"Podcasting is a great tool for improving sales productivity" - Interview with John Smibert
In previous discussions Adam Fraser has provided excellent insight into how salespeople can leverage social media to improve their sales effectiveness. Since Adam is an expert on podcasting I asked him if he through podcasting was a tool from which salespeople could leverage 
value.
Podcasting was not a tool that I had used much so his answer was very enlightening to me.
Bottom line he convinced me that salespeople would benefit greatly by using podcasting in two ways; firstly as a consumer to learn during time they are commuting, exercising or walking the dog. Secondly, he suggested that salespeople could benefit greatly by producing their own podcasts for consumption by their target customers.
I think you might his thoughts of value.
I encourage you to read or view the interview below to learn more. It's contains some interesting thinking for sales leaders, management and salespeople.
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Adam Fraser is the founder of Echo Junction who help organisations and businesses leverage value from marketing and social media technology.
Interview
John: Hello, I've got Adam Fraser with me again - welcome back, Adam!
Adam: Thanks, John!
John: Adam, you're very experienced at podcasting.
Adam: Yes.
John: You've published how many?
Adam: Look, I've done more than 50 at the moment, I'm over a year into my personal podcast journey. Whether I'd call myself an expert, John, that's for you to decide, but I'm a passionate lover of the medium, and I'm enjoying both podcasting as a consumer and as a producer.
John: Well, as you see, I'm passionate about video and video interviews, keeping them short and sharp and getting some value out of them. But I thought we'd talk about podcasting, and I was thinking from a couple of points of view. One was salespeople can learn a lot and get access to a lot of really good educational type of stuff about sales on podcasts, right?
Adam: John, it's a fantastic educational tool. Like I say, my podcast journey began as a consumer. As I was moving into the marketing and the social media space, I'd probably listened to 5 to 10 hours of podcasts a week. But what other way can you effectively customise your own radio station? You listen to what you want, when you want, it's inherently mobile now with the smartphones, and you can get access to the world's best minds in whatever sector you're focused on via a podcast.
John: And I guess the main time where you'd access that would be when you're travelling.
Adam: Look, I happen to have a long commute, I also run, I walk a dog, there's no such thing as dead time for me anymore. Podcasting's a great medium, because unlike video and text, which are great mediums in their own right, clearly when you're watching TV or watching a video or reading a book or reading a blog post, that's all you're doing. The beauty of podcasting is you can be standing on a train, walking your dog, exercising at the gym and educating yourself at the same time.
John: It sounds like I should be producing podcasts instead of video.
Adam: Maybe export the audio, John, and you can do both!
John: Maybe I should do that. Okay, so that makes sense. The thing that really struck my mind though, aside from us as consumers and salespeople leveraging a lot of podcasts... and I think that's very valuable for salespeople to do, I know a lot of salespeople and sales leaders and sales managers that do listen to podcasts religiously. But let me turn that around a little bit. I've been having a lot of discussions recently with Tony Hughes, and we've been talking about how salespeople should build their personal profiles, build their personal brand, how they then can share commercially insightful information that's of value to customers, and Tony made the statement on one of the videos I did that if you can't write, you can't sell.
Essentially if you can't produce content of value to people, then people will not respect the ability of you to come with insightful information, all you're doing is sharing other people's information, and I think there's some good insight to that. But let me take it one step further. Should we as salespeople, aside from producing content, should podcasts be something we should be driving out there? Because we can talk about some of the key insights in a commercial world that are of value to our customers.
Adam: I think it should certainly be part of your consideration in building authority, in building trust, in building credibility in your space as a thought leader and an authority. Yes, generating content. Type of medium, whether that's the written word, whether that's video, whether that's audio. Not all mediums work for all people, but podcasting absolutely should be part of the thinking process, and with the tools available today and on the backbone of the Internet, you can get up and running with a podcast very, very cheaply.
John: Yes, just take a phone and you can talk it into. Is that good enough?
Adam: A decent set of headphones, a decent microphone, a few bits of free software and you're up and away.
John: So you need something more than your iPhone.
Adam: You could go low budget with an iPhone, but like I say, we're talking... If I said less than 500 Australian dollars and you can build effectively a radio network, it's very different to say 20 years ago when launching your own radio show wouldn't have been within the reach of most people.
John: So, for Tony Hughes and all Tony's followers out there. Yes, you can write, but if you do some research and have some good commercial insight that'd be of value to your customers, why don't you stand and talk it into a microphone and put it under a podcast.
Adam: Again, within podcasting there's different types. Yes, you can go for an audio monologue, yourself talking, but the active curation in today's cluttered, news-packed world is also of value. You could be talking about the week's news in sales, you could be talking about the week's trends in a certain industry that you're trying to build authority on...
John: Or, I could go and interview some of my best customers about how they're driving their business, which would be of enormous value for my other potential customers.
Adam: Absolutely. And the interview format is probably the most common one, and within the Echo Junction podcast that you mentioned that's the format I've gone with.
John: Yes, you're here because you originally interviewed me and I loved that - thanks, Adam.
Adam: And Tony Hughes as well.
John: That's right - good on you. Okay, so some interesting messages there, and it's a little bit off the beam of the things I normally talk about, but podcasts could be really valuable, certainly valuable for us to learn. They could be valuable as sales professionals and consultants out there to produce our own podcasts and think about how we do that. It's easy, and you can communicate great insight very easily.
Adam: Absolutely.
John: Thank you very much!
Adam: Thanks a lot, John!
Go to @adamf2014 or echojunction.com.au to see and hear more of Adam.
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More TALKING SALES discussions with Adam Fraser:
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