Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

How do you pitch potential podcast guests?🎙️

7 Feb 2023 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker explains a practical strategy for increasing the success rate of podcast guest pitches by leveraging social proof. He notes that high‑profile figures such as Ryan Holiday, Robin Sharma, and Grant Cardone receive countless pitch requests and rarely have time to research each host. By mentioning that well‑known guests have already appeared on the show, the host creates instant credibility and reduces the decision friction for the prospect. The speaker also highlights the value of smaller, mutually‑known contacts: if a guest sees that other respected peers (e.g., Nick from Book Thinkers) have accepted, they are far more likely to say yes. He suggests using these endorsements as a shortcut, even reaching out to the prior guest for a quick validation (“Hey Nick, how was this interview?”) to further reassure the potential guest. The overall message is that name‑dropping and showcasing prior guest approvals can dramatically improve booking rates without requiring the guest to do any additional research.

Chapters

The higher up you go in terms of access to people, the more they get offered to go on shows. Ryan Holiday and Robin Sharma and Grant Cardone are getting pitched tons of times about being on people's shows. They don't want to do the research to look into you. Because if they had to look at even for 10 minutes on each person, that's like an entire day to look at all the people who are pitching them on podcasts. But if you say these 3 people have been on it, and those names mean something, it's like, oh, okay, yeah, cool. And listen, it doesn't only have to be big names. Like now you're in a really fortunate position that you've had so many names to be able to pull from. But at the beginning, if people want to try to get names on Like if somebody got you on their podcast and then they came to me and they said, hey, we had Nick from Book Thinkers on the show, I'm much more likely to say yes because Nick said yes. If you want to get me on your show, look at who I follow. And if you got Nick and you got like 2 other people, it's like, oh, they all said yes. I might ping Nick to say, hey Nick, how was this Angela person who interviewed you? She legit? It's like, oh yeah, yeah, it was a blast. Okay, cool. And then I'm not looking at your show. I'm not looking at Instagram. I'm not looking at anything else. It's like, because Nick said yes, I'm going to say yes and let's go.