The episode today is from Logan Lyles and it’s about tips on how you can leverage being a host of a podcast to help you sell more effectively.
Have you ever thought about starting a podcast?
Join the discussion below. Scott and Logan are happy to help with your podcasting questions.
SweetFish Media
B2B Growth Show
Logan on LinkedIn
Scott’s Inspired Marketing Podcast
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips Podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Logan has made my job super easy today by introducing himself, so let’s just jump right in:
Logan Lyles: Hi, my name is Logan Lyles. I’m the co-host of B2B Growth, a daily podcast for B2B sales and marketing leaders. I also head up sales for SweetFish Media, a podcast agency for B2B brands. My tips today are going to be about four specific ways you can leverage being a host or even a co-host of a podcast to help you sell more effectively, open doors to new opportunities and close deals faster. You’ve probably heard it said before that your network equals your net worth and the first way to leverage being a salesperson and a podcast host is to grow your network, but it’s not in the way that you might think.
Picture going to decision makers at your most coveted accounts and instead of asking them for a 15-minute demo meeting, asking them if they would like to be a featured guest on your industry podcast, I can tell you from experience that the reply rates to this methodology are so much higher than any cold email or well-crafted LinkedIn in mail message that we might be sending. It’s a flattering message for your prospect. They see it as a PR boost for their company, especially if they’re a C-level executive. They see it as a boost to their personal brand as well, and at the end of the day, you have a scalable way to build new relationships with the people you want to talk to most. The second way you can leverage being a podcast host is the development of your own personal brand. We’re being told as salespeople, that we have to put out content that’s relevant for our buyers to stand out in a crowded marketplace, but we have no time to sit at our desks and crank out blog posts.
Most of our bosses wouldn’t be very happy with us anyway. Plus, you’re probably thinking, I’m not that of a writer. Being the host of an interview-based podcast though allows you to create content that you can share, but it also keeps you doing the very thing your boss wants you to be doing, and successful salespeople are maximizing their time doing — talking to prospects. The third way you can leverage being a podcast host as a salesperson is something I alluded to earlier. Something that helps you sell more effectively. We all know that we desperately need to understand the world of our buyers. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned about marketing trends and the day to day life of my ideal clients who happen to be marketing leaders at B2B tech companies by interviewing them on our podcast, they share what’s working. They share their failures, they share glimpses behind the scenes into their world.
This is Intel. I’d be hard-pressed to get elsewhere. For example, I’ve recently interviewed marketing leaders on our podcast who shared exactly how they approach their budget and make a lot of their buying decisions. This is invaluable information for me as a salesperson selling to this type of marketing executive, but it doesn’t feel like market analysis or buyer research. It feels like a conversation and it’s also valuable to the guest being featured on the podcast and informative to me at the same time all the while building those relationships that I mentioned earlier. The fourth and final way I found that you can leverage being a podcast host is what we call borrowed brand equity. About five months into being the host of our podcast, B2B growth, I was listed as a Top B2B marketer to follow in 2019. I found this interesting for two reasons.
First, I’m a salesperson first. Secondly, I was new to the B2B marketing space as of six months prior to that list coming out. But because I’ve interviewed big names and leaders from recognizable brands in the industry into which I sell, I’m recognized as a peer among the buyers that I sell to. So, the power of a podcast definitely does go beyond the one to one relationships that you create with the guests that you interview on the show. But I’ll come back to my first point that those relationships have been one of the biggest drivers of new deals and close business for me, and I’m not alone. Just off the top of my head, I can think of two other podcast hosts who have closed a ton of business directly attributed to relationships with the guests on their show. One to the tune of about a hundred thousand dollars in net new business in the first year of being a podcast host, the other over 700 k within the first year of his show. So traditionally everyone sees a podcast as a marketing rather than a sales function. But hopefully, these tips have shed some light on ways that you could leverage a podcast for yourself and your brand as a salesperson.
Scott Ingram: I could talk about this strategy for hours, but the promise is 5-10 minutes per episode or less, so I won’t. What I will say is that as far as I know, I’m the only sales professional I know that’s actually doing this. Not starting a sales podcast, there’s a ton of those, but a podcast that’s focused on your industry and your clients and prospects. For coming up on 3 years I’ve hosted the Inspired Marketing Podcast which focuses on marketers who have invested in the Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions that we provide services around. Just this week we released an interview that I did with the CMO of a multi-billion-dollar organization. You can listen to the 33-minute conversation that we recorded, but the real gold was in the 45 minutes that we spent together before and after the mics were turned on. Just in the last dozen or so episodes I’ve talked with HomeAway, Lexmark, Optum, PTC, Lenovo, Overstock, Thomson Reuters, Samsung and Ingram Micro and like Logan said, the response rate on this type of outreach is beyond anything else I’ve ever experienced.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but the approach is powerful and I appreciate Logan sharing my biggest secret… I think.
In all seriousness, we’re happy to continue the discussion in the comments at DailySales.Tips/19
Today’s question is: Have you ever thought about starting a podcast? But feel free to ask any other podcast related questions you might have and I’m sure Logan will be glad to help me get you some great answers.
Of course, you’ll also find links to Logan’s profile, the B2B Growth Show, Sweetfish media and all that great stuff. Check it out at DailySales.Tips/19, then come back tomorrow for a tip from another podcaster but don’t worry, this has nothing to do with podcasting. Mike Simmons is going to talk about Personal KPIs.