How to Get Great Guests for Your Podcast with Pipedrive

Do you wish it didn’t take so much time to get great guests for your podcast?

You’re busy enough trying to produce a quality podcast for your audience regularly. And on top of that, you’ve got a full-time job or business to run.

It takes time and effort to find and book podcast guests. But you also have to keep track of who you’ve invited, who hasn’t responded yet, who you need to schedule an interview with etc.

And once you’ve been podcasting for a while, the list of people that you’ve invited will just keep getting bigger and bigger. It’s a lot of information to try and stay up to speed with.

When I started my podcast, I used to keep all this information in a spreadsheet. It worked for a while, but things got quickly out of control.

For example, every time I added a new person to my spreadsheet, I had to check the existing list of all the people in there to make sure that I wasn’t adding the same person to the list again.

After some research, I decided that I need to use a CRM (customer relationship management) app to track all this information and it would be a lot more efficient than trying to do it all in a spreadsheet.

In this post, I’m going to show you how you can use Pipedrive to help you get great guests for your podcast. By using a CRM app like Pipedrive, you’ll be able to:

• Better organize and track your list of potential podcast guests
• View everything about your guest e.g. bio, links, emails, etc. in one place
• Do timely follow-ups with people who haven’t responded yet
• Get great guests on your podcast with less time and effort

How to Get Great Podcast Guests with Pipedrive

Pipedrive is cloud based CRM that provides a visual sales pipeline. Instead of creating a sales pipeline, we’re going to create an ‘interview pipeline.’

Pipedrive costs around $10 per month (based on an annual plan). And if you’re serious about podcasting, then it’s well worth it because it will save you a lot of time.

To get started, just head over to Pipedrive and signup for a free trial.

How to Setup Up Your Interview Pipeline

Step 1: Create Your Pipeline

When you first log into Pipedrive, you’ll see the default pipeline that gets created for new accounts. We’re going to leave this alone and create our pipeline for tracking podcast guests.

1. Go to ‘Settings’ and select the ‘Pipelines’ option.
2. Click the ‘Add New Pipeline’ button and call it ‘Podcast Guests’.
3. Click the ‘Add Stage’ button and add the following 9 stages

• Suggested
• Approved
• Invited
• Follow Up 1 Sent
• Follow Up 2 Sent
• Follow Up 3 Sent
• Scheduling
• Rescheduling
• Scheduled

You might be thinking ‘why have 3 follow up emails sent after the initial invitation?’

Because the secret to getting great guests for your podcast is persistence. 

[bctt tweet=”You have to be polite but persistent to get great guests for your podcast” username=”prestopod”]

Step 2: View Your New Pipeline

When you’ve added the stages, click the Pipedrive logo to return to the home page.

Click the ‘Pipeline’ drop-down menu and select ‘Podcast Guests’.

You should now see the new pipeline that you just created:

And we’re now ready to start adding your potential guests to your interview pipeline.

Step 3: Add Your Potential Guests

Adding new guests in Pipedrive is easy.

1. Click the ‘Add Deal’ button (everything’s a ‘Deal’ in Pipedrive)
2. Enter the name, company and deal title of your potential guest.
3. Click the ‘Save’ button

Here’s how that would look if you wanted to invite me to be a guest on your podcast.

You can ignore the ‘Deal Value’ and ‘Expected Close Date’ fields.

Step 4: Keep Your Guest Information in One Place

Now when you go back to your homepage, you’ll see a new deal in the ‘Suggested’ column.

If you click on that ‘deal,’ you’ll see more details about your guest or can add more information. This includes:

• Contact Information
• Useful Links
• Related Deals i.e. did you already invite them before and forget?
• Add notes about the guest
• Attach relevant files
• Add the next action i.e. email them tomorrow

Let’s say that you wanted to add a note to remind you why you think this person would be a good guest. Here’s how you’d do that:

But it’s totally up to you what information you want to store there.

Step 5: Drag and Drop Your Guests

With Pipedrive it’s easy to track your potential guests as go through the steps involved in booking them e.g. send an invite, send a follow-up email, schedule interview, etc.

For example, if you sent an email inviting me to be on your podcast, all you would do is click and drag my ‘deal’ from the ‘Suggested’ stage to the ‘Invited’ stage.

I skipped the ‘Approved’ stage because you’re the one adding the potential guest. But if you have someone on your team who finds guests and emails them on your behalf, then you would move the deal into the ‘Approved’ stage, so your team member knows that you want that person to be a guest on your show.

Step 6: Each Guest is Won or Loss

If a potential guest declines to be on your podcast, you don’t want them still showing up in your pipeline. But you do want to retain the person’s information just in case you think about inviting them again in the future.

All you do is click the ‘deal’ and then click the ‘Lost’ button to hide this person’s information.

And the same goes for people who do come on as guests on your show. Just click the ‘Won’ button.

And that’s pretty much about it. You now have the basic knowledge you need to manage your ‘interview pipeline’ in Pipedrive.

A Couple of Advanced Options

There are a couple of advanced options in Pipedrive that I also want to tell you about. You don’t have to use any of these, but they might help to make the process of getting great guests for your podcast even easier.

1. Deal Rotting

Deal ‘rotting’ is a cool feature in Pipedrive. It gives you a visual way to quickly see if a particular ‘deal’ or guest needs some follow-up.

Let’s setup deal rotting for guests that we send an invitation to:

1. Go to ‘Settings’ and select the ‘Pipelines’ option
2. Choose the pipeline your created i.e. ‘Podcast Guests’
3. Click the ‘Invited’ stage and enable ‘Deal Rotting’
4. Set the deal to rot after ‘7’ days of inactivity

Let’s say that you sent me an email invite to be a guest on your podcast. And I still haven’t replied to after seven days. Normally, I wouldn’t do that. 🙂 Anyway, Pipedrive will automatically turn my ‘deal’ red so you can see that a follow-up is needed.

2. Email History

Another thing that you can do in Pipedrive is track all the emails you send to your guests. This is great when you want to quickly know what emails have been sent to the guest – without having to go and search your email sent folder every time.

Pipedrive will give you an email address e.g. youraccount@pipedrive.com. All you do is that that email to the cc or bcc line of the emails that you send to your guests and Pipedrive will automatically add a copy of that email to the guest’s ‘deal’.

Managing all the information about your potential guests and following up doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming. And using a CRM application can help you become more efficient and productive.

Question: Would this setup work for your process? If not, let me know in the comments what else you’d like to able to do.