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coming up on today's episode of the sales man podcast [Music] you know the big thing that i like to think about when we say you know these brands have have these marketing podcasts is a lot of people are looking at content marketers to not only be these amazing kind of creators and writers but also to be the expert about the thing that they're writing about which is just it's improbable that you're going to have someone to be an expert and an amazing writer an amazing marketer and b2b you know a lot of people say it's for brand awareness which um you know we can have an argument about what brand awareness means all day but but part of brand awareness is kind of staking your claim and expertise and if you're going to do that you got to go toe-to-toe with some of these other experts in the field and kind of dig in and learn from them and so it's a beautiful opportunity for that hello salvation my name is will barron and i'm the host of the salesman podcast the world's most downloaded b2b sales show on today's episode we have the legend that is zachary ballinger he is the cro over at casted which you invited casted dot casted.us and on today's show we're getting into podcasts and how they can be an incredible tool to get the attention of your potential customers everything that we talk about is available in the show note to this episode over at salesman.org and so with that said let's jump right into it so okay so in today's episode we're going to talk about clearly one of my favorite topics of all time podcasting we're going to look at how we can use podcast content to engage potential buyers especially and specifically in the b2b space and i think we're going to talk about marketing sales and and the combination of the two as well i feel like that's organically going to come up in this conversation but zachary get started mate i'm going to kind of tee you up here but if most marketing teams have a podcast and marketers love these podcasts loads of content gets it's thrown out every week from them that's great for marketers but why should sales people care about this well it's their job right right on top of that just you got to care um you know the big thing that i like to think about when we say you know these brands have have these marketing podcasts is a lot of people are looking at content marketers to not only be these amazing kind of creators and writers but also to be the expert about the thing that they're writing about which is just it's improbable that you're going to have someone to be an expert and an amazing writer an amazing marketer the thing that podcast brings to the table is it allows that content marketer to be more of a journalist again to ask those those digging questions and then bring on experts so as a sales person you're learning from experts in your field about the things that you're selling sometimes learning from your prospects about what's valuable to them um if that's i mean if you're a salesperson you don't care about that you're probably in the wrong field so are we making some assumptions here that our marketing podcast for our organization is having on people who are relevant to the the buyers that we're trying to get in front of is that that's a fair assumption right because i know some marketing some podcasts are just you know self-help or this or that and uh i i guess we're narrowing things down to the b2b space here aren't we absolutely absolutely and you know i think that that's a big um delineation between those those kind of self-help and all those other things and b2b you know a lot of people say it's for brand awareness which um you know we can have an argument about what brand awareness means all day but but part of brand awareness is kind of staking your claim and expertise and if you're going to do that you got to go toe-to-toe with some of these other experts in the field and kind of dig in and learn from them and so um it's a beautiful opportunity for that and what happened zachary if our marketing team turns around and says that the podcast is just for brand awareness it's not for cutting up into chunks and using for content for sales people or for sales people to learn or from what what can we assume if a marketer turns around and says this this content is podcast is just for brand awareness i mean there's no better awareness than driving leads right so you know at the end of the day even if it is for brand awareness uh you're going to gain some type of following some type of list to call upon um and inevitably you're gonna drive people into the business so you know when i look at brand awareness i mean it's just legion just like everything else right and and so for for me brand awareness if you want to call it that great as a sales person i'm still gonna be paying attention to who's coming in because they're they're listening to our expertise sure that that's a very politically correct way of saying that i would say personally my opinion on this uh right or wrongly if you are if someone comes to you with that kind of result in 2020 the age that we're living in they probably don't know what they're doing and they're just doing fluffy marketing as opposed to stuff that actually matters right there i don't think that anyone's ever called me politically correct so i'm glad this is reported okay well we'll we'll cut that out to send that to your team and uh we'll do a side podcast on that right okay zachary so the the podcast content that most brands are creating it's useful sales people we've covered that topic how can sales people then leverage this um this content how can we use it to generate leads other than what perhaps marketing is doing on its own right of you know perhaps as an ad within the podcast itself telling people to claim a white paper or do this or do that there's a call to action can sales people um otherwise use this content to get attention and you know whether it's social selling or sending snippets of the content to potential buyers where they might find it interesting what can we do to leverage this podcast content other than again what the marketers are doing which is generally just pushing it out to the masses absolutely and and you know we i look at this as another piece of content in your arsenal right so um it's not podcasting alone it's podcasting it's more of a holistic approach to to marketing so you know one thing is it just helps you be interesting and cold outreach it gives you more um of an expertise of more of a hill to uh you know i guess a soapbox on social media to to come in here and not just talk about what you know but show that someone else thinks the way that you think so um you know the way that we internally use it is just like you said we send snippets of podcasts to prospects when we think that it appeals to them we've had the luxury of being able to record um references by some of our top customers though they'll just have a conversation about us um and that obviously helps a lot in sales cycles when someone wants a reference and and we say hey listen to this first if you still need a reference after this we'll coordinate one with you um so that's that's fantastic from our perspective because i i think you're touching on it here i've got this inadvertently i didn't realize any of this was going to happen but i get a lot of rub off the guests that i've had on on the show whether it's someone like yourself uh zachary you know an expert in in this podcasting a b2b space or we've had you know olympic athletes on the show we've had an astronaut a nasa ants a nasa astronaut on the show as well and i don't know if there's a cognitive bias there's some kind of human wiring that when two people are having a good time and associated together that one person rubs off on the other and that brand equity of that individual passes on but i think that's massive for b2b sales people because typically you're reaching out the prospect they're either in pain and they're going to listen or they're not in pain and they don't really care right now at the moment but you're seen rightly wrongly as a another pesky salesperson until you get the conversation flowing in until you get through that phase of of objections whether you're cold emailing call calling whatever it is but to be able to send a piece of content where hopefully it's somebody that your prospect really looks up to is chatting with someone from your organization that immediately i feel has a massive positive or potentially massive positive impact on you know the brand that you're representing and you then get the rub of sharing that with with the people that you're reaching out to so is there any other kind of like second or third layer benefits to doing this as that kind of like that brand rub that we can look forward to if we are kind of using uh podcasts within our sales prospecting efforts absolutely so before i even dive into that that was the nicest way to say that i'm your not your most interesting guest of all time i did not say that ceos you're here as well so that's you know that's nice um yeah i mean the ripple effect of podcasts i think that a lot of people just output a show and then they move on they go to the next episode in the next episode but um really it's an evergreen it's a beautiful type of evergreen where um you know not only are you promoting it you're having your guests promote as well the ability to track that now that's that's also incredibly interesting seeing okay how much of this traffic is from me and my audience and how much is it from their audience right and um you know if we look at someone like david cancel the ceo of drift uh if i record a podcast with david they're not coming for me um but that's that's the beauty of podcasts is like if you wrote a byline and a blog post i don't know that we're gonna see as much engagement and and desire to hear more from us but if we haven't a podcast and he's talking about us that's you know two three layers deep they're gonna be talking about dave cancel and what he said to us that's great for us so let's let's make this practical unreal then for the audience so say you have uh david on on the show um you know drift i think actually drift is sponsoring this very episode right now so that's uh timely and and uh lucky from obviously this is one of our best customers so we used a great example perfect so we love drift over at salesman.org so let's let's use david uh as an example perhaps he's come on your podcast how would you then leverage that to give the sales specifically because that's what we're really interested in this show perhaps touch on what you give the marketing team as well and how they would leverage that to generate new leads yeah that's a that's david's a really timely example right we've had dave gerhart the other david from from drift uh formerly on the show as well you know on one thing it gives marketing team a bunch of of just ammunition to go to go to work with and and they're generating great content but from the sales side you know social proof is such a hard thing without either just blatantly dropping like we work with drift and just you know hammering that home but having the ability to say not only do we work with drift they were willing to have a conversation with us about how we work together and our podcast isn't necessarily about like our product all the time it's more about the industry of b2b uh podcasting but you know dave cancel where to come on our show and he's cordially invited i'm sure lindsay our ceo would love to have him um to talk about how drift prioritizes their their b2b podcasts well that is ammunition right because drift one of these organizations that people kind of aspire to right they're on a rocket ship and everything they do is gold right now uh has been gold for a while and to hear that part of that gold for them is you know a bb podcast if if my sales team doesn't go to work in in outbound emails if they're not talking to prospects who are in the sales cycle now about how drift this this company that we get to hold up on a pitard you know we i i think that that's that's a big miss like sales people should definitely be talking about social proof this person came to us essentially right we're not going out and just dropping a case study or a use case we had a conversation and that's engaging and you can listen to it and learn some things um my sales team better be using that i know that they are but i hope they're gonna hear this and they take this as a threat as well they better continue using this stuff well we can re-leverage this to motivate the team as well as another another use for the podcast what does it look like um very practically i don't you don't need to give us word for word what would it look like in an email but how would you pitch that content in the sales context of would it be a video embedded within an email would it be a kind of a post on on linkedin would it be commenting on other people's posts on linkedin how would you get that or what is the content you would share is it a clip is it the whole thing does it the whole thing that's time stamped what is it and how would you get that in front of the right people yeah so um we take a few a few prongs to our approach one is um i look at at our linkedin presence for as as sales not not just my team or myself but sales linkedin presence your brand right no one no one gives a what cassette is posting on on linkedin it's what the cast of people are posting on linkedin and so we leverage that as um you know marketing our sales team is doing marketing essentially so what are they sending out um to apply to their version of the masses then when we get into our outbound it's more specific and and it's more about okay i've done a little bit of research i know some of the struggles that you're dealing with i know your tech stack first of all um listen to this very similar prospect and what they had to say uh about us or about the industry and how to solve some of these problems so we we do a little bit of both kind of one-to-one um which is a it's a slog i mean it's tough to get really personalized one-to-one uh communications but um we really continue to encourage that um and then linkedin is more um you know the version of masses for a sales person what maybe that's ten accounts maybe maybe not like the marketing masses right a little bit more specific targeted but um it's both commenting on on linkedin posts is is a is a fascinating discussion to be had i think that it can be sleazy um but i also think that it can be well done when you're engaging in the the conversation in a way that's appropriate and not selling uh and if you linked and message someone they better be really good they better be really good because those are the those are the things that really i think can lose people quickly for sure and what i like about this approach then is that if you do a new podcast each week maybe you're not going to email the same person or send them a linkedin message each week but i i how can i say this i guess i'm almost turned into a marketer right here and so the audience are like being slightly sick in their mouths as they're hearing this because they want to know how to get deals done and get attention as opposed to the the larger brand things that we can talk about here but if we just go into marketing for a second because i want to talk about how uh how we our sales people can approach their marketing team and get them to do some of this work for us we'll wrap up the show with that uh zachary but if we go into the marketing front i feel like there's probably a numerous say three or four tracks of customers so i sell to crm organizations sales enablement organizations companies that want to be in front of a affluent audience i sell they're probably the main three tracks i sell to when i'm selling ad space on the salesman broadcast now i could do if i wanted to be strategic about this which i'm clearly not at all i could have someone on the show to talk about crm i'd have someone on the show to talk about sales enablement i could have someone else to talk about success skills or the lifestyle side of things and if i did that every other week i mean at least once a month i would have a very specific piece of content that is valuable to one specific line of my potential buyers that could go out to them and that's probably a reasonable cadence then of every three or four weeks hey we did this podcast this is probably uh valuable to you and so what i'm getting at here is how strategic do we need to be with all of this because it seems like if we did what i just described off the top of my head i'm sure we could do make a better plan if we tried one podcast a week is enough content to prospect for a large team forever ongoing yeah um you know we actually recommend not doing once a week we actually recommend every other week um we had a few customers do some tests and just like letting that cadence kind of draw out and like let it let people hear it let people listen before something else is on the table it's just a side note um in terms of strategy you know i look at a few different ways you could do that um the two ways i look at strategy one is it it has to be an engaging conversation it doesn't matter who you have on and and who you're bringing on if it's not a good conversation if it feels salesy if it feels like you're pushing too hard in one direction then you're gonna run into the same problem that you have with with you know some other content like blogs are boring right blogs are there for seo blogs are there for education and but if you have a shorter attention span like there's no entertainment value in there and that's the beauty of podcast you get a little bit of both um the other way that i see it is i like the strategy and this isn't correct right this is just my opinion on it um i think you could do a thousand different strategies i like the strategy of like lean into um you know what where you're going i used to work at a company um that did uh really focus on on e-commerce really focused on um you know one-on-one personalization and the founder was this uh crazy person in a good way like he he was like five years ahead of the market he was brilliant and he used to run up and down the halls cursing up a storm with these brilliant ideas and we always used to say if we just get him to say this in front of a prospect we're gonna win more deals so we would bring him if the founder just into every deal that we could but it was just one guy he wasn't scalable in a podcast you can scale that expertise though so you're getting these brilliant ideas this thought leadership and you're getting it in front of way more people than you could if i just brought him into a meeting uh back when travel was still a thing uh it hasn't been for the better part of the year but you know you can get him on on a podcast and he's talking about the future of e-commerce and the future of of this marketplace and i can start to send this to all of my deals i have to worry about strategically bringing him in to this deal or that deal and then you have access to people beyond him as well which is great i mean he was he was brilliant and he was an expert but there are other experts that i could have access to and so when i look at strategy i think lean into your expertise lean into your industry um don't worry so much about um you know am i checking this box with this box or this box bring in people let them go free to have their brilliant ideas you're gonna get gold from it and and you're going to find a way to leverage that if you're a crafting sales person and you're going to leverage the hell out of it you're going to build great templates you're going to build great cadences around that um and i think that you're going to find that that type of prospecting you mix that with a great blog post you mix that with a white paper that's impactful or a case study and you're going to find that people are engaged because you're you're different you're doing something different than the normal here's an email that's not necessarily personalized i'm going to reach out to you on linkedin and pretend i'm not selling to you like those those pieces if you mix it up a little bit engagement's going to go through the roof and you just touched on something really important though that i've never considered before and this is really valuable anyone can send some spammy email and we we did it years ago now we did a big piece with hubspot and i shared a bunch of templates that i've used to sell ad space on the podcast i have since received those templated emails bounced back at me the hubspot blog post did really well and so people have used my own template that's now five years out of date back on me because you can just copy it but you can't copy or you're gonna like an idiot if you take the ceo of your competitor and you insert their content in your emails so immediately you differentiate it i mean i know i've never considered that before but if you can get someone especially if it's someone internal with an external experts you've got a social proof as well that's a seems like a really powerful combination that a competitor can't just come along and rip off exactly and did you respond to your email templates i would i would just be like hello this is great i think i think the first time i got it i've had it for you a few times now the first time i got it through i emailed the person back and then get a response because i wanted to then i was basically asking information if i could use this as a linkedin post to screenshot it and compare it against the original blog um but i didn't get a response so that was that was as far as we got with that one uh zachary okay so let me let's wrap up the conversation with this because i feel like we're talking in best case scenario here of we have a great ceo they are doing a podcast and they're engaging with people we can cut it up and we've got the you know both permission and and the ability to do that or our marketing team is doing it for us and feeding some of this you know sales content down to us down down the funnel perhaps to using a platform like casted to test whether things are effective or not effective and we will get into all that in a second but what do we do if we've got a crappy brand podcast that's going on in the background and it's not really applicable for anything that we're discussing here what do we need to do say or you're gonna like fight with our marketing team over to to get them on board with some of this other than say listen to this uh this show with zachary that's a so you know the worst case scenario is something we deal with a lot like we have a lot of customers that come on before their customers and it's okay we gotta we gotta redo the strategy right so uh one thing is you know sales marketing is sales so so first of all we need to make sure that the marketing is uh aligned to the end goal of revenue and we also need to make sure that sales is aligned to the long tail of marketing like it's not all going to be immediate results your responsibility as a sales person if your marketing team is doing something that you think is is maybe not as effective um a don't just say it sucks you got to bring some proof you got to bring some suggestions you've got to be constructive uh and you also have to be clear with what you need uh if if it's a if it's a brand play um you know if that's the claim then you know tell them that the best way to get a brand play is to bring on experts in the field and and discuss strategies um to be provocative right i think you sent me some some free questions uh to our podcast a little behind the scenes look here and your questions were relatively provocative right it's like okay that was going to prompt a conversation and whether the fight is real or not it doesn't really matter like the conversation is what matters so you know if i'm at a place like a marxist which congratulations to them they just got uh acquired and then and that's where i came from but if i'm there you could have a brand podcast and just talk about email marketing as a standalone tactic right or you can do what marxist did and have this podcast where you're bringing on experts in the e-commerce uh area where you're talking about their um email marketing strategy and how it impacts their bottom line and now suddenly you're having on not just prospects not just customers but you're experts in in the field and i remember one specifically chelsea muller who's um a cmo in in the us she came onto the podcast and and she's this e-commerce expert and she came onto the podcast and just schooled us on their strategy and immediately sales people were like how do i i i need to get this out to people who look up to her i need to get this out to to my people so you know be clear you need experts if it's if it's just a brand play well what's the what do you mean like clarify what you mean brand play because for me as a sales person a great brand play is something that gives me authority in the business marketplace in the marketplace that makes total sense it's funny i'll go even further behind the scenes here that email sent so for the audience listening salesnation i will send a the topic overall topic view and then a few starting points just so the conversation is somewhat lubricated at the beginning of it and then we see where we go from there i i put in brackets and then deleted it afterwards i was just like p.s i'm not trying to be an ass with this i'm just trying to play devil's advocate slightly with these questions and go back and forth and i was like if i but if i put that it sounds like i'm being an ass so yeah so i deleted it just sent it but it's funny that you picked up on the uh the fact that they were relatively you know provocative when you probably i i just i don't like the thoughts of a guest who's you doing you're doing other us a favor by coming on the show and sharing your expertise here i hate the thought that the the sat there going out bloody hell it's gonna be a battle this you know and sometimes it just end up a battle which is good but you can engage it and you know if the other person's having a good time you can go back and forth and that's good but yeah just for the the is it the removing the the fourth wall or the third curtain or whatever it is for the audience okay absolutely so zachary how can final question on this and this'll i guess let's come back to casted uh you know the the company uh you're rapping here right how do we measure this how do we know if this is a success other than getting replies to emails with clips from podcasts in versus replies to emails with no podcasting we can sort that out ourselves how do we go about measuring this at a higher level and to see if if our b2b podcast endeavors are successful in the market so i'll speak anecdotally and then we'll go a little more statistically right so one thing that we have is is um for us and and a little bit for our company just you know showing off some of our features set we we actually can see um who's listening to our podcast in real time so um a few weeks ago we we released this feature and we saw three or four people come in um through our slack channel which was fun like it gives a slack notification so and so is listening very much like a drift notification on slack it's like oh someone's trying to talk to us um and they were all prospects and within the next week we had four contracts out to those individuals so for us like anecdotally we were like wow this was the perfect first week where we're seeing who's coming in um they're all at companies that we're trying to sell to and then we got contracts out and we signed them all so we were like immediately like over the moon and then our thought was well how many times has this happened that we didn't know this and the answer was probably a lot um statistically how you look at this and and via metric um leads generated by podcasts is something we should be looking at we look at it for blog posts we look at you know we measure drift by you know conversation qualified leads right and uh their cql model and so this is a similar thing these are podcast qualified leads if you want to add another stupid pql mqlsql to the to the whole thing these are people who are coming in and you know their engagement level is is up for argument i don't know that we have a lot of data on you know is a podcast listener more engaged or less engaged in a blog post reader i don't know but you can be sure that a podcast listener is informed like that's why i'm having an expert on is is so great like things can get lost in text things can get lost in a case study they're only seeing the metrics that you're providing them maybe they don't have enough context when you're listening to a podcast whether it's 25 30 hopefully not an hour but a long podcast like you're getting informed you're getting educated through the process so even if you're at the tippy top of the funnel okay you're getting a little bit more educated if you're at the bottom of the funnel this could be the thing that just knocks you through that you're like okay i heard the thing that i needed to hear and this is going to really impact me so i'm going to go and show that i'm ready to buy um so you know there's a lot of ways to measure it right now my big focus and our big focus holly tells our director of marketing does a great job of kind of measuring backwards is what kind of leads are influenced through this um and then we kind of take that all the way back to revenue sure and i i i don't have data on this so i can't prove it but i i know personally i've not read a blog post properly in probably like a decade skim them go back and it might be a resource that you'd go back to multiple times whereas a podcast are probably not going to listen more than once but there's more friction to putting the headphones on going walk going for a walk or you know with a dog or whatever it is or getting you know going to the gym and listening to something there's more friction to download the physical podcast and to tune in if i'm at my computer again put the headphones on and i've got to block everything else out and just watch or if it's a video podcast or or the audio so i would against assumption to update on this i would assume that the uh you know the engagement the the amount of attention that you're getting from that must be significantly higher than just a generic a blog post and so you know i'm really uh i i don't know about yourself zachary but five years ago when i started selling podcast i had to explain to people what a podcast was now it's so big ubiquitous that i know i'll have to do that and people are excited to learn what the podcast is about people tune in when they've got nothing to do with sales they want to you know i said we've had all kinds of crazy people on the show and they want to just tune into that kind of stuff so i would say again anecdotally the engagement you can get from two experts especially a salesperson sending a link to this two experts one internal one external is gonna be far higher than some intern writing blog posts and spamming them out with keyword stuffing to try and uh to try and get some backlinks to it to our website sure sure and i i 100 agree i'm not actually sure that i can read anymore i have adhd i don't even know if i am capable so uh yeah it's been a long time since i've read a blog folks i think i've written more than i've read in the last year yeah well so i write all the time but i write a script for a video an audio show if you've just pasted what i put onto a page or in a book it just you know really could be boring it's that extra layer of i'm not saying i'm incredibly charismatic or anything uh far far from that but the ability to just have that conversation and to share it and to be able to ask questions you know if i ask you something you're not sure in a blog post it just gets flown through and people click off it and but in a conversation it's very difficult to continue the conversation without things being somewhat clear or you know relatively clear as well so without me i clearly i'm totally biased on this so i take back up and i just said it's totally biased and maybe i'm not the right source for for this but i just want to emphasize the point that podcasts video content as well it's incredibly powerful all of our prospecting all of our marketing for both the training program that we have and the the ad space that we sell all comes from people watching the show and joining it and tuning in so with that again massively biased uh kind of interpretation of what you led on to their zachary let's wrap up the show mate i've got a couple questions to ask everyone that comes on the most important one is if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self what would be one piece of advice you'd help that you give him to help him become better at selling oh that's that's uh that's compelling uh shut up you know that would be what i would i would tell myself uh is is shut up i i get the luxury of making the transition from a solutions consultant to a sales rep um which is a was an interesting transition i've kind of gone back and forth my whole career i'm i'm more partial partial to being a soulcon that i am a sales rep but um i saw great success because i was actually an expert in the product um but being an expert in the product does not make you an expert in what your prospect wants and what um their problems are and i i know at least three or four deals large deals that i lost because i didn't actually dig into their their problem i just told them what the solution was and that's just just shut up perfect i love it and with that zachary tell us more about casted and where we can find out more about you as well sir absolutely so cassid is the the first and only b2b podcasting platform right now so we are built for marketers to get more out of their podcast and to measure it by more than just downloads um you can find out more about us at casa.us hit our driftbot up sometimes i'll pop on and and have a chat with you as well um we were found about two years ago and uh just a really fun team and a really fun time to learn more about me probably uh just on the cathode website linkedin i kind of stay off the social media uh as to not uh be too um bombastic and offend everyone so i i kind of stay away and keep those um those opinions to uh my wife and then she tells me to shut up so fair enough that's one way of doing it you might be missing out on like your old ceo of your previous company a ton of of traffic and attention with your i'm going to make up a word here bombasticness um story for another time right so with that um i appreciate this mate as i said i'm massively biased i'm over over emphasized podcasting anytime i can for marketing and sales i think it's an incredible way to get a message across and so with that may want to thank you for your time your your energy on this and for joining us on the salesman podcast absolutely thank you so much well this was uh this is a great time