Sales is a complicated, multi-faceted discipline, and it has evolved dramatically over just the last few years. The growth of Social media alone has caused marketers and sales teams to rethink the conventional sales funnel.
Now Snapchat is the belle of the ball on social media, with some 150 million daily active users, which is roughly 15 times what Twitter sees. Once again, the professional community is faced with wrapping our heads around a new series of best practices for social selling
Because of the frequent shifts in sales methodology – where to find prospects and how to engage with leads – there must be millions of pieces of advice published all over the internet every week, often in the form of blog posts, white papers and ebooks. Many of these resources are likely amazing and can really help drive your sales forward – but this makes for two challenges.
First off, it’s extremely difficult to keep up with the latest blog posts from every quality source. Content comes fast and furious, and sometimes it can feel redundant. Likewise, it can often seem like everyone in the world is promoting their ebook these days, offering to give you a free download in exchange for your email address.
And secondly, sales is a multi-layered issue. Different people take different approaches, and a lot of successful sales is about building relationships and bouncing ideas off people. That’s pretty much what a Podcast is – a somewhat structured, often freeform discussion of ideas, concepts, best practices and trends. Discussing sales is perfect for the podcast format.
What’s more, podcasts are great for on-the-go, hands-free content consumption. Listening is easy to do while running, commuting, walking your dog, or any number of other 20 to 30 minute activities. A white paper? Less so.
All this having been said, what sales podcasts should you be listening to so you can stay in the loop? Here are 15 of the best options.
1. The Advanced Selling Podcast
– With expert sales trainers Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale
They’re almost at 400 episodes as of now, and co-hosts Bryan Neale and Bill Caskey aren’t showing signs of slowing down anytime soon. Each episode is a deep-dive look at designing sales strategies that work towards revenue and growth goals. Bryan Neale also works as an NFL ref, and Caskey is the founder of Sales Leadership Academy.
2. Ramp – With thought leader and analytics expert Cara Hogan of InsightSquared
The specific focus here is on SaaS analytics, but the broader focus is how to use data and analytics to really understand your leads, your pipeline, your funnel, your targets – and how to use that data and resulting insights to drive growth. Not many sales-related podcasts include deep-dives into data – usually there will be just a few guests who bring it up over the course of a season – so if you’re working in a more data-centric environment, this can be an ideal listen.
3. B2B Growth Show – With James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media, contributor to Huffington Post
This one is targeted specifically to B2B sales teams, which is helpful because people have been predicting their demise for years now. The topics and episode titles on B2B Growth are extremely effective at drawing audience attention and offer huge practical insights, such as how to tailor your LinkedIn profile for lead generation.
4. The Ultimate Sales Hustle (SoundCloud) – With Steli Efti, Quora go-to guy and prominent sales hustler
As anyone who’s ever worked on a freelance basis or overseen an entrepreneurial / startup initiative knows, the sales side always requires major investment of resources. You need to find the right targets, get their attention, build the relationships and close the deal – and all the while, you’re managing other responsibilities and corresponding with stakeholders who aren’t customers. Steli Efti, the host of this podcast, is the CEO of Close.io and a sales hustle master. There are strong guests here too, like Gary Vaynerchuk, for example.
5. Real Sales Talk (iTunes) – With Sean Mitchell and Phill Keene, growth experts and sales practitioners
Alice Heiman, Jim Keenan, Jack Kosakowski, just some of the big names in sales that Sean and Phill manage to attract onto their show. They talk sales tips, techniques, best practices and topics include belters like ‘Building a social selling strategy that produces results’ and ‘Referrals - Your Most Overlooked Sales Strategy’.
6. Closing Bigger – With Shane Gibson, keynote speaker on social media and sales performance
He’s one of Forbes’ top 30 social salespeople in the world and he publishes in numerous publications on the topics of leadership, marketing, social media, and sales performance. His podcasts range from the likes of help guides to millionaire marketing on a shoestring budget, all the way to in-depth interviews with sales leaders like Anthony Iannarino.
7. The Salesman Podcast – With Will Barron, award-winning sales podcaster and influential blogger
You can get this one as standard audio or in a YouTube version, which is nice. They have super interesting topics on this podcast, including bringing on an FBI negotiator to teach you how to get through to anyone and discussing with thought leader and coach Carole Mahoney on why the future of sales is about people rather than technology.
8. In the Arena – With Anthony Iannarino, world-famous speaker, author and sales leader
Anthony shares his extremely wide knowledge on a whole range of subjects that are important for startups, enabling you to build expertise fast. At Leadfeeder we’ve found Anthony to be very willing to provide fantastic free advice and his personableness comes through not only in these interviews but also because he has the power to get such world-renowned names onto his show. In the last 6 months alone he’s covered hot topics like “why every salesperson needs to learn how to tell and sell’ and ‘what is the future of social media’.
9. The Social Selling Podcast – With Linking into Sales, a company that thinks social selling is about opening, not closing
Social selling is hot stuff at the moment as the number of channels salespeople can use to contact prospects skyrockets but loads of sales professionals have under-developed skills in this area – and that’s why Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman started this podcast. The series provides the latest cutting-edge social selling techniques and talks to the sales leaders developing company strategies for social selling. Their podcasts fly out regularly and in length vary from bite-size to hour-long. You can listen or watch the lively discussion on YouTube.
10. Accelerate – With Andy Paul, sales leader, author, speaker and consultant
Visually it’s a huge treat to visit Andy’s page and for every podcast there are clear timestamps to make it super easy to find the advice you’re looking for. Andy packs podcasts full of people who have real experience from the field, like Co-Founder of Pipedrive Timo Rein, and very often there’ll be a new podcast every single day! Wow!
11. Sell or Die – With best selling author Jeffrey Gitomer and world-renowned LinkedIn Jennifer Gluckow
Podcasts in this lively, hard-talking show are mostly around the 60-minute mark and include such belters as ‘Proven strategies for C-Level Selling with guest Mark the Sales Hunter’ and ‘What it Means to be a Sales Person with Jeff Bajorek’. It’s a little difficult to know what the content is before diving in but that’s normally not an issue because podcasts are pretty entertaining whatever the topic.
12. Stories From The Sales Floor – With Ben Sardella of Datanyze and Pouyan Salehi of PersistIQ
We love this series because it’s positioned as a kind of lunch date with top minds from the world of sales; think lively booze-up rather than boring high school lesson. With anecdotes and accounts you’ll get a lot of entertainment and quite a few laughs, making it perfect commuting entertainment when you can’t be bothered to scribble down numbers and strategies.
13. Bowery Capital Startup Sales (iTunes) – With Bowery Capital team, an early stage venture capital fund
If you run a startup (like we do), then definitely check out these gems which help you tackle the pain-points every startup faces. It’s hugely easy to listen to this podcast and pick up tons of ideas, tools and techniques, and even if you’re not working for a growth company you’ll benefit from listening. One of my favourite episodes is ‘SaaS Churn Management In Early-Stage Sales Orgs’ and one of the things I love most is that all you need is a spare 21 minutes in the bath to come out that little bit wiser.
14. The Sales Podcast – with Wes Schaeffer, a self-described “ruthlessly pragmatic sales trainer”
The reason I like what Wes produces is that a lot of it has the feel of being very off-the-cuff. This is isn’t only about sales in the typical sense of how to nail an appointment with the C-suite; it’s also about copywriters and marketers, who are pretty key ingredients when it comes to driving sales. Wes is onto podcast #230 and one of my recent favourites is with someone Wes describes as “the most ripped-off copywriter alive”. What’s not to like?
15. Sales Success Stories – With Scott Ingram, who loves hearing from ordinary sales people, not experts
Scott’s series doesn’t go down the usual route of calling up some big names and asking for favours. He’s “100% focused on deconstructing world class sales performers instead of the more traditional interviews with ‘sales experts’ who haven’t actually sold anything, but themselves, in years or decades.” This is a personal project of Scott’s and that comes through in these podcasts, which also cover areas traditionally sidelined in sales, like the power of empathy.
The Tip of the Sales Audio Iceberg
The value of listening to these people talk about sales can best be summed up by, well, referencing another podcast. On one recent episode of Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast, Professor Cass Sunstein talks about C-Factor, which is the notion that individuals (and teams) succeed or fail based on being curious about new ways of approaching their challenges.
Sales can be a challenge. If you can use some help meeting your targets – and who among us doesn’t – you need to discover new ways of approaching your craft. And if you’re working out after a tough day, why not spend 30 minutes with one of the above podcasts to embrace these new perspectives?
What other podcasts would you recommend? If they’re not explicitly about sales, have any of them given you really tangible sales advice from a different context or perspective?
