I did NOT see this coming - a surprising benefit of attending The Podcast Show 2026

Hello, fellow B2B podcaster. I want you to join me now and picture the scene from just a couple of days ago. I'm fresh from The Podcast Show in London. So let's play the weird magical harp music so we can transport in time just a few hours to being in the middle of the Business Design Center in Islington in London.

It's busy, it smells faintly of lanyards and ambition, and someone is heading towards me. They're on my six. Now, at a conference full of people who all do some version of what I do, this could well go a number of ways, and one of the ways it does go, fairly regularly if I'm honest, is someone walks up, we exchange kind of polite pleasantries. We both say, "Yeah, we should definitely have a proper catch-up sometime," and then we both immediately know that we absolutely won't.

This was not that. This person was technically speaking a competitor. They were, in theory, trying to win some of the same clients that I'm trying to win, and what they said was, " I've been listening to your podcast for a while, and I think we should work together." Not against each other, together.

I didn't pitch them. I didn't give them a business card. I just nodded and thought, "Yeah, that's my podcast doing its job," which as it turns out, is a very useful thing for a podcast to do. Let's talk about that Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neal Vealio, founder of Podnos, a podcast agency helping you get better results from podcasting.

Right, the podcast show. Now, for the uninitiated, it's essentially a very large gathering of people who all love podcasting, all gathered in one place to talk about podcasting to other people who also love podcasting. It is, in its own way, a perfectly pleasant echo chamber. And like all industry events, it has a certain rhythm to it.

You arrive, you pick up your lanyard, you look at the program on your app, and you mentally circle three talks that you'll definitely want to attend, and then you won't attend them because you ended up in a hallway in conversations that ran too long. You eat something slightly disappointing from a cardboard tray, and you find yourself repeatedly saying, "Yeah, we should probably catch up soon," to approximately eleven hundred people. It's the standard stuff. But here's what was different this time.

People came up to me who actually knew what I do. Not in that vague networking sense. As in, " Yes, I know you have a podcast agency." But even more than that, they'd actually listened.

They'd formed opinions about things I'd said on episodes. One person actually reenacted a cold open from a past episode, which is simultaneously flattering and slightly alarming. And the conversations that followed didn't start with, "So tell me a bit about yourself." They started somewhere else entirely, somewhere a bit further along the discovery journey of connecting with me as a creator.

It was kind of like arriving at a meeting where the first 20 minutes had already happened without you. And that is a profoundly useful feeling, and it's got nothing to do with how many downloads your show gets There's a distinction worth drawing here because I think it usually gets missed. Recognition is when someone's heard of you, and trust is when someone has already made up their mind about you, you know, before you've even opened your mouth. Recognition is nice.

You can't pay your mortgage with it, but it's nice. Trust, on the other hand, is the thing that changes how the conversation begins and therefore how it ends. And what was happening at the podcast show wasn't just recognition. It was trust preloaded, and I didn't build it by attending the conference.

I built it by consistently making something useful for the right people over time. Simple in principle, but surprisingly rare in practice Here's a question that I promise is far more interesting than it sounds. If your main competitor sat down and they listened to your entire podcast, i.e.

the back catalog, the whole lot, possibly while eating one of those cardboard trade sandwiches , settling in for the afternoon, how would they feel by the end of it? Threatened? Slightly impressed? Or even a bit rattled?

Or would they just feel fine? If the honest answer is fine, well, then that's useful data because a competitor who listens to your podcast and feels nothing is a competitor who has absolutely no reason to come and try and track you down at a conference and suggest that you work together. They'll just go and get their own sandwich, continue with what they were doing before, and not give you or your show another thought. And the reason most B2B podcasts land in that fine category isn't anything to do with the production quality.

It's nothing to do with your cadence, your frequency of release. It isn't even the topics you're covering particularly. It's that most B2B podcasts are built to be agreeable. Every statement features a safety net.

Every opinion gets balanced by its opposite. Every episode sounds just slightly like it's been approved by a committee whose primary concern was that nobody would be upset by it. You know, which is a perfectly reasonable way to run a committee. It's a somewhat less useful way to run a podcast Think about what my competitors heard when they started listening to this show.

They heard someone with a clear, specific, and consistently held view on what B2B podcasts are actually for, and also, slightly awkwardly, why most of them are probably missing the point. Now, they could decide that I was wrong. They could write a LinkedIn post completely trashing my views, or they could come and find me at the podcast show and say, "I think there's something in this actually, Valio. Let's see if we can do something together."

And two of them went with option three, and that's what a podcast with a genuine point of view does. Not to everyone. I mean, not every competitor is going to want to become a collaborator. Frankly, that would be exhausting.

But for the right people in the right circumstances, it can kind of change that dynamic. Right, okay, so let's get practical about this. What actually produces this kind of result? Because have a clear point of view is the sort of advice that sounds terrifically useful and then just evaporates into nonsense the moment you try and do something with it.

So here are three things in no particular order, except for the order that I've put them in. One, the it depends epidemic. Now, this is a particular verbal tick that runs through a huge number of B2B podcasts, and in fact, B2B marketing in general. It goes something like this.

Someone asks a pointed question or makes a bold statement, and the response is, " Well, it really depends on your individual situation." And look, sometimes things really do depend on that particular situation. I'm not arguing against nuance, but if every single episode you publish ends in, "You know what? It really depends," well, you've not given your listener anything to go by.

They can't do anything with your thinking. The podcasts that create gravity are the ones where the host has actually committed to an answer. Not the only possible answer, but their answer, the one they're prepared to defend even when a slightly annoyed person sends them an email. That consistency is what builds a reputation, and a reputation is what means someone crosses a conference floor to speak with you rather than the seven other people nearby who are doing pretty much the same thing.

Number two, give your listener something to say on Monday morning. This is probably the most useful reframe that I can offer any B2B podcast content creator. Don't ask yourself, "Is this interesting?" Ask yourself, "What's someone gonna do with this on Monday morning, or Tuesday if it's a bank holiday?"

Specifically, what I mean is, can they take something from your episode into an internal meeting and then reference it? Can they say, "Look, boss, I've been listening to this show, and the argument they're making about X is exactly what we've been getting wrong"? Can they use it to explain something to their team, or justify a decision to their CFO, or articulate a problem that they've been unable to deal with for the past six months? If the answer is yes, the podcast is pulling its weight.

If the answer is, "Well, it's an interesting listen Well, so is a documentary about deep sea creatures. It doesn't mean anyone's gonna reference dolphins during a procurement meeting Number three, sound like yourself consistently. The compounding effect of a podcast is entirely dependent on sounding like the same person, holding the same underlying views, making the same essential argument, just from different angles with different examples over time. If your show sounds noticeably different every few months, depending on what conference you've recently been to, or what business book you've just finished reading, or what podcast you've just finished listening to, then you're not building a body of work, you're just building a mood board.

And when someone listens to six months of a podcast and can predict broadly how you'd approach a problem they haven't heard you discuss yet, well, that's the moment you become a resource rather than just a show. And resources are the things people mention to colleagues, and they reference them in meetings. And you know what? They occasionally use them as the basis for walking across a conference room and asking if there's a way to work together Okay, this is Founder FAQs, where I answer questions from actual humans in the wild who got in touch about their podcasts.

This week's comes from Diane in North London, who runs a compliance training consultancy. Here's Diane's voice note. " Hi, Neal. Diane, lovely to hear from you.

Thanks so much, and yeah, you've touched on what I can only describe as that ring light question because it comes up constantly, and it always involves somewhere in the background, someone's Amazon basket with a ring light in it with no commitment to clicking the buy button. Here's what I'm gonna say about video podcasting. It's a real thing. Look, YouTube is the most used podcast platform according to some surveys in the US, so the discoverability is genuinely there.

And even in the latest Podnews report card, which specifically looks at which apps are doing what, for the first time, YouTube overtook Spotify in the top three podcast apps. So yeah, I'm not gonna tell you it's a fad or that you should ignore YouTube because that would be completely wrong and also slightly embarrassing given how quickly things are moving along. But here is the thing, adding a camera to your podcast does not change the results that your podcast is getting. It just means more people can see you while it does or doesn't do the thing you want it to do.

So if your podcast is currently a well-produced show that isn't generating any commercial results whatsoever, filming it is gonna give you a well-produced show that isn't generating commercial results whatsoever in widescreen. You'll be able to see it, but that's about the extent of it. So my honest answer to your question, Diane, is to figure out first what your podcast is meant to be doing for the business. Once you've got that sorted, then you can come back to base and ask whether video helps it to do that job better.

For some shows, yeah, it probably will do. For others, it's the kind of project that feels very productive while you're doing it, and then it sits on a YouTube channel that nobody quite got round to promoting. So sort out its job first, then whack the ring light over it Time for the quick tip for B2B founders, and this one requires approximately zero budget and about 30 seconds of thought, so it's a winner. When you follow up with a prospect after a call, instead of sending them a link to your podcast's homepage, send them a link to the one episode that speaks directly to the problem they just mentioned.

Not the show in general, one specific episode, the one that's basically about them and their problem. And for bonus points, stick the timestamp in there for where they need to fast-forward to so they can hear that problem being solved in real time. Because frankly, "Here's my podcast" is kind of the audio equivalent of handing someone a brochure. They're gonna smile, they're gonna say thanks, and then they're gonna put it in exactly the same folder as every other brochure they've been given since 2019.

" I thought you might find this particular episode useful given what you said in our call about X", to quote Gen Z, hit different. It says that you were listening, it says that your show has something specific to offer them and their specific situation, and it continues the sales conversation before the next one has even been scheduled with someone else This is the same podcast. It's the same episode. It's just a completely different impact, and it genuinely takes 30 seconds Okay, so the whole argument really of this episode is that the right podcast heard by the right people can change how your relationships start before you've even met them, not just with your prospects, but with your peers, collaborators, occasionally competitors who decide it's more interesting to be on your side than fight with you.

The content side of that is what we tend to talk about on this show, but the other half of that, i.e., getting the podcast in front of the right people in the first place, well, that's a different problem. And your existing followers, your email list, and your mum are probably, like, not quite the sufficient audience on their own.

So Podno's done-for-you marketing service is built to combat exactly this. We figure out where your ideal listeners are spending most of their time, and then we build the targeting assets and run a multi-channel campaign across different content partners, pay placements, pay-per-click, all that sort of stuff, and a few things that we have to keep to ourselves because it's protected IP. But the bottom line is we guarantee a minimum of 1,000 ideal listeners per month across your episodes, and we keep testing until that cost per acquisition is down to where it needs to be, and we share those results with you so that you feel like you're growing all the time.

It's £1,000 a month. It starts with an eligibility audit, so we're both sure that it makes sense before anyone signs anything. If that sounds useful to you, head to podknows.co.

uk/contact and select podcast coaching from the dropdown. Tell me a bit more about your show, and we'll take it from there Right.