← B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
Stop Making a B2B Podcast! Start Making a SALES Podcast.
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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, Neil Velio, the founder of Podnos 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, 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 gonna 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 this 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 Capitol 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. Sells is the desperate cousin that turns up at the family wedding and tries to sell everyone Ann Summers and Better Wear 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 ooh, 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 B2B 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 selling your 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 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 a prospect has thought to themselves, oh God, yeah, what I was doing isn't working. I really need some help? If the answer is 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 buzz 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 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 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 it's 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 neilodnows.co.uk, that's n, e, a, l@po d, k, n o w s.co.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 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 podnos.co.uk sales-podcast test. That's P O-N-O-W-S.co.uk sales podcast 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.