Introduction
Securing top-tier podcast guests? It’s no cakewalk!
Juggling schedules, dealing with last-minute cancellations—sound familiar? It’s a common struggle that often flies under the radar.
In this episode of “Content Universe,” host Mig Lisvot tackles the nitty-gritty of guest management.
Get ready for practical gems drawn from Mig’s rich experience at a top content marketing agency.
Learn how to:
– Set up a consistent guest schedule
– Build a killer Guest Relationship Management (GRM) system
Whether you’re in engineering or science, these insights will help you streamline your guest management and power up your production process!
Get in on the secrets to building a robust guest pipeline and maintaining an editorial calendar that’s months ahead.
Don’t miss out—tune in and supercharge your podcast game!
What You’ll Learn
1. Discover why being 3 months ahead is crucial.
2. Learn to turn CRM principles into GRM strategies.
3. How to handle logistics of guest scheduling seamlessly.
4. Tips for managing multiple podcast guests effectively.
5. Ensure content flow with proactive guest management.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to the Content Universe! Today we’re going to talk about something that I actually find the hardest part of having a podcast. And it doesn’t really matter whether your podcast is a weekly, weekly show, a bi-weekly show, maybe it’s only like once a month. It could probably even be something that’s less than that, although then the whole idea of having a podcast sometimes disappears a bit if you have less than an interview per month. Now, what I’m talking about is Interview Based Podcast and on the contrary you can search a lot about how to make a podcast. You’ll find tons and tons of blog posts, videos, all kinds of stuff that talks about the technicalities, what microphones you need, whether you should use the Zoom H6 or whether you should use a Rode Procaster or whatever. All of these technical aspects, how you should distribute, all of this. There’s a lot of content on the Internet about this, but something that we’ve really struggled that I find the hardest bit of having a frequent podcast, or a podcast with a regularity into the frequent’s, or the publishing’s, so that by that I mean to kinda keep the rhythm of coming out. The hardest bit, to me, is to get people to participate, to get the guest. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Now, my name is Mig Lisvot, and I have the content marketing agency where we create content for high knowledge companies. We can of course, help you if you’re in such a company. What we actually do is, we do the podcasts, we make the podcasts for our clients. We write blog posts, we write social media stuff. We do video, all of this kind of content-y kind of things. We do that for high knowledge companies, so engineers. It could be technical companies, science-based stuff, all that kind of stuff. What we struggle with, always, and what we’re trying to solve, and what I’ll present to you today, is a way of managing the guests that you want to participate in each episode. This may sound pretty easy, but what we find is that, oftentimes, it’s actually not finding out who you want to participate in an episode, it’s more the logistics around getting that interview date set, getting it in the calendar, keeping it in the calendar, and also of course actually conducting the interview and being there when it’s in the calendar. There is just hundreds and hundreds of things that can go wrong in that, and there’s a lot of work that it takes just to get those interviews down. Now, the first thing I would recommend you do if you want to create your own interview based show, first of all always be 3 month ahead. Because three months, 1 quarter, three months always let you have that slack time, that little bit of slack in your deadlines, that little bit of, you know, extra time where you can kind of, you know, if an interview got cancelled you still have time to catch up, you still have 2 months. If you only have say one month of slack time, you’re suddenly really stressed because not always, especially people of a certain status or of a certain knowledge level, those people that you really want to interview, those people tend to have filled up calendars already. So what you wanna do is always be 3 month ahead, so you always have 3 months of interview just lying there, ready to be published. All the work has been done and meanwhile you are already working on the interviews that go in the next quarter and of course, this is a rolling quarter so it’s not the business quarters of a year, it’s more like a rolling 3 months always. Now that’s really hard I find but it’s something that’s really worth striving for because it gives you so much more, you know, easy writing so you don’t have to stress it all through. Now, the second thing I’d recommend you do is learn from sales. What do I mean by this? Now when I say learn from sales, what we found is that keeping track of multiple interview guests or multiple podcast participants, sometimes we have two guests per show or per episode that is, so keeping track of who can do what and when and how far are we in the communication, have we just reached out, are we in dialogue, have we already set an interview date? All of this is so hard keeping track of, if you are just relying on your own memory and maybe on you know searching through your Outlook. It’s just, to me is just impossible, so what we actually did instead was to create what I can call a GRM. So instead of a CRM for customer or client relationship management, you will have a guest relationship management. What our GRM does is it allows us to kind of have an overview of who we have already contacted, what topics we want them to talk about, if there are someone who can participate in more than one topic, that’s a really beneficial thing. All of that we can have in a system that is set up to drive people through. And the cool thing about sales systems, the CRM systems, is that they’re already designed to close a deal. They’re already designed to collect information about a person. Collect information about what they know something about, who they know, what their company does. It’s already attuned to doing that and it’s already attuned to reminding you when is the time to reach out to George again because George didn’t answer your last email. It’s already built in to these CRM systems. And of course, you can use whatever CRM system you want. You can build your own or build your own in a project software or whatever or you can use Salesforce or Microsoft CRM or whatever they call them. But the idea here is to just take those principles and take all of those techniques and methods and then apply it into getting guests to become or get people to become guests on your show. What we would do is we would have a GRM system where we have all the topics listed out that we want. And those topics of course, come from a brainstorm and an editorial meeting of some sort. So, we have all the topics that we want to talk about and then next column we have all the different guests that we want to interview or all the different people that we want as guests in our show combined of course up against the topic. And then we have information like phone number or email and of course, the company or whatever they’re working for, if it’s The Scientist or whatever. So, we’d have all that listed out just as you would in a CRM system. And then, of course, instead of having lukewarm lead, warm lead… all of these kinds of terms from the customer side or the client side, we would have information or columns or however you use it, whether it’s a Kanban board you move people along or whether it’s just a list where you can kind of see everything. But we would have, of course, categories telling have we already contacted this person or is there no established contact? Have we tried reaching out? If so, ok, fair enough. We mark that and then we set a date for when we would like to do something again, in case we don’t hear from from the person. Next step, are we in dialog? Do we actually have a correspondence back and forward or email or have we talked on the phone? Are they interested? All of this. We kind of just out all that into the system so we have that knowledge on the actual contact just like you would in a CRM system. You start to get the idea here, don’t you? And then, of course, we move them along as communication progresses. We move them along this kind of lead funnel that we do with our guests. And of course, in the end it will be, interview date is set, fair enough, that means it’s in the calendar and then of course, we have the last, which basically closes down the guest lead, so to say. And that is of course when the interview is already conducted. And when that happens, it turns over to our project management or production team, and then everything else, all the content production happens from there. But that’s another story, that’s for another episode. I think just to sum it all up, the hardest bit I find in producing a regular podcast and having a regular show is by far getting people to join your show. Getting those interview dates into the calendar and then of course sometimes people get sick, so even if it’s in the calendar, it’s still not recorded. So get those interviews down and manage all of your people. All of the people that you reach out to, manage them as you would in a client management system. Okay? What we do is, as I started out by saying, we would try to work three months ahead so we always have a little bit of slight time. And then if we know we need to do, say, 12 episodes per year, so one per month, we would always, from our editorial meeting, we will always reach out to as many as we find clever. So that could be, maybe reach out to six people in one go, so when we had the editorial meeting, we would already know who we want to contact, we would already know the topics. Now, sit down, reach out to all six of them or maybe even ten of them or even 12, reach out to them all because if you do so, it’s just so much better to have all of the interviews recorded on your drive than it is to suddenly be like, oh shoot, we have a podcast deadline in one month and we don’t have any recordings left. And then you have to rush through getting a interview date, you have to rush through the whole production and we’ve tried that many times as well and it really just kills the flow and it just, of course it also can have impact on the quality because everything needs to be rushed through and it’s just not a nice place to be in. So those three things, be three month ahead always if you can, use a GRM, so a guest relationship management system and then of course reach out to a lot of people in advance so you context become established way ahead of publishing date. All right, those were the words for today and for the learning of this episode of the Content Universe I hope you enjoyed, see you around!
