Your Sales Team Have Never Heard Your Podcast (And It's Costing You)

Hello. Thanks so much for booking in for a call. So shall I explain a little bit more about what we can do for you? Hi, Neal here, founder of Podknows Podcasting.

What just happened there sounds like total fantasy, doesn't it? But what if I told you there are hundreds of businesses having conversations with prospects just like that across the UK and the United States? And what if I told you they've learned how to leverage their podcasts so they can spend less time chatting with tire kicking disinterested D-tier prospects and spend more time celebrating wins over a glass of something fizzy with A-tier clients and enjoying many more hours to Netflix and chill.

Would you be interested in learning more about that? Thought so. That's what this episode's about. Let's get into it.

Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neal Veglio, founder of Podknows Podcasting. We're a podcast agency helping people and brands like you to get more from your podcast. Right, let me do my finest Columbo impression because we're about to establish a crime scene. That's absolutely what this is.

Somewhere in your business right now, there are two things that should know about each other but don't. They're being kept apart. Your podcast, which has spent the last several months patiently, sometimes brilliantly, answering every possible question your ideal client could have, and your sales team are currently on calls answering those exact same questions from scratch for probably the 474th time this week alone, and they're slowly losing the will to live. They've been in each other's proximity for months, and yet nobody has put their hand up and raise the point saying, "This is what we made and this is when to use it."

And this bit here in particular answers the objections that you're facing on an almost daily basis. This bit here will literally save you around about half an hour having to explain from scratch once again with a brand new prospect. Your podcast is basically the most knowledgeable colleague within your company who's been sitting in their desk for 18 months straight and nobody has once walked over to them and said, "Hello." And this colleague has answered every single question that any of your ideal customers could ever have, and probably does it better than any of your sales team members, to be honest.

The podcast has never asked for a pay rise never moans when you tell it to turn up on time for work, never takes Fridays off, and has never once shown up with a hangover hoping you won't notice. And it doesn't reply all on emails that don't even need a reply. Despite all this, your sales team is still out there explaining everything manually again and again and again because nobody told them that this colleague exists. So that's the crime.

Let's figure out how this happened. Oh, but first, just one more thing. No, that's all I've got, and this is why I'm a podcast consultant and not a professional Columbo impersonator. Here's how this happened, and let's get real about this.

It's everybody's fault, and it is absolutely your fault in roughly that order. The podcast got handed to marketing. Marketing, quite sensibly, treated it like a marketing asset and optimized it according to their expertise. They looked at the downloads, the follower numbers, the listens.

They studied the graphs. Probably stuck all the data into Power BI marveled over how things looked really pretty and did the whole glass half full thing, noticing patterns that looked vaguely encouraging if you squint at them at the right angle after a glass of wine. Lovely. Sales, meanwhile, was doing what sales always does, focusing entirely on closing the deals directly in front of them.

You know, fielding those objections, sending the follow-up emails that try not to appear desperate and begging, but basically say, "Hey, just circling back. Wanted to bring this to the top of your inbox," in about 17 different ways. They've sat through call after call after call where the prospector said, "Oh, just send something over and I'll have my team look at it." Which is prospectese for, "I've already decided no, I find confrontation massively stressful, and I'd very much like you to bugger off."

Nobody had the meeting. You know the one. The one where someone says, " Here is episode 12. Here is how episode 12 is useful.

Here's exactly when to deploy episode 12 during a sales conversation. And here is how you, as a busy rep, can stop explaining for a living and actually start confirming and converting instead." That meeting, probably the most important meeting you could ever have in a business that has a podcasting asset at almost every company I've ever audited the podcast for has never happened. Not once.

Let me be clear about this. No company with a podcast that I have done an audit for has ever had that meeting. Because the podcast has been filed under content, and content lives within the marketing department. Marketing sends it out to the world.

That's it. That's their job. Sales has its very own dashboard, its own needs, its own wants, its own KPIs, and never the twain shall meet apparently. Even when the podcast has been slowly doing the sales team's job on the sly for months and it's had not a single word of thanks.

Here's what it actually sounds like when somebody gets on top of this and sorts it out, has that conversation, holds those meetings, puts this plan in place. And I want you to really pay attention right now 'cause this is important. Your rep gets on a call. Instead of launching into the full explanation of how you guys work, you know, the one that takes about 15 minutes, carries three repetitive analogies that they become almost famous for, and then ultimately handling the objection that the prospect was always definitely going to raise because the pitch doesn't land.

So they spend the first five minutes of the call going, " Hang on. Is any of this stuff useful to us?" Instead of that, the prospect already arrives half sold. The 15-minute story about how you work, the analogies, the explanation, the diagrams, the bit where you describe the client's actual situation and tell them how you're going to solve it, all that stuff is already done.

The podcast did it. It's already contained within the MP3. And that was already before the call even started, your podcast did it all for free. Meanwhile, your rep was still sat there nursing their hangover that they're hoping you didn't notice from the night before.

That transformation from convincing to confirming to converting, that is worth considerably more to your pipeline than episode 41 might be that you're planning this week in which the CEO that hosts the podcast plans on indulging in a topic they find personally fascinating but does nothing particularly useful for the business. Certainly doesn't push the needle in sales, however good 41 turns out to be, and I'm sure it's gonna be excellent in their head, truly. So here's your action plan for the coming week, and you're gonna feel mildly annoyed at how straightforward this is, and you're gonna curse yourself for not thinking about it before.

Go through the episodes in your dashboard. Copy the titles to a spreadsheet. In that spreadsheet, right next to each episode title, a deployment note. Not a description of what the episode is about, but notes on how it helps overcome objections.

How it'll get a founder, prospect, whoever it is, over the line. Something like, " Send this episode to any prospects who've gone a little bit quiet after we've sent them a proposal." Also add a note to, like, play the clip at minute three where we specifically address the problem that they claimed they had during our discovery call. Remind them of the solution that we possess.

And for future prospects, those you haven't even spoken to yet, get a strategy going. Add a note to the episodes saying things like, "Share this before any call involving a procurement team," because procurement teams are very nice people who will absolutely need pre-educating. And if we don't do a good enough job of that, this is absolutely gonna take considerably longer than anyone has budgeted for. Just one document that contains all this info and then send that to your teams, both of them.

Sales need to know what marketing are doing. Marketing need to know what sales are up to. And that's it. That's my whole intervention.

This'll take maybe 10 minutes of your time, or appoint a VA to do it for you. And before you think to yourself, "Surely it can't be that simple," it really can be. The fact that pretty much nobody has ever done it is genuinely the main reason I still have a job, so you're welcome Each episode I'd like to do a founder FAQ, except this week it's not a question, it's just an observation. A voice note from a man named Fred Copestake, who runs a company named Brindis, which is a sales training and consultancy business that is very good.

I say that with complete objectivity, and not at all because Fred said some tremendously nice and kind things about this podcast in the voice note that he clearly thought might end up getting played on air. Fred's a sales professional. Fred has clearly listened to more than one episode of this show and identified a strategic opportunity accordingly, and I respect that enormously. Well played, Fred.

I love the fact that Fred also makes reference to the word that I used in the episode he's referencing, gauche. Anyway, here's Fred's message. Hi, Neal. Perhaps I'm in danger of sounding a little gauche.

Actually, I don't care. I think it's quite cool to be gauche. But, uh, what you were saying in your podcast this week about marketing not wanting to be seen to be salesy, yeah, 100% agreed. But I think it's because they don't understand what sales is.

A lot of marketeers will have been trained, that have gone to university, that have gone through kind of 9K a year's worth of, uh, education on a business studies course and not been told about it. Just literally not been told. Yeah. It's like it doesn't exist.

They don't want to admit that there is a whole bunch of people out there who go out and talk to people about, like, whether they might wanna buy something. There's another issue as well you didn't touch on, which is that companies are self-obsessed. They're so interested in what they do, their products, their services, that they just go on and on and on about it. They'll train salespeople, or any staff that they have to, about their products and services a-and offerings and, and never about the problems that customers have.

So they're just... They don't even realise that that's actually what people care about and what they will want to, to listen to. So the most successful people I see are the ones that absolutely get this. They'll talk to customers about their problems, uh, issues, concerns, challenges, triggers.

What-whatever it is you wanna call it. And get really high quality conversations with people who are skilled in having the conversations to do that. And absolutely I see how your podcast strategy would support that big time. Right.

A few things. The university point, completely correct, and it explains an enormous amount about how sales and marketing is done in this day and age. An entire generation of marketers graduated from business degrees that treated sales like a slightly embarrassing must, like a relative who works in insurance. We all need them.

We don't necessarily want them. Yeah, we all know they exist. Yeah, they pay for things. We don't exactly want them to Christmas dinner.

The result is marketing professionals who are structurally, genuinely unequipped to connect what they make to the sales motion it's supposed to serve. They didn't really fail. The syllabus failed them, which is a very little comfort when your podcast is full of useful content that nobody in sales has ever thought to deploy. But at least now you know who to blame.

The self-obsession point, well, I want this framed on a wall in every founder's office, ideally at eye level, so they've got to look at it while they're on calls. Companies are trained from the inside out to talk about themselves, the products, the services, their credentials, the founder origin story, the garage, the vision, the inspiring story involving a lot of instant noodles and an extremely patient partner. Meanwhile, the customer's sitting there thinking, "I don't really give a shit about your garage.

I care about the thing that's gonna get me in a room with no windows if I get this wrong. Talk to me about that" The shows that work are built entirely around that feeling, not the product, the problem that product solves. So yeah, Fred, thanks. Brilliant addition.

Come back anytime. Maybe bring wine. It feels thematically appropriate given your company name. I'll provide the glasses.

If you wanna send me a voice note, a question, a mild grievance, or something you think that I've missed in one of these episodes, and some of you will be chomping at the bit to point out things that I haven't mentioned. I do occasionally get things wrong. I know, surprises me, too. Well, you can do all of that at podknows.

co.uk/feedback. That's P-O-D-K-N-O-W-S.co.

uk/feedback. Try and keep them as close to under 60 seconds, please. No need to sound polished, and gauche is now officially a de facto word that must be used, and that's Fred's fault entirely. All right, this episode's quick tip.

Most podcasters, myself included, ask for a follow at the very end of the episode, which is kind of a bit like a restaurant asking you to leave a review on your way out the door while you're already in your coat, keys in hand, thinking about whether you're parked on a single or double yellow. You'll say yes. You won't do it. Everybody moves on.

The moment to actually ask is probably right after the most valuable thing you've mentioned in the episode, not after the call to action, not after the thanks for listening. Right after the bit where the listener finds themself thinking, "Oh my God, that's exactly my situation," because that's when goodwill is at its absolute peak, and their phone might well still be in their hand. Find the single most useful moment in your next episode. Ask immediately after it, before they've moved on to your next point, before they've mentally checked out and started thinking about paying for their parking.

The difference is noticeable, especially when you are measuring your results. Try it once, and you'll never put that follow ask right at the end of your episode over the outro music again. I say that, but I'll still do that. Cobbler's shoes and all that.

Right. If you've reached the end of this episode with your sales team document already taking shape in your head, excellent. Go and make it now, genuinely. Do it before you listen to something else and forget.

But if you've still got a slightly uncomfortable feeling underneath all this, and part of you is wondering whether your podcast is actually saying and doing the right things to be worth deploying to prospects in the first place Well, that's exactly what my diagnostic session is for. We look at your show together. We work out whether it's doing the job it should be doing or whether it's just orbiting your business, trying to look busy and achieving the square root of all. And achieving the square root of not very much.

This is a PG-13 show. You'll leave the session with a straight answer, document that takes about three weeks to arrive and requires a second meeting to decode. You'll get a straight answer in just one session. So you can walk into the following Monday knowing exactly what you're actually doing with this podcasting thing.

Book your diagnostic session now at podknows.co.uk/diagnostic. And the link is in the episode description.

Until next time, go on and introduce your podcast to your sales team, will you? They've been in the same building for two years now and it's starting to get slightly awks.