How to Get on Podcasts & Be a Great Guest
How we got on 200+ relevant podcasts in a year
If you’re looking for how to get yourself invited as a guest on podcasts (and nail your guest appearance), you’ve come to the right place.
After spending 1 year of outreach getting our CEO, Jeroen, on over 200 podcasts, I’ve compiled a list of the best tips & tricks. 👇
We’ll cover:
- Why it’s valuable to get on podcasts
- How to approach podcasts
- How to build a podcast list
- How to write the best podcast outreach sequence
- What to prepare for when they start responding
- How to be a great guest
- How to manage the follow up
Why it’s valuable to get on podcasts
I’ll start off by prefacing that the benefits of getting featured on podcasts are long term rather than short term. If you’re going into podcasting expecting to quickly boost your sales, think again. Most people that have tried this have been disappointed.
Getting yourself on many podcasts and getting your brand mentioned where your audience is listening helps build brand recognition. This is a way to grow your own audience and expand your reach, which you can expect to lead to increased sales down the road. 📈
You can reach a similarly sized audience as you would at a conference talk with a much smaller time investment. Going to a conference costs time and money – traveling to the conference, spending day(s) at the conference, buying conference tickets, booking hotels, etc. Meanwhile, being featured as a guest on a podcast can be done right from your living room or office.
On top of that, podcasts give you a much bigger opportunity to talk about what your business does and why. It’s something you’ll often get asked, right off the bat most of the time.
Podcasts also tend to be a more personal chat and are therefore better at building more personal relationships with your audience at scale. 😍
Lastly, being a guest on podcasts establishes you as an expert in the industry. This builds credibility with your brand.
How to approach podcasts
While some podcasts may have forms directly on their site, we’ve found that emailing them directly works better. It puts you in contact with a real person you can engage with more than a form and, in most cases, sort of pre-approves you before filling out the form. ✅
Conveniently, every podcast has an RSS feed with an email address linked to it.
This is usually the right email address to reach out to for podcast requests, so it’s an efficient and effective way of getting in touch.
When emailing, we’ll ask them whether we should go through a form instead in case they do prefer this method of vetting. If they do, they’ll ask some qualifying questions before sending us to the form if they have one. And in those cases, we’ve mostly likely already been accepted. They’ll just ask us to fill out the form to put us through their proper booking flow.
How to build a podcast list
Now, the next question is: how can you identify who to approach? How can you find podcasts that are a good fit for you as a guest? 🤔
The first step is to understand how a good fit may look between you and the podcast. Think about which audience you want to reach, what topics they are interested in, and where you can add some valuable insights or stories. In short, figure out who you can inspire and how. And make sure that it’s somehow related to your business, so you can see long-term business results from getting in front of that audience.
There’s generally three aspects you can filter podcasts on:
- The topic of the podcast
- The language of the podcast
- The geographic focus of the podcast
Together they will define its audience plus the range of things you can talk about.
The best place I know of to search for relevant podcasts is Listennotes. It’s a free podcast search engine that offers some paid upgrades.
If you’ve defined multiple topics you want to search podcasts for, it’s best to search for them one by one on Listennotes (if relevant, combined with a filter for the right subset of languages and geographies).
I also recommend filtering out podcasts that haven’t had any recent episodes with the filter “Pub date of latest episode”. We typically only contact podcasts with episodes in the past month, because otherwise you might get in touch with a lot of inactive/dead podcasts, which doesn’t help you much.
At the time of writing this more advanced filtering comes on the premium “Super Search” plan, which is priced at $4/day and is billed only for the amount of days you have it enabled. The real kicker about this plan however is that you get access to the email address linked to the RSS feed of the podcast, which is essential when you’re reaching out. (Trust me, you need it! And I don’t get affiliate commissions on this whatsoever. 😃)
After you launch a search for relevant podcasts on Listennotes, you have a few options:
- You can browse through it, select the ones that are a fit, and copy them over into a list so you can start reaching out
- You can automatically get the whole list from the search results pages into a sheet (aka scraping it)
- You can click “Export results to CSV” to have Listennotes do the work for you – mind you, it is quite expensive
If you go for one of the two last options where you get the whole list first, then we highly recommend you to do an extra curation step before starting your outreach. It’s really essential to first manually curate the list to make sure you only reach to podcasts that are a good fit. We do this by working through it in a Google Sheet manually first.
If you feel a bit lazy and think it makes sense to skip that curation step, do know that:
- Some podcast hosts will immediately notice that you haven’t done your research properly and get angry or even mark your emails as spam. We have a podcast ourselves called “Founder Coffee – Intimate SaaS chats” on which we interview founders of SaaS companies (preferably established SaaS for SMBs). There’s nothing more frustrating than getting daily emails promoting the CEOs of companies who sell consumer products, coaching, … well, not SaaS.
- Some other podcast hosts may not notice immediately that you’re not a fit and may start aligning on potential topics. After a lengthy and often frustrating discussion, you’ll probably then come to that conclusion anyway and end the discussion in an awkward way.
- A third possible case is that you end up getting on the podcast anyway, but you don’t really know the audience nor what value you can bring them. You may end up making a fool of yourself and your brand. This is a complete loss of time and clearly the opposite result of the one you were hoping for.
In short, not doing the manual work wastes everyone’s time, builds bad karma, and may hurt your brand. ⚠️
That’s why I personally spend a good amount of time going through the list to make sure I only contact podcasts that touch the right audience (the one we want to reach with Salesflare) and where our CEO, Jeroen, can add significant value.
How to write the best podcast outreach sequence
When writing any cold email sequence, it’s important to write your emails with the mindset that you’re sending it to one person at a time. This helps make your email sound natural, as if you really did just send it to them, not to an automated list of many people.
With podcasts, think about your email from the host’s shoes. They may get several emails a day with people pitching themselves to be a guest. How can you stand out? 🤔
We send a personalized sequence of emails at scale using Salesflare’s built-in email workflows feature. Our podcast sequence is our best performing email sequence, with a 48% reply rate. ✨
I’ll break down how to approach each email step.
Email 1
Make your email short & to the point. Let them know you’ve taken a look and it seems to be the right fit, let them quickly know who you are and establish credibility. For example, “we’re the #1 CRM on Product Hunt”. (We could also say Salesflare is top rated on G2.com, but this maybe sounds a little more enticing.)
It’s important to be concise here. Sending a wall of text about what you and your company do will overwhelm them.
End the email with a simple call to action: we ask here if they’re the right person to talk to. This makes it easy for them to quickly forward the email to who takes care of booking guests in case they’re not the right one.
Email 2
If they haven’t replied to your first email, think about how you can approach them in a different way. For example, ask them again if they mind connecting you to the right person or if there is a form to fill out instead.
This presents the podcast host with a simple choice: they can either forward your email along or send you a quick link to the form.
Email 3
The third email is where you can send over a bit more about yourself to further establish your credibility. For example, send them a link to your personal podcast or LinkedIn profile.
That way they can do a bit more research on their own if they choose to, but again aren’t bombarded with a wall of text in their inbox.
Email 4
Email 4 is the breakup email. Let them know it seems they’re too busy or uninterested and you won’t reach out to them anymore.
Although it seems simple, this email does work! We typically have a 5% reply rate on our breakup email from people who have been too busy to dig deeper but want to let us know that they are interested and ask us to follow up in x amount of weeks or months.
Do make sure to send these outreach emails with a tool that sends emails automatically from your inbox, like the email workflows feature in Salesflare. Don’t send it out for instance with an email newsletter tool like Mailchimp. People will get the email in their Promotions or Other tab and clearly see that it’s not a personal email.
If you want to dig deeper here, in two related articles, we explore in more detail how to send personal emails at scale and how to write cold emails that get replies.
What to prepare for when they start responding
Once responses start coming in, you’ll notice a lot of the same information is being asked. It’s good to have the following info on hand:
Podcast bio
Keep it short & to the point. For example, our CEO, Jeroen’s podcast bio looks like this:
Jeroen is co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for SMBs selling B2B, mostly popular with agencies and fast-growing startups.
Salesflare itself was founded when Jeroen and his co-founder Lieven wanted to manage the leads for their software company in an easier way. They didn’t like to keep track of them manually and built Salesflare, which pulls customer data together automatically.
It’s now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top rated on review platforms like G2 for its ease of use and automation features.
Sometimes podcasts do ask for a longer bio (not very often). If that’s the case, you can elaborate a bit more on your past experience that brought you to where you are today.
LinkedIn & social links
I normally send out the links to our website and Jeroen’s LinkedIn profile. If you have more, send them over too!
Headshot
I find it’s handiest to keep your headshot in a shareable Google Drive link. That saves you time uploading headshots in different places. Sometimes forms even ask for a headshot but don’t have an upload button. That’s when a Google Drive / Dropbox / … link is most practical.
Background info on guest
Sometimes podcast hosts want a bit of background on the guest before jumping right into bio and socials. It’s good to have a little blurb that details what you’ve done in the past and establish a bit of extra credibility. It’s good to include extra information here that they wouldn’t exactly find in your podcast bio.
For example, something like:
With a 7-person company, Jeroen and the team have built a CRM company that competes with the giants, the likes of Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive. It’s the #1 CRM on Product Hunt and has more than 2000 companies actively using the software with NPS scores of 50 and more, all supported by a team that is hundreds to thousands times smaller than the teams of competing companies.
List of general topics guest can speak on
Some hosts ask in general what the guest can speak about. Here is where I give a small list of general areas of expertise Jeroen can speak about.
Jeroen can talk about a variety of topics, from sales automation and remote sales (in times of COVID-19 and beyond), over growth strategy and marketing, to product management.
List of topic ideas they can choose from
Other hosts ask directly what topic ideas we have. In that case, it’s best to list more specific topics. Such as:
Here’s a few possibilities of topics Jeroen can speak on:
– How to grow a software business to over 2000 active users/companies
– How to automate the part of sales that makes you a robot and become more human
– How to sell remotely in times of COVID-19… and beyond
– Why people don’t use CRMs and how to fix that
– How to use a CRM to make more sales
– Why you should organize your team around habits, not goals
– How to do content marketing that doesn’t suck and generates leads
– How to simplify and game-ify your product’s onboarding
– How to compete with giants as a small business
– How to create personal connections at scale using data & technology
Media kit / one-pager
Sometimes hosts simply ask for a media kit or one-pager. In those cases, I send them over a Google Doc link that includes all the info above in one place.
Having these materials on hand will make your follow up smoother. You can always tweak the answers a bit to tailor them even more to the podcast. For example, we keep a different list of topics on hand based on whether the podcast is about sales, branding, customer service, SaaS, marketing, etc.
How to be a great guest
Once you’ve finally gotten yourself on as a guest, it’s important to make sure you’re a great one.
Don’t try plugging your company too much. Mentioning your company will inevitably happen and that’s enough. Adding value to the audience is more important than using it as a commercial opportunity.
Remember: it’s about building long term brand recognition and an audience relationship, not about short-term sales. Very few people buy your product or service immediately after they’ve heard you talk on a podcast. It’s more important to expand your audience and identify as an industry expert than to get quick sales from being featured as a guest.
From our experience, once you’ve gone on a few podcasts you’ll notice there are two questions that recur in most podcasts:
At the start:
Why did you start [company name]?
At the end:
If people want to find out more about you or about [company name], where should they go?
It’s best to prepare the answers to these questions thoroughly.
Next to that, it’s good to have an outline for each of the topic ideas you’re presenting to podcast hosts. You don’t have to have that in written format, but it’s a good idea if you’re a fan of prepping well. 🤓
How to manage the follow up
Now that you know how to start getting in touch with podcasts, the question is: how will you organize yourself for closing these podcast opportunities too? 🤔
When reaching some scale, following up podcasts in Excel or from memory just doesn’t cut it anymore. Opportunities start falling through the cracks and a lot of time is spent manually following up. You need a system. ⚙️
What we did is create a ‘Visibility partnerships’ pipeline with custom stages to match our podcast flow. We have stages for when we’re in contact, for when an intro call has been booked, for when a date has been scheduled, and for when the podcast is done/live or rejected.
This helps us keep on top of things and is especially helpful for Jeroen and I working together. We can easily keep track of what stage each podcast is at, who is in contact with whom, and what action still needs to be taken.
An automated CRM, like Salesflare, helps you keep this overview without the extra work.
Salesflare automatically keeps track of every email, meeting and call. It lets you know when your podcast leads are opening your emails or visiting your website. And it tells you when podcast hosts have gone inactive and it’s time to follow up.
It also makes it super easy for me and Jeroen to collaborate.
To approach podcasts professionally, follow up timely and work together around them, give Salesflare a try. It’s set up in a matter of minutes.
We know that the internet is full of fantastic claims, so… for proof that this process for getting on podcasts works, check out our up-to-date overview of all the live podcast episodes Jeroen was on. It may not show 200+ podcasts at the moment you check it, as a big part of the recorded episodes still need to go live. 😃
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