Hoe word ik een goede gast op podcasts?

Hoe we in een jaar tijd op meer dan 200 relevante podcasts kwamen

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

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. 😍

Ten slotte word je als gast op podcasts een expert in de sector. Dit vergroot de geloofwaardigheid van je merk.

Hoe podcasts benaderen

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. ✅

Het handige is dat elke podcast een RSS-feed heeft met een e-mailadres eraan gekoppeld.

More about how to find that email address at scale in “How to build a podcast list” below!

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.

Hoe je een podcastlijst opbouwt

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:

  1. Het onderwerp van de podcast
  2. De taal van de podcast
  3. De geografische focus van de podcast

Samen bepalen ze het publiek en de dingen waarover je kunt praten.

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.

Here’s how a search for marketing podcasts looks on Listennotes.

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. 😃)

Nadat je op Listennotes naar relevante podcasts hebt gezocht, heb je een paar opties:

  • Je kunt er doorheen bladeren, de juiste selecteren en ze kopiëren naar een lijst zodat je ze kunt gaan benaderen.
  • Je kunt automatisch de hele lijst van de pagina's met zoekresultaten in een blad krijgen (ook wel scraping genoemd)
  • 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.

The podcast name and description mostly tells you enough to decide whether it’s a good fit… or not.

Als je een beetje lui bent en denkt dat het zinvol is om die curatiestap over te slaan, weet dan dat:

  • 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.

De beste podcastreeks schrijven

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. ✨

That means 48% of podcast hosts replied to us! 🤯

I’ll break down how to approach each email step.

E-mail 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.

E-mail 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.

Dit geeft de podcasthost een eenvoudige keuze: hij kan je e-mail doorsturen of je een snelle link naar het formulier sturen.

E-mail 3

In de derde e-mail kun je wat meer over jezelf vertellen om je geloofwaardigheid verder te vergroten. Stuur ze bijvoorbeeld een link naar je persoonlijke podcast of LinkedIn-profiel.

Podcasters trust fellow podcasters a little more 👀

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.

E-mail 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.

Hoewel het eenvoudig lijkt, werkt deze e-mail wel degelijk! We hebben meestal een antwoordpercentage van 5% op onze e-mails van mensen die het te druk hebben gehad om dieper te graven, maar die ons willen laten weten dat ze geïnteresseerd zijn en ons vragen om over een x aantal weken of maanden een vervolg te geven.

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.

Als je hier dieper op wilt ingaan, gaan we in twee gerelateerde artikelen dieper in op hoe je persoonlijke e-mails op grote schaal verstuurt en hoe je koude e-mails schrijft die beantwoord worden.

Waarop moet je je voorbereiden als ze beginnen te reageren

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 medeoprichter en CEO van Salesflare, een intelligente CRM gebouwd voor MKB-bedrijven die B2B verkopen, vooral populair bij bureaus en snelgroeiende 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 & sociale links

I normally send out the links to our website and Jeroen’s LinkedIn profile. If you have more, send them over too!

Hoofdfoto

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.

Achtergrondinformatie over de gast

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.

Bijvoorbeeld iets als:

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.

Lijst met algemene onderwerpen waarover gasten kunnen spreken

Sommige hosts vragen in het algemeen waar de gast over kan spreken. Hier geef ik een kleine lijst van algemene expertisegebieden waar Jeroen over kan spreken.

Jeroen kan over verschillende onderwerpen praten, van verkoopautomatisering en verkoop op afstand (in tijden van COVID-19 en daarna), over groeistrategie en marketing tot productmanagement.

Lijst met onderwerpideeën waaruit ze kunnen kiezen

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

Mediakit / one-pager

Soms vragen hosts gewoon om een mediakit of one-pager. In die gevallen stuur ik ze een Google Doc-link die alle bovenstaande info op één plek bevat.

Als je dit materiaal bij de hand hebt, zal je opvolging vlotter verlopen. Je kunt de antwoorden altijd een beetje aanpassen om ze nog beter af te stemmen op de podcast. We houden bijvoorbeeld een andere lijst met onderwerpen bij de hand naargelang de podcast gaat over verkoop, branding, klantendienst, SaaS, marketing, enz.

Hoe een geweldige gast te zijn

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:

Aan het begin:

Waarom ben je [bedrijfsnaam] begonnen?

Aan het einde:

Als mensen meer willen weten over jou of over [bedrijfsnaam], waar moeten ze dan naartoe?

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. 🤓

Hoe de follow-up beheren

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.

Dit helpt ons het overzicht te bewaren en is vooral handig voor Jeroen en mij als we samenwerken. We kunnen gemakkelijk bijhouden in welk stadium elke podcast zich bevindt, wie met wie contact heeft en welke actie er nog ondernomen moet worden.

Een geautomatiseerd CRM, zoals Salesflare, helpt je dit overzicht te houden zonder het extra werk.

We keep an overview in our podcast pipeline in Salesflare 👆

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.

Het maakt het ook supergemakkelijk voor mij en Jeroen om samen te werken.

To collaborate efficiently, we message each other and share all our emails through Salesflare 👀

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. 😃

We hopen dat je deze post leuk vond. Als je het leuk vond, vertel het dan verder!

👉 Je kunt @salesflare volgen op Twitter, Facebook en LinkedIn.

Keri Byrne
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