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Podcast Playbook: Helping Coaches & Advisors Convert Podcast Content into Clients
The Interview Mistake That Causes Listener Drop Off in the First 5 Minutes
00:27:15
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- [00:00]
A
Last year, I started working with a podcast coach on my personal finance show. And to my surprise, we spent most of our time on the first five minutes of my episodes. Not growth tactics, not CTAs, not guest selection. Nope. The beginning of the episode. He knew I wanted to grow my show, so I was a little skeptical about the approach, but I went along with it. My coach helped me break a few bad habits and think much more intentionally about how I was opening episodes. And then I started noticing downloads growing and probably even a better indicator, my Apple and Spotify followers started to climb. That experience changed how I think about podcasting, and I want you to have that exact same experience. So I asked my coach to come on and break down some of those insights here so you can benefit from them, too. And that coach is Josal Sehai from Stacking Benchman's. He's done over 1800 episodes, built a show with tens of millions of downloads, and most importantly, knows how to keep people listening. So by the end of this episode, you're going to know how to do the same by strengthening your introductions and turning them into your secret power for listener retention and podcast growth. Joe, my man. What's going on?
- [01:02]
B
Wait a minute, dude. I thought I was here to meet the coach. I was like, oh, we're gonna meet the coach. That's gonna be so great. Both of us together.
- [01:10]
A
You are so humble, but you are definitely the coach. Man. It was so fun working with you last year. And I remember one of the things that stuck with me the most was was this idea around framing and how most podcast hosts introduce their guest based on their relationship to them, not necessarily why the listener should care. Can you break that down for me?
- [01:27]
B
I think if we think about this like a good movie versus a really crappy movie, right? A bad movie, you just don't care. Like some of the later Marvel movies. Like, I'm at the point with Marvel movies just in the. I'm just like, I don't. I just don't care. Oh, yeah, they're fighting again. Who cares? They're going to win at some point. But in a really good movie, the stakes are high, and there's a reason why I have to go into this swamp with the main character to take a chainsaw. This is from one of my favorite movies. And we have to find my dead dad to get the ring to prove to everybody that. That he's actually dead. And the movie brings you to that point. So the quicker that we can do that in a podcast, the better off the podcast is going to be the better off the listener is going to be. Because especially with what you and I do, which is financial podcasting, there truly are some big stakes. But often what I found early in my podcasting career, the listener doesn't understand how big the stakes are. Like, they're like, okay, budget, you know, okay, I write down my numbers. What's that all about? Well, you know that huge vacation you could take once a year if you actually save some money? We can do that without credit card debt. Wait, what? In fact, we might be able to make it two vacations. What about three vacations? What about quit your job early? How awesome would that be? And if you build those stakes early on about why it's important for you as my listener to listen to this guest, then I think we're framing it the right way, because then the listener's in it. They're like, okay, I get that the stakes are high. I gotta listen to this guest. This is gonna be an awesome conversation. It's all built around me and nothing else.
- [03:10]
A
Yeah, I remember we were breaking down one of my podcast episodes, and I had a friend on. He's a real estate coach, a real estate investor. And I remember introducing him that way. I was like, hey, I met this guy at fincon, which is a big conference, and he was really cool, and I'm really excited to learn from him. And you were just like, nope, nope, nope. Like, it does not matter what, who, his relationship to you, why you want to have him there. Frame it as in the sense of, like, why the listener should care. Like, what. What is it about Chad that they are really going to become obsessed with? And why did you hand select him for your audience? And that reframing has helped me so much in introductions.
- [03:50]
B
If we're talking about the Chad that I know, Chad. I mean, Chad's journey is so awesome because Chad was able to live in South America. Chad was able to live in Spain. Chad started off with no money and doing something like real estate when you have no money. Are you kidding me? Chad was able to get this mentor, so he's already walked this walk that if you want real estate, like, Chad's the perfect guy to listen to. What? I don't want the people listening to you and I right now to think is, okay, well, I can't have my friends on. No, no, no, you're friends with Chad because Chad's a badass and you're a badass, and. And you guys have fun together. But that'll come out during the conversation and if it comes out 3/4 the way through the conversation that you and he had had a fantastic time together at fincon, and that's when you met him. If that somehow comes out later on during the report of the episode. Well, now Chad's already built his credibility with the audience, but I feel like it destroys credibility. I just know this is a podcast listener. When I'm five minutes into an episode and I hear about you and your buddy are going to yuck it up for 45 minutes, the stakes already went out the window. I'm like, oh, God. You couldn't find a guest this week, so you're having your buddy on. Great, fantastic. And now I have to listen to this junk.
- [05:04]
A
Let's talk about first question. Especially for interviews. This was a place that we got obsessed with. I mean, I think it was like five or six episodes in a row. You're like, okay, what's the first question you're going to ask? What are some examples of some first questions you almost never want to hear?
- [05:16]
B
What I don't want to hear is, so tell. Tell my audience a little bit about you. Like, what exactly is your bio? Because what that says to me is that you have spent no time. And by the way, I hear podcasters do this all the time, and so do you. Like, yeah, so tell. Tell our audience exactly what you do. That tells me as a podcast listener that you have not done your research, that you have Rando guest on. And by the way, this is probably not at all what happened, but this is what your audience thinks is happening. You have no idea what their background is. You're just learning about them. It's like you poured a cup of coffee, you walked up to the microphone, you turn on, you go, oh, well, let's find out who this random person is I'm going to be talking to now. So tell me a little bit about yourself. There also is kind of the warm up, right? So that's number one. You don't ask for their bio. You tell the listener what the stakes are and why this person is hugely important and why you have monster respect for them and you're really excited to connect them, being the guest with your awesome listener base. The other thing I don't want to hear is what I call the warmup. And the warm up is, so tell me about when you were a kid. Like, tell me about your. Your background. And now we're going to do 25 minutes of history. There's actually a reason why books don't do this. Notice that if a book If a bio goes into somebody's background, like somebody's written a memoir, the editor has always changed it around so that the person's background is either chapter two or chapter three. So if they're going to go into their childhood, it's never chapter one, and it's not chapter one for a reason. Because the famous football coach, I don't want to hear about when he was nine. Like, even though those formative years might be important, I want to hear about what he did the day before the Super Bowl. So they start off with the day before the super bowl, the day of the super bowl, or even the big play in the Super Bowl. And then they go, but you know what? None of this would have been possible if I hadn't had that lesson from my dad when I was nine. And now you're giving context to that background. But in podcasting, I feel like often we take a good. We take a good 10 minutes often to warm up. We warm up. Our guest warms up in about 10 minutes. You can feel it. By the way, I remember this when I started podcasting, about 10 minutes in, my guest is on. I'm on. They're laying down some awesome stuff. The bad news is your listener is not going to give you 10 minutes. And actually, this is pretty cool. There's a study around this. Marriott hotels a number of years ago did a study of people walking into their hotel. How many minutes do you think? Have I told you this one before?
- [07:58]
A
No.
- [07:58]
B
How many minutes does the average Marriott guest give the hotel before they decide if they like it or not?
- [08:05]
A
I can't imagine it's more than two or three minutes.
- [08:07]
B
Yeah, it is. It is two minutes often. Think about this. If you're the second person in line to check in, you haven't even checked in yet, and you've already decided this hotel sucks or this hotel is awesome. Two minutes in podcasting, I think it's even less than that. I think I know me, when I go looking for new podcast a few times a year, I. I give it maybe 45 seconds. I'm like, yeah, I'm out. I'm done. And it doesn't mean, you know, a lot of podcasters say you got to get right into it. That doesn't have to often always be the case. Maybe there is some important stuff you're going to share first before you get into the meat of your conversation. But only avoid that approach of getting to the meat right now for a damn good reason. You know, you have to. You have to begin with, I'm going to get to the meat and then go, well, I got this other thing, so you really have to think of it like a speed bump. Is this speed bump worth going over before I get to the meet? If it is, then do it. If it's not, then, then don't.
- [09:06]
A
Can you give me some examples? You know, we have a. I have a client and a friend of yours I know, Jesse Kramer. He starts his show off. He'll kind of like, quickly introduce the topic, and then he goes into the listener review of the week. Yeah, and we've always. We've been playing around with that and trying to figure out if that's the right place for. Yeah, but he's usually pretty snappy. It's 15, 20 seconds max that he does this. And of course, like, he's been gaining tons of reviews by asking it straight up front when most people are listening. And then he talks about a super soft T shirt, which people love to. To recite back. But, you know, any other speed bumps that you think might be worth actually cruising over?
- [09:40]
B
Well, let's just talk about his speed bump because. Because it's dangerous. I mean, whenever you do community building at the beginning of the episode, it's very dangerous. I don't really want to be in your community. I don't know anything about you. Who cares about your community? You said in the headline that you were going to talk about xyz, and now you're talking about your awesome community. Okay, now, Jesse, leaving it at 45 seconds, you know, knowing that time is money and I got to do this quickly, it can build credibility. It can say, if you keep it short, that, you know what? I've got a bunch of other people that are in this community. You're going to love it. The water's warm. Come on, get in. But generally, the way you want to think about community building, actually, the way I think about building a podcast in general is like a mullet business in the front, party in the back. Right? So community building, and this is another mistake. I don't think enough podcasters do community building. And at the end of the episode, when your listener base, if you go look on Podcast Connect, Apple Podcast Connect, or you look at Spotify, you can see when people start trailing off, you're going to naturally have people trail off throughout the episode. So maybe at the end of the episode, you're left with 70% of the audience that you had at the beginning. Those people at the end of the audience, at the end of the show, you just had this awesome Discussion with Chad. Let's say you've taught them a ton of stuff and now you're down to. Even though it's only 70%, you're down to your biggest fans that just want to spend more time with you. And often a new podcaster goes, okay, see you later. When you could be then Talking to that 70% of people about whatever it is you sell. If you sell something, you could be talking about your group. You know, if you've got a money networks group or a Facebook group or whatever it is, you could talk about the next meetup that you have. If you're meeting in person, you can talk about reviews that you got or your super soft T shirt, whatever it is. So I like doing community building, but I really like it in the back. If you keep it at the front, I think it's got to be short. Anything else that you do, like, sometimes. We'll have a very special event coming up. This is a good one for the. For the beginning. I know that it's really important, whatever XYZ is that we're going to talk about. But you know what? We got this really cool event coming up next Thursday where we're gonna watch a movie that was up for an Academy Award together. And you know what? How many finance movies are ever up for Academy Awards? They never are. But we're gonna get together on YouTube. You, me, a bunch of other stackers. We're gonna have, like, the virtual beach ball going around. It's gonna be great. So join us then. So we did that early on because it was a big event, and I thought that showing that you can be a part of something bigger without really getting into the nitty gritty of long reviews or long community building was important to do at the front. What I don't want to do, though, is sell a lot at the front. That. That's very dangerous if you're like, you know. And listen, we got to do it about seven, eight minutes in our show as our first sponsor spots, and it kills me. And I know it's a speed bump, but we've tried putting it in all kinds of different places, and it's like a necessary evil. And you know what's funny? I used to disguise it around humor as well. I used to have all kinds of humor around the sponsor spot. I go, oh, hey, Doug. To one of my co hosts. I go, I go, doug, what is that fungus on the bottom of your foot? We're gonna take a look at Doug's fungus for just a second. And then while we're supposedly looking at the fungus on Doug's foot. We do the sponsor spots. I found out people hated that. They hated the fact that we were masking it. You know what I do now? And people don't click through it like they used to as much. I tell them it's a necessary evil. I'm like, hey, we got a couple sponsors that keep us keeping on so that we can bring you all this for free. We got a couple now. We got a couple halfway through the show at Doug's Trivia, and that's it. So we're going to hang on for a second, we're going to hear from them, and when we come back, we're going to dive into. So I build up the guest, I build up the stakes, and then I tell people, hey, we're going to be right back with a guest. But first we got to do this thing. The number of people skipping it when I was brutally honest about what we were doing went down. Yeah, it blew me away.
- [13:45]
A
Yeah. I'm not that surprised. Podcast listeners are so smart, and if you're just transparent with them, I feel like they get it and they'll support you or they'll find the 15 second skip and. And go ahead and flip through them. What about your last podcast episode? Especially maybe a guest interview. Can you walk me through kind of like how you designed that opening, like what you were thinking about, what question you picked? How much of it is like super intentional versus how much of it is just on the spot, you riffing or kind of coming at it in the moment?
- [14:12]
B
The first couple questions are always incredibly scripted. The rest of it is not as scripted, but the first question always is because of the fact that I want to think about my interview like a James Bond car chase. Like James Bond movies don't start off with James Bond having a cereal. The phone rings. He gets called into the office. 20 minutes of driving, gets in the office, punches in, goes and talks to his boss, finds out that he's got to fight the bad guy. No, he is being chased down a mountainside on skis by four very big people who are going to kill him. Right. And that's. That's the beginning. So I want to find this point, and I do that for a couple reasons. A, it's better for the listener if we just jump into what the juiciest thing is. But I also found that for my guest, the guest level of intensity goes through the roof if I start on a high. Now, here's the problem. I don't know If I can keep it up, right? If I start off with a car chase, the biggest thing. So we were interviewing this guy, Hal Elrod, for people that know how Elrod you. You know that Hell. El H. Elrod. Easy for me to say. Hell's whole life changed when he was in a car accident. So he's. He's merging onto the highway. His car flips over. He almost dies. And in that moment of almost dying, everything changed. And now he's super intentional about his life and he teaches people how to be super intentional. So I start off with it's October 17th, it's one o' clock in the morning. You're merging onto the highway. What happened? Then I start off with the car flips, right? And so let's just get right to that particular moment. Another great guest, Lisa Peterson. Lisa Peterson's life change. She's in the third floor of a medical facility. The elevator is right behind her. She's in the desert. She lives outside of Tucson. And the elevator dings and there's a dude in an overcoat in the middle of summer in the desert. And he goes striding across toward the doctor's office. And she's like, what's going on? And the woman at the. The receptionist desk goes, you can't go in there. And he turns to her and to everybody and he opens up his overcoat and he's got guns. And all of a sudden, Lisa's life changed and she got more intentional. So we started off with that. We just start off with what was your life like for, you know, up until then? Well, it's kind of boring. And things were. And I just kind of coasted along. No, we're going to start with guns. And sadly, somebody died that day. Three people died that day, I believe. So I always try to start on that big high and then see if we can keep it up for my interviews are about 25, 30 minutes. And to see if we can keep it up for. For the entire interview. And I can't think of a time that we didn't where I'm like 20 minutes in and the intensity's gone.
- [17:05]
A
Is there any other angles that you'll test, especially with like a guest that doesn't have that big moment, that doesn't have like the. The gun moment or the car flip?
- [17:14]
B
Sure.
- [17:15]
A
Like, is there other places that someone could be thinking about starting with a guest?
- [17:19]
B
Well, I just want to start with what their key thing is. Then you talked about Chad, Chad Carson. So Chad Carson, I'm going to start with you on property in South Carolina. But you lived with your family for over a year in Ecuador. How. How do you do that? Like, how does. How does that work? So I ask him the really big question that everybody's wondering. You know, it's funny. We had Neil Massimino and a NASA guy on, and I asked him very. The very first question was the number one question that everybody wants to know about being in space.
- [17:56]
A
What's that?
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B
How do you pee? Everybody wonders it. How do you go to the bathroom in space? And I said. I said, you know what, Neil? I've got a lot of really important questions. I really didn't. You know, I'm a finance guy, so I really didn't know about what to ask him about. I mean, I had a full list. But I started off with the number one question. The modest wanted to know, okay, how before. Before we get to your transformation. He did something really cool, by the way. He actually reversed his eyesight and made it better. He was. He was denied for the space program when he first applied because his eyesight wasn't good enough. He found a doctor who taught him how to get rid of his glasses and how to make his eyesight better, and it actually worked. And he applied again, and he became an astronaut.
- [18:43]
A
That's cool. Yeah, that's cool.
- [18:45]
B
That was. By the way, that could have been my first question. Yeah, but I knew. I knew that everybody wants to know how you pee in space, so we started there.
- [18:53]
A
Somewhere interesting, at least I feel like, is the minimum that you should be considering for that first question. Not tell me about yourself or a lot of times I'll often hear, I know about you, but tell. Tell the audience a little bit about you. It's so. Feels so lazy whenever people say that. I'm like, not only did you actually do the research or you kind of know this person, but you couldn't frame them the right way for your audience. Like, that drives me crazy.
- [19:15]
B
It's so frustrating, you know, the. The arc of your show. Like, I want to think about my arc like it's a movie. You know, we started off this conversation talking about how it's like a movie. The whole conversation should be like a movie. You should start fast. But you're also looking for a story arc. So I do have. Well, I don't have a ton of questions. I generally have about eight questions, but my questions are in a story arc, so there's like, a visible beginning, middle, and end. And I also know enough about the person that I know for my structure. We have Time for two or maybe three stories. And the story structure I'm looking for is this. Somebody is driving toward a goal. By driving, I mean, they are just marching through life going toward this goal, and they really want it. And something gets in the way, right? Something that stops most of the people listening to the podcast. It gets in the way, but they found a way around it. What was the. What were they driving toward? What was the obstacle? How did they find their way around it? The last thing is, if somebody's telling a really good story, even if it feels like it's taking a long time for the story to go, I just shut up and I let them tell it. Often, if my guest pauses, I always want to go, huh? Yeah, yeah. I just want the verbal. It's okay, whatever it is. I remember being at a great conference called Podcast Movement, and I was there. Mark Marin was on the main stage, and he was talking about the lead singer of a band who is at a Holiday Inn Express, and he is fixing a noose up to the light fixture and getting on a chair, and he's going to kill himself. And at the last minute, he decides not to. And Mark put it very well. Mark said, in that moment, all I wanted to do was hug the guy. All I wanted to do. And he's starting to cry while he's talk, telling the story about how he's thinking about. Well, not think about. He's trying to commit suicide and he's crying and he goes. I'm not his therapist, though. I am a podcaster, and I have a bunch of listeners who have probably thought about suicide. And if I'm able to have him tell this story very effectively, then everyone can go through the emotions, feel the emotions, and not commit suicide and learn that being alive another day is. Is 100 better. But he said it's. It's so, so, so hard because you got to let the guy tell the story and you just got to get out of his way.
- [22:01]
A
That's well said. As we're wrapping up this conversation. Joe, let's talk about longevity. I mean, you've been in the podcasting space for a whole long time. You know, 1800 plus episodes on stacking Benjamins, you got Stacking Deeds. You probably have had a ton of other podcast projects out there, and I do feel like longevity is somewhat the superpower to podcast growth. I mean, you will sort it out over time, and you're intentional about it, and you stay in the game. What's been the secret for you for podcasting this long and. And Actually staying in this medium, you
- [22:29]
B
know, for me, it's been a Madonna. And by that I mean Madonna over the course of her career was the queen of reinvention. You look at, at her early career, her mid career, her later career, it's reinvention. I never think about the fact we've done 1800 episodes. I don't think about those episodes. I think about how we're changing the game for the next episode. Like, like, how are we going to be different? And if you go back and listen to the first stacking Benjamin shows, they are a lot different than they are now. And I also get into being the chef. And what I mean by that is I really think it is a death rattle of your show if you spend a lot of time asking your audience what they want you to serve next. Like, what? What do you want me? And don't get me wrong, you want to serve stuff that your audience wants to eat, but you also have to make stuff that's really fun for you to make. So you kind of meet them halfway. Tim Ferriss talked about this when he had an interesting conversation on his show about how he makes his podcast. He goes, my goal with my, with my, my listeners is if I want to talk about violin making, which has nothing to do with anything that would ever be on the Tim Ferriss show, I need to find a way to meet my audience halfway to violin making so that they get enough personal growth out of that and I'm able to talk about violins, which I absolutely love. Like, if I can meet them part way. And I'll give you how this can become fun. So the first few years on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, nobody was listening to Stacky Benjamins. We publish every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Nobody was listening to that episode. And I looked at the numbers and I'm like, okay, I could not publish, which I didn't want to do. I said, screw it. I'm going to make an episode that's for listener of one, which is me. So I had my favorite board game people on and we still do this today and now today, by the way, it's one of our most downloaded episodes every single year. My board game fans come out every year and they all, they go back in the back catalog and listen to all the other ones because those are way evergreen. So I have the biggest people in the board game industry come on and they give me two top five list, top five games about money. And then the second half of the show, they do a top five list of games you can buy at Walmart or Target that don't suck because everybody is about to do. You know, holiday time. The month of December is when you play games with the family. And how often do you go to Target and you look at the shelf of games and you buy one that's really crappy, and everybody spends the next two hours just going, how do I get. How do I politely leave? Right? And it's awesome. We actually played a game last night. I had a short game night with a couple friends of mine, and I played a game that my guest last Black Friday recommended, and these guys were cracking up. The game's called Ito. Super fun.
- [25:19]
A
Folks, this is Joe Salce. Hi. Stacking Benjamins. If you want to see an expert do it live, go check out his show. Joe, man, this was a blast. Thanks for coming on the show.
- [25:28]
B
Thanks for having me on, man.
- [25:29]
A
A huge shout out to Joe for coming on and breaking this all down. If you want to see it in action once again, I highly recommend that you check out his show, Stacking Benjamin's. My favorite takeaway from this conversation was when he was talking about being a chef and finding a way not only to serve up what your audience wants, but what you want. How do you find that perfect balance? I felt like that was such a great nugget that he dropped on us. I also really like what he said about the game night episode and, you know, Black Friday being an episode that he probably could have just scrapped. He could have just taken a free day, but he experimented and tried something different, and now that turned into one of his most popular episodes. Just goes to show that experimentation is going to be a method to keep podcasting a long game for you. And then I just love all of his thoughts around media and how that influenced how he opens up episodes. But the James Bond example or the mullet framework, I think if you start thinking about your episode introductions with some of those things in mind, you really get to transform what is a lot of times a boring or slow start into something fast, exciting, and thrilling. And it was honestly so much fun working with Joe. Uh, we met five times last year on my personal podcast and it goes to show that even as a podcast coach myself, it's a great reminder how valuable getting someone else's outside perspective is, how to, you know, getting excited about learning new things and just staying energized on improving. And if that is something that you are also looking for, that's exactly what this show is here to help you with. So don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss what's coming up next. That's it for today. Thanks for tuning into Podcast Playbook.