The Yaag Project

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Claimed

► Tell us about you and your podcast

The ABM Conversations Podcast is the no.1 podcast for B2B marketers wanting to explore strategies, tactics and real experiments to drive revenue, customer engagement, retention and increase your customer lifetime value. The rare B2B marketing podcast that promises to stay away from fluff and vanity metrics.

Hosts: Yaagneshwaran Ganesh and Manish Nepal.

Our listeners majorly comprise B2B marketers and sales professionals in SaaS with at least 5+ years of experience. 80% of our listeners are from the US, UK, India, Australia and some parts of Europe.

► Why & how did you start this podcast? 

Both myself (Yaagneshwaran Ganesh) and Manish Nepal, the hosts of The ABM Conversations Podcast, never started it with the mindset of building a million subscribers. And that helps us have strong 1:1 relationships with our listeners.

And thanks to our well knit audience, our podcast became one among the top 1% podcasts in the world.

We started the podcast in December 2019, and we already had 4 episodes recorded before we figured the platform to use for distribution.

We wanted to build a B2B marketing podcast that discusses real and practical problems, what works and what doesn’t -- not the one that talks about things like 'where did you go to college?', 'what's you favorite drink', etc. We are all about cutting down the fluff and keeping it real and tangible.

In the words of our listeners —’In the marketing world that’s full of ‘supposed gurus’ who haven’t applied any of their ideas themselves and are all fluff, this one is refreshing!’

We openly breakdown our hands-on experience. We also bring the best of guests from around the world who won’t pull any punches.

Check out some of our popular episodes featuring Rand Fishkin, Scott Brinker, Christopher Lochhead, Jon Miller (founder of Marketo), Sangram Vajre, Stephanie Cox and more.

► How'd you find the time and funding to do this podcast?

The ABM Conversations Podcast releases a new episode every Tuesday. We don't like to break our show up into seasons, we run it episodically. Each episode is about an hour. We schedule our recordings, edit the content, and distribute it. Overall it takes about 7-8 hours of work across the functions for each episode.

We had a sponsor for almost a year, but then we decided to make it an ad-free podcast so we are now self-funding it.

► What do you gain from podcasting?        

We currently don't have a sponsorship. However, our first sponsor was Zest.is and it was a great synergy because we both were focused on a similar mission (to produce truly useful and actionable content for B2B marketers).

Our biggest benefit from the podcast is that it has become a marketing university for us. We have built some great relationships with some of the best in the marketing fraternity. We believe in playing long term games with long term people.

Revenue isn't our top priority right now, but never say never :) But that said, we had so many occasions where someone who was on our podcast went on to become our client or extend into a business relationship in some way.

► How does your podcasting process look like? 

We record completely remote, so we use Samson C01U Pro and Audio Technica AR200X mics. Our biggest learning is to use dynamic mics instead of condenser mics for better audio quality.

For all guest episodes, we use Zencastr to record our sessions. We both Macbook and Windows systems.

For hosting and distribution, we use Simplecast. We find it easy to use and useful in terms of analytics.

For transcriptions, we use Podscribe and for audiograms we prefer the Headliner app.

Our show notes and transcripts are further edited and repurposed into proper blogs (not as-is transcriptions with time stamps)

About Guests and preparation:
Most of our guests come through inbound referrals. We have a list of requirements for our guests and we vet them for our audience fit and topic of expertise. We prefer to have an exploratory call with all guests to go through the housekeeping aspects and explore the topic-fit and identify the record dates that mutually work.

1. We don't share the exact questions but share the ball park of the topics we would want to touch on the episode. We like to keep the flow natural.
2. On the recording day, there is usually a brief ice-breaking conversation before we hit the record button, to ensure the guest is comfortable.
3. Once the recording is finished, we ask the guest for feedback on what we can improve going forward and if there is something that they shared needs to be edited out.

For people who do video podcasts, I'm hearing a lot of good things about riverside.fm, you might want to give it a spin.

► How do you market your show?

We are available on all podcasting platforms and are among the top podcasts in the B2B marketing category, which makes us easy to be found.

For promotion we use LinkedIn primarily, and have just started a podcast account on Twitter. FB doesn't make sense for us right now.

Most of our listeners listen on our Apple Podcasts, with Spotify and Google Podcasts being the close second and third.

► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?

Focus on producing great content and being relevant to your listeners. Do that consistently. Consistency pays. There are no shortcuts. Don't fall for growth hacks or bot driven downloads.

And when you are not sure, reach out to other podcasters in your domain. Most of the times, people are willing to help and go way beyond than we assume.

► Where can we learn more about you & your podcasts?

Check us out at yaagneshwaran.com/abm-conversations-podcast to know what our podcast is all about. And if you have questions on running your podcast, feel free to reach out. I'm happy to answer as long as I know the answer :)