Why your podcast needs a 'discovery call'

An interview before the interview? Are you kidding me?

That’s what I thought when I first heard about the ‘discovery call’ before the episode.

Why wouldn’t I just sit down in the interview and record? Does it really make sense to do a pre-interview?

Well, let me tell you: when I started doing this, my interviews became 10X better.

Why is that the case? Well, there are a ton of benefits that come with doing a discovery call...here’s 5 to get you going.

Set the expectations

In a pre-interview, you can set the scene for what to expect and make sure they’re a good guest for your show (And that your’e a good platform for them). You can also go over things like distribution schedule, what tech specifics people need to know and anything else your guest may want to talk about.

Get them to understand your core mission

For any podcaster, but especially for those with a smaller reach this is something you should pay attention to.

If you can get them to connect with the core ethos, or raison d’etre, instead of just the amount of listeners or reach you have then you’ll have a much better episode since your guest is invested in your mission.

I’ve been able to land guests WAY out of my league because I got guests to connect to the mission we were working on.

Ask what they think is important to cover

An oft-overlooked practice in interviewing is asking your guest what they think is important to cover. I’m not talking about their talking points - but things they hear/think/see that are important to talk about. We can fall into the trap of typecasting a guest for a certain topic - when in reality, they want to talk about something completely different. So don’t judge a book by its cover - but open it up and read it.

Ask them what others aren’t covering, but should be

This is something that, surprisingly for me, caught a lot of my guests off-guard. They so often get asked to go into the basics - but rarely get to go beyond that. So ask if there are some parts that you can go that past that.

Ask them what is off limits

I think this is my favourite part of the discovery call. Rarely will you get an answer - but this just helps to build more trust between you and your guest. I think good boundaries make for good interviews. So, add in this question as part of your discovery call to build more trust with your prospective guest.

Follow these steps for your next podcast interview and tell me that the interview itself isn’t 10X better than just doing an interview.

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