Tom Schwab - What is Your Differentiation Strategy?

Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 442-22. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Thank you to everyone for listening. A real pleasure to have you with us today. And my next guest has an interesting story as well. In the noisy digital world, you can't break through the noise. You just add to it. Instead, you need to get in on the conversation where your ideal customers are already listening. As a Navy veteran who ran nuclear power plants and an inbound marketing engineer, Tom Schwab, my next guest, has a refreshingly unique approach. He focuses on time-proven strategies, then supercharges it with today's technology and podcast interview marketing. He's an author, a speaker, and a teacher, and Tom helps you get more traffic, leads, and raving customer fans by being interviewed on targeted podcasts. Tom, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hey Bill, I am thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Uh, it's very interesting that you've, you've taken charge of this new, fairly new technology and really created a platform for people to do it professionally, to, to be a guests. I've had the pleasure of having numerous interview valet guests on the show, and it's been a terrific experience every single time. So tell us a little bit more about you and your background. Yeah, and I think what we do here is not, it's not revolutionary, it's evolutionary, you know, leveraging other people's platforms to get your message out there. And from my background, I'm an engineer by degree. Like you said, my first job out of college was running nuclear power plants and people say, Wow, that's amazing. I'm like, no, what's amazing is that people are much smarter to Out the systems, the process, the culture to make that work and really that's what we're doing at Interview valet. So you know, I believe today everybody's biggest problem is obscurity, right? Today there are thousands, tens of thousands of people you could help if they just knew about you and you know the best way to get people to find out about you is not breaking through. Noise, because honestly we're all probably adding to the noise, but to get introduced by somebody they already know, like, and trust. And today one of the easiest ways to do that is on podcast interviews. I mean, even today with COVID and travel restrictions, you can still get right into people's ears by talking on podcasts. Right. And and Tom, podcasts have been around for what, maybe 10 years, and they kind of had an initial surge and then they kind of kind of got quiet. Of course with COVID things have gone through the roof again. How did you come up with the idea for interview valet? Well, I always say it's, it's an evolution of what I was doing, so my background is in inbound marketing using content to attract, engage, and to like customers. And you know, a dozen years ago, 15 years ago, the best hack for that was guest blogging. So instead of me writing a blog and putting it on my own site and having, you know, 3 people read it, you know, one of them being my mom, um, to put it on a guest blog, right, so put it out on. Wall Street Journal, Fortune, wherever your ideal customers are, you know, get that no like and trust. So back in 2014, I hypothesized that you could use podcast interviews that same way. And one of the things that I looked at was that you know I've written a lot of blogs in my life. But Bill, every one of them felt like a homework assignment. I'm not a natural writer, but I love to talk. And so for me it was very easy. And so we started to test it in 2014 and I was really amazed when I saw the conversion rates were like 25 times better than blogs at first I I thought, well, it's, you know, it's a niche, it's a personality, and the more we tested it, the more it actually worked out. And really, you know, if somebody hears you for 20-30 minutes, uh, you know, if they come back to your website, they come back as an engaged lead. It's not just a tire kicker or somebody that clicked on an ad on Facebook. Interesting, interesting. Now one of the pioneers, I guess, and one of the most successful podcasters is a guy named John Lee Dumas, and he was on my show a couple of years ago, a great guy, and he said that, you know, we're entering the age of the specialized podcast where if you knitted left-handed with blue thread, you could find a podcast. Out there that is probably by someone who could, you know, you'd have an audience. So how do you find, how does, how do our listeners find to get booked on podcasts that matter to their business because there's like we talked about earlier with franchises in podcasts, there's a ton of people that are doing podcasts in all varieties of of topics these days. You're right, and right now there's 1.7 million podcasts now of only 700,000 of them have been active in the last 30 days, but the problem is not finding the podcast, it's finding the right one. And just like you said, Bill, bigger is not better. Better is better, and I always use the example of somebody a couple of years ago pointed out to me there's a game out there called Pickleball, right? I wasn't familiar with it at the time, but I looked it up at that time there were a dozen podcasts focused on pickleball. You know, if you want to, if you're the best pickle ball. Coach out there or have the best equipment, that's where you want to go for for your ideal audience and there's a lot of search engines out there now. You could just put, you know, whatever your your topic is and put podcast in there. You can go into iTunes and put that keyword in there. Another great thing to do is to ask your clients, what kind of podcasts do you like, which ones do you listen to? Often they're the best market research you can have, and often people, you know, talk about the biggest one, right? Um, uh, but there's all kinds of niche ones for your industry, for your, um, For your associations, so really you can start on rabbit holes just going into a Google search and putting that in there. And there's other search engines out there that you'll soon find. You know, iTunes has one. Charitable has one. If you just start searching those, you'll find those. And one of the unique things I found is that when I get approached by interview valet for a guest, it's, it's been, it's presented in a certain way. It's like, you know, we've vetted this guest, we think that they're right for your demographics, your audience, and the other cool thing is it always comes with a very nice one page overview. That talks about what you know what we're going to talk about and how to introduce the guests and all that type of stuff. So I'm giving you a little plug here, Tom, but, but how, how does, how do our listeners become an ideal guest and again predictably turn listeners into leads? And Bill, you hit on it right there. Uh, you said when you introduce a guest, I, I loathe the word pitch and that's what so many people are doing. To me it's dehumanizing. You, you pitch a baseball, you introduce a human being. So with that, um, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook. I might have missed a couple of jabs in there. I look at it as serve, serve, serve, serve, ask. So when you find a podcast and you're like, Wow, I'd love to be a guest on this. Well, first thing to do is leave it a rating and review. Podcasters, we're all vain. We listen for our own name. If you leave a rating and review, that podcast host will know who you are. Share the content on social media, make some comments on it. After you've served, then you've got the opportunity to reach out to them. And with that, um, to say, hey, I, you know, I've listened to the podcast. I enjoyed this guest and I think I've got some value that I could offer to your audience. Once again, serving. And when you do that, you're gonna find that the podcast host asks you to be on. The other thing is the word guest. Think of it as being invited to somebody's home as a guest at a dinner party. They're going to introduce you to all their friends. So make sure that you show up on time sounding great, prepared, be a gracious guest, not just to come in for a transaction. And then ultimately, you know, to move people from being a passive listener to an active visitor. To an engaged lead, well, give them something of value that makes them want to go to your website. You know, I wrote a book. I give more of those away than I sell, and I'm happy to give those away because it adds value there. Make it easy for people to come back to your website and, and, and find you and connect with you. Uh, I always am amazed sometimes when I'm out there jogging at half speed as I listen to a podcast at 2x speed when people are on and they they start to give, well, you can get me an email here and Facebook here and LinkedIn there. I'm like, they don't understand. I'm, I'm running, I'm driving, I'm multitasking. The chances of me even remembering one of those is slim, so give me one place to go, make it easy for me. That's a great tip, and I think that also leads into a couple more questions I have for you. Number one, let's talk about who's listening. To podcasts and now we think of you just mentioned one key time when people listen, and that's when they're jogging and of course they're not going to watch a video when they're jogging or they're not going to be jogging very long. Number 2 is when they're driving, and we've seen the advent of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and some of these other technologies coming into new vehicles that give people more choices. As a matter of fact, I remember hearing. A couple of years ago that they were going to do away with AM radio because it was all streaming anymore anyways on new cars. I don't think that actually happened, but let's talk about that. Who listens to podcasts? Well, if you look at the studies bill, it says that the average podcast listener is above average education and above average, um, um. Income They're also the the numbers say that they're probably past college age. Uh, before that, it's a lot of video, but these are people that are interested in new ideas, right? There's always those people that are proud that, you know, they've never listened or never read a book since they graduated high school. They're the ones that are still listening to 80s rock and roll, and I do that at times, but most of the time, I want to learn something new. I, I wanna, I wanna be. Always learning and ahead of the pack. So what you see is a lot of times there are early adopters or those people that are really looking for answers. The other thing that I think is interesting is that word podcast. I think we're recording this now in 2020. I think somebody's going to listen to this in 2030, and every time we say podcast they may laugh. Right, because in 1920, radio was called wireless telegraph, and by 1930, it was radio. And really today it's, it's interesting because we're recording a podcast here, but What if somebody read the transcript? Would that still be a podcast, or what if there was a clip of it that got put up on social media? Would that still be a podcast? You know, some podcasters are including the video and they'll put it up on YouTube. So the question is, is it a podcast? I don't know. As long as people get the content, and I think that's one of the great things today that it's so easy for us to create in the way that's easiest for us. And then repurpose it in the way that's easiest for other people. So let's talk about now. You're the author of Podcast Guest Profits. That's the book you were mentioning, Grow Your Business with a targeted interview strategy. How about for the business owners that are listening to this typically that are saying, you know, I just don't know that I have anything great to say, or I don't, I just don't know why anybody would want to listen to me. Well, first, I would just want to say I don't want to be pitching my book. If anybody wants a free copy of it, I'm more than happy to give it to you. Just go to interview valet.com/exitcoach, and you can get a free copy right there. But you're right in that most people underestimate what they know, and one of the phrases that really struck me and I learned this in the navy, is what's ordinary to you. It is amazing to others. We all know something different and a friend of mine helped me with this. He's actually a lawyer, and he said if you look at the legal definition of what an expert is, it's someone that knows something by their education, their degree, their training, or their experience that makes them more knowledgeable than the average person. So sometimes that expert is the PhD, right, that person has got all kinds of letters behind their name. And you know, Bill, that actually those people don't work really well on podcast interviews because it can be intimidating. They, they sound more like college professors. The next type of expert, I call him like the the old sage, right, the person that's been doing it for, for 20 or 30 years knows everything, um, can talk about it, and they do well on podcast interviews, but often people look at them and go, well, that's examples from 20 years ago. That's not the way it is today. Often the person that does the best is is the traveler, right? It's that person that is one step ahead of you that knows what you're going through, that knows the problems you've had. One of my favorite examples is there's a gentleman called Nick Pavlidis. He wrote a book called um. Uh, confessions of a terrible husband, lessons learned from a lumpy couch, and you know, he's just a husband and a father. He's going through it also and you can relate to that. But as a business owner, you think about it, you live your business day in and day out. You would love to speak about it. You love to share what you have learned, and you know so many things about your industry and you know I call Myself, the CEO of Interview Valet, and to me, CEO stands for Chief Evangelist Officer. I want to evangelize the company. I want to evangelize our clients. I want to evangelize this entire category that we're in and you know, if you ever meet a business owner, even if they're an introvert, they love to talk about their business and their industry. That's their passion. That's why we're here. It sure is interesting to hear your viewpoints on this, Tom. I want our listeners to get a sense for what would happen if they decide, you know, maybe I'll check that out and they get in touch with Interview valet. What what happens there? What's the process? Well, sure, and well, first of all, you know, we've got an assessment. It's 10 questions that you can answer, and it will give you a score that says predict to you how well this will work for you. Um, and there's also some hints on on how to improve your results with it. Like I said, we've also got the book. If you want to do it yourself, what we do is not magic. It's not, it's not a secret. It's just we do it with excellence. It's all we do. We've got a team of 18 that this is all we focus on. Or if somebody says, you know, I'd like to to have a discovery call and let's talk about this strategy. Let's talk about how I could use it in my business or how maybe you could work with Interview valet, then we jump on a call. It's just a 30 minute call. We'll learn a little bit about your business. We'll tell you straight up, you know, this is how we think, um. You would this would work for you. We'll give you any suggestions on on how you can improve your results. And if you want to, we can talk about, you know, how we could help you with that also. Our goal is always to get our clients the maximum return on investment of their money and their time. You know, one of our early clients said, I like working with you because Sinatra only sang. I said, well, what's that mean? And he's like, well, Sinatra was a hardworking guy, a smart guy, but he realized that the best use of his time was performing. And so that's really what we do, um, and we let our clients be the guest and then we take care of all the rest. I sure do appreciate you coming on. You know, I will again, a big shout out to your team at Interview Valet, tremendously friendly folks, very professional, as being on the receiving end as someone who does podcasts, it's great to, I know the quality that the people are coming at me when Interview valet gets in touch with me, so I really appreciate that again. You can go to interviewvalet.com/exitcoach. They've set up a special page with some resources for for you, our listeners, and again, Tom, it's really great to have you on the show and I really appreciate the service that you're providing, and I wish you the best of luck. I think it's terrific and I hope you'll come back and update us in a few months or so. Let us know how it's going there at Interview valet. I would love that bill, and I just want to thank you for all you do. You know, anybody that says doing a podcast is easy has either never done it or never done it well. It's the great ones that just make it look easy. And so I'm gonna, I'm going to ask for something for listeners. You know, if you enjoy this, go and leave a rating and review. It's how other people find this podcast and you've been blessed by it and tried blessing other people by leaving a rating and review. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.