
podcast. That's a LinkedIn company page with
a microphone. And that's what you're
probably making, whether you like it or not. The thing that you
should be making, and the thing I'm going to make the case for
over the next few minutes to you directly is a sales podcast.
Now note I said sales podcast,
not salesy podcast. Let me be clear here.
I'm not talking about a pitch fest. I'm not talking about a weekly
advert or fortnightly advert or monthly advert, depending on your
cadence, that mentions your
services and your brand and your business every two minutes
and ends with anyway. If any of that sounded good to you,
then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Buy my stuff. When
I say sales podcast, I mean it in the way
that it is a show where every
episode has been deliberately designed to accelerate
a particular decision to be made by
your ideal customer listener. It's a way to
amplify inbound conversion. But those people need
to already be circling you. We have the
capital ready for you right now. So every episode
has one job, one direction
and one ideal outcome. Every
single episode. Here's the bit that's
generally really funny to me.
Marketers, whose job it is to literally
market the thing that they use to generate
revenue. Marketers hate the word sales. They've been
conditioned to believe that the word sales
is aggressive, loud,
needy. Sales is the desperate cousin that turns up at the
family wedding and tries to sell everyone Ann Summers and
Betterware and Avon tries to get them on their
Amazon affiliate pyramid scheme. Whereas
marketing is the sophisticated one. Marketing
turns up wearing the nice suit and has the color coordinated
Filofax in their pocket just in case. So when someone like
me suggests that a branded podcast should play the part of
a sales asset, there's a visible twitch of nervousness,
of reluctance, of oh no,
gauche. We can't be seen to be selling. That would ruin
our brand. That would alienate our audience. It would be
awful. Stop for a minute, would you? Just listen to yourself.
The business you work for exists to sell something, whether that's
your business or you're a decision maker in
somebody else's business. The whole point of that business
is to sell to generate revenue,
to build profits so that you can survive
and the people that you have within your business
can also survive. Pay the rent, pay the mortgage, pay the
bills, enjoy themselves now and again, go to the cinema.
None of that happens if you don't sell. And every piece of content
that you produce within that business, whether it's this podcast
or a YouTube or social media or your
newsletter, all of that is produced
ultimately in service of that end. And pretending
otherwise is not being high minded. It's just
expensive. It's costing you a fortune. So the dodge has become
this, oh no, no, no, no, no, we're not making a sales podcast.
No, we're making a B2B podcast. We're making a
branded podcast with a B2B intent.
And the B2 to be gives people
permission to ignore the commercial job
that the thing has. It's kind of a get out clause.
It says, look, we don't have to justify any of
this that we're making here with results because it's a
B2B podcast and B2B podcasts are content
and they're about the industry and about us being thought
leaders and brand awareness. Yeah,
about that. Let me be really clear about what I'm saying here.
Let's leave no waters muddy. I'm not saying that
every episode should end with a five minute sales pitch.
I'm not saying you should hard sell any cold open. I'm not saying you should
name drop your products and services every 40
seconds like some cursed corporate
idiot. A sales podcast, in the way that I'm defining
it, is kind of the conversation
that a genuinely brilliant person at your company who
knows a lot, is great at talking to customers. A
conversation they'd be having if they were sitting down
in a room with a prospect who was pretty much 70%
sure that they wanted to buy your products or your services. The kind
of conversation where the prospect walks away, heads back home or
to their office, and thinks to themselves, yeah,
these are the people I want to work with. I don't really need to shop
around anymore. It doesn't sell at them.
It just removes any friction they might still have
from signing an agreement with you. Think about that
distinction, because that's exactly what we're talking about here.
It's the whole game. The traditional B2B podcast
tries to convince strangers. The sales
podcast removes any remaining lingering doubt
from the almost ready to buy that are lingering in
the podcast apps or on your YouTube channel, loving the
content you're putting out. One of those methods is a
license to print money, sustain your business, grow
and become the brilliant, brilliant company that you
know you need to be. The other is a conveyor belt of hope.
Let's talk about the three question test that I put every
B2B podcast through to figure out whether or not they
are genuinely making their podcast have a job. Go
back to my episode about what job does your podcast do? To
find out more about that. Here's how you tell the difference. Take
your last three episodes, your most recent three episodes. Not what
you plan to record, but what's already out there in the RSS feed
on Apple podcasts on Spotify, and ask yourself these three
questions. 1. Does this episode
serve a specific buying trigger? Not a topic, not
a theme, a buying trigger. A moment where prospect has
thought to themselves, oh God, yeah, what
I was doing isn't working. I really need some help? If the
answer is eh, kinda maybe
in a general way, then it's a no.
Question 2 could a prospect comfortably
bring an episode of yours into
an internal conversation within their own business where they're talking about
buying something? Could they present that to their boss
and say this is why I want to hire these people,
or would that feel embarrassing for them because
the episode is too generic, doesn't get to the point, it's kind of
meandering and it's too light and too safe to be
quoted by any decision maker as evidence of a
reason to buy. Question 3 By the end of the
episode, is the next step obvious for them to take?
Is it clear? Is it singular? You know, not check us out on
our website, not follow us on LinkedIn.
Just one clear place they need to go to to find out more.
Take that next step in their relationship from
being an anonymous listener or consumer of your content to someone
that could be in a position to reach out and buy. And
does it give them a reason why why they need to take that next step
with you? Now, if you've answered with yes three times, you got a
sales podcast. Well done. Two or fewer and you've got a pretty
wishy washy industry podcast, a B2B podcast in the
truest sense of the word, that's just operating very
politely and doing not very much at all for your business. By the way, if
you want to run this test for yourself properly, across
all the questions I've shared and more, I built a one page
self audit for you. I'll give you more on that in a minute.
Here's the thing. When you start building episodes with this in mind, with
this outcome designed in the process, when you accept that
your podcast's job is to accelerate inbound
conversions for those people who are already in your
circle, then the whole thing changes for you. And
I don't just mean the content, I mean what
happens with and around your podcast. Your
sales team starts using it confidently, adding it to email
signatures, sharing episodes with would be
prospects they want to get on the phone or in email. It becomes
a specific sales asset, a weapon.
You know you mentioned on our call last week that you are
struggling with X
and episode 11 of our podcast actually covers this off. That's the
sales podcast earning its keep. When you know that your podcast
is working, your prospects start quoting it back to you.
I listened to your episode about why and that's
exactly what we're dealing with. When can we sit down and have a chat about
this? When can we start? That's a sales podcast doing the
job. And it's the same as essentially doing the job of
having three discovery calls in one hit. Just one
download, just one listen. If this is working, then your
marketing team stops panicking about reach and starts paying attention
to the behavior of customers that are getting in touch.
Who's binge listening? Which episodes are being shared, you
know, inside the prospect's own company? Which ones are being
quoted back on our sales calls? That's a signal. We talk
about signals all the time in marketing. It's a
real signal. It's not a download. It's not even a listen. It's a signal.
It's evidence of customers wanting to buy from you.
And here's the thing that really matters that nobody considers
when they're just churning out content that they're calling a B2B podcast,
your close rates change. Not because the
podcast is converting cold strangers. No, it isn't.
It's not meant to. If your podcast is doing its job,
it's nurturing people from the top all the way down to that
sales conversation. But if it's working, by the time that
a prospect gets in front of your salesperson,
a huge chunk of the heavy lifting is already done. They've heard you think
they've heard what you got to say about matters. They've heard you disagree with
industry consensus. It's a big part of why my show
works, the one you're listening to right now. Because I don't go along with
the industry norms, I challenge them. Doesn't make me popular.
But it does mean my prospects totally trust that I know what I'm
talking about. If they've heard you be specific about a problem that
they're currently in, they're arriving pre sold. That's
what inbound conversions actually look like when your
sales podcast is doing its job and working properly.
Not a flood of cold leads. A steadier, shorter,
high quality pipeline where everyone who's showing
up is already sold or at least halfway to signing with
you. Here's the awkward bit that nobody wants to admit. Most
B2B podcasters aren't accidentally failing to do
this. They've been built on purpose in a way
that makes it impossible. They've been built to avoid
looking too commercial, to avoid upsetting anyone,
to avoid having a point of view strong enough to stand for something
and actually move anyone off of a fence. And the result is exactly
what you'd expect in that scenario. A show that nobody hates,
which is also a show that nobody buys from. If your podcast wouldn't
make anyone in your industry slightly uncomfortable, it's not
doing its job. Here's the way to look at it. If it couldn't
possibly ever cost you any deal, then is definitely
also not winning you one. A sales podcast has a spine.
It takes a position on things. It names a problem
specifically enough that the right listener feels seen and
heard and the wrong listener moves on, blocks you
and ignores you for life. Great. We didn't want them
anyway. Still a bug in the matrix. It's the whole
damn point. I hate your
podcast. Whoa.
Each episode I answer a question that's landed in my inbox from someone
running or launching a B2B podcast. You can send yours to
neal@podknows.co.uk, that's n e a l at p
o d k n o w s dot co dot uk. this one's
from Gareth, who runs operations at a B2B services firm in Cardiff.
He says, neil, I'm recording my first episode next week and I'm already losing sleep
about it. Every time I do a practice take, I freeze the second
the red light comes on. Any advice before I completely embarrass myself on
my own podcast? Gareth? First of all, breathe. Secondly,
the nerves aren't the problem here. The cause of them is you're
nervous because you're trying to sound like a podcaster. And
we can tell, everyone starts out doing this.
You got a voice in your head that's this, like, weird hybrid of
every presenter, every podcast you've ever heard, and you're trying to merge them all together
and make your own version of that. Don't impersonate people.
You're not Stephen Bartlett or Joe Rogan. Thank God
you're Gareth from Cardiff, who knows his industry inside
out. And that is the person that people are going to press play to hear,
not an imitation. Two practical things for you. Number one,
before you record, pick someone real, like a colleague, a
mate, a client that you actually like and pretend you're
explaining the thing to them, not to a general audience.
The audience is a collective, made up noun that makes you go
weird on a microphone. A specific person in mind doesn't.
Number two, stop listening back to the first 30 seconds of your
takes, then the worst 30 seconds. I'm serious, that's
where everyone sounds awful, including me, more than 20 years
in. that point, you're still getting into your stride, getting into
your flow. Start your listening back from about minute two, you'll
realize you sound better than you think. Oh, and the final thing,
the red light doesn't know anything about you. It's a
diode. It can't judge you. You're allowed to ignore it.
Quick tip for this episode and it's about your cover art. Your
podcast cover art is not a logo. I see this constantly. A
B2B company shoves their logo on a podcast
Canva slide and calls it the podcast cover.
They even put a microphone next to it. That's not cover art. That's
company stationery. Cover art has two jobs. Neither of them are
corporate. Job one Tell a human being in a
thumbnail the size of a postage stamp what the show's about and who it's
for. Job number two Be legible enough to
match the Apple podcasts and Spotify search indexing
and show somebody that's scrolling for a particular
search term that this is the show for them. Your company logo
tells them neither of these things, right? If any of this has landed
if you've been listening to this episode, realizing that your show is a well
produced industry podcast and not a sales podcast,
I built you something for it. It's called the Sales Podcast Self
Audit. It's a one page PDF with seven yes or no
questions. You run your last three episodes through it. You score it honestly,
and by the end you'll know exactly where your show sits on the
scale between inbound conversion machine and expensive
LinkedIn content filler. You'll find it at
podknows.co.uk/sales-podcast
test. That's P
O D K N O
W S dot co dot uk slash sales dash podcast dash test.
The link is in the episode description. Until next time, stop
making an industry podcast that hides behind the word
B2B. Start creating a sales asset
that earns its place in your overall company pipeline. Talk
to you on the next episode.