Pitch Perfect // audio tutorial

If you agree with Lauren Passell, who writes two terrifically ambitious newsletters—Podcast, the Newsletter and Podcast Marketing Magic—not to mention running Tink Media, then you should be spending 50% of your time creating your podcast, and the other 50% getting it out there. 

I heard this advice long before I met Lauren, who I've since come to appreciate as one of the most knowledgeable and helpful people I know on the topic of podcast promotion. She's one of the voices that you'll hear in this week's module about pitching, and she has a lot to say on the topic. Lauren has carved out a space for herself in the industry as a sort of matchmaker in podcasts. She is so passionate about promo swaps and getting podcasters working together that she spent most of her career facilitating those connections.

The other conversation you’ll hear this week is with Naomi Mellor, who heads up the Skylark Collective and created the International Women’s Podcast Awards. I met Naomi after Shelter in Place won the “Changing the World One Moment at a Time” award in September of 2021, and since then we’ve become friends who now regularly partner to support each other’s work and get more podcasters connected to the global podcast community.

We’ve included these particular conversations because both of these women understand that from awards submissions to email exchanges, everything you do in this business is really just a way of pitching yourself and your work—and the way you pitch matters. Every great pitch begins with relationship-building. At its essence, it’s saying “I see you, I love you, we belong together.” 

Let’s look at each of those components one at a time to understand better.

I see you.

This is step one, the required research that could take five minutes or five hours, depending on what’s at stake. At the bare minimum, it means Googling the person you’re reaching out to, looking at their LinkedIn profile, maybe even reading articles they’ve written or listening to podcast episodes they’ve created. Do you understand who this person is and what they care about? If you’re not sure, then keep searching and seeing. 

If you’ve ever been in charge of hiring for a position, then you’ve likely experienced this concept firsthand. A quick glance at your applicants’ cover letters will show you who sees you and your company and who hasn’t taken the time to get to know and your work. Because a cover letter is really just another kind of pitch. It’s the applicant’s chance to make a clear, concise case for why they’re the perfect person for the job—but that case begins with seeing. 

We’ve often been amazed at the wide range of applicants we’ve received for our Kasama Collective training intensive. Even though we go out of our way to let applicants know exactly what we’re looking for on our website, and tell them up front that they should listen to the testimonials from our graduates and check out at least a few Shelter in Place episodes, many of the cover letters we get are an entire page of people just talking about themselves and what they’re hoping to get out of the experience—but with no acknowledgement that they even understand who we are or whether or not they even like the work we’re doing. 

Sending a pitch like that is like asking someone you’ve never met to marry you. No matter how impressive their resume is, they’ve taken themselves out of the running simply because they didn’t take the time to make us feel seen.

The work of learning about someone’s work can be time-consuming, but it’s always worth it, because it establishes up front that you understand who you’re working with, and that you don’t just care about yourself and what you can get out of that connection. Your pitch is coming from a place of genuine appreciation and enthusiasm.

Which leads me to the next part of pitching . . . 

I love you.

Once you can authentically say, I see you, and you like what you see, identify what it is that you appreciate so much about that person or publication or organization. Be as specific as possible. 

“I like your podcast,” is very different from “when I listened to Melissa Lent’s story in your episode ‘Hyphenated Identity,’ it meant so much to me, because it was the first time I heard a story from someone just like me.”

If you’re pitching a podcast, don’t just listen to the most recent episode. Dig deeper into the back catalog and find at least a couple that resonate. 

If there’s a newsletter you’d like to pitch, subscribe and read it for weeks or even months. Sometimes when you do this, you’ll realize that what you see is not actually something you love. That’s a great clue that the fit isn’t right, and a signal to move onto another podcast or publication where you have a more natural alignment with the work they’re doing. 

But when you do find yourself loving someone else’s work, I want to encourage you to reach out and let them know about it—even if you’ve never met this person before or you’re new to their list or podcast. You’re not pitching them. You’re just making them feel seen and loved. It’s wonderful to get an email from someone whose only objective is to tell you that you’re doing great. We all need those encouragements. You never know when that 30-second email will make someone else’s day. Chances are it’ll also make you feel better to send it.

Of course, sometimes those emails do lay the groundwork to pitch a little further down the road. Maybe the person you’re following puts out a call for pitches, or maybe you’ve got something to share—an anniversary, a themed episode that aligns with an upcoming holiday—or maybe you just feel like you’re ready.

Which brings me to that third step.

We belong together.

This is the pitch itself. 

If I’m going to obsess over word choices and rewrite sentences dozens of times, this is the point where I do that. If it’s an email or pitch I really care about, I might read it out loud or even get feedback from others. I want my pitch to be clear, concise, and compelling. I’m not just asking for something, but making a case for why this partnership is great for both of us.

Your pitch should connect the dots so that it’s clear you belong together. It should cast a vision of an inspiring partnership with someone who is great to work with: you!

This is a lot easier and less formal if you’re already friendly with the person you’re pitching, but there are ways that you can make it easier for people to say yes to you even if there isn’t an established relationship. Something I learned from Lauren Passell is to make it as easy as possible for someone to say yes to you, and to leave the door open wide enough that you can work together even if they don’t say yes to the specific thing you’re asking for. 

To be fair, this isn’t always possible. Pitching a lot means being told no a lot, because that magical “we belong together” moment doesn’t happen everyday. Don’t take it personally when people say no—and don’t assume that no right now means no forever. It might just be a matter of timing, or they may have just said yes to someone whose pitch is a lot like yours.

Author Jeffrey Higa, who published his first book at age 55, said this about pitching: “I view rejection as the editor determining that my submission and their readership is not a perfect fit—not a failure inherent in my work or in me as a writer. I’ve learned that talent matters far less than two other characteristics I possess: persistence and indifference to rejection.” 

If someone is doing work that you just can’t get enough of and you’re dying to work with them, keep seeing them and loving them and letting them know how much you appreciate them. And when you have a reason to reach out with another pitch, or a different pitch, or just some opportunity to connect, do it. And in the meantime, keep finding other places and people to pitch.

I agree with Lauren Passell and the many others in the industry who are urging us to spend half our time pitching and putting ourselves out there. But I think an equally important part of that process is understanding when the timing is right for you to pitch.

Even though we heard that 50% rule pretty early on and have been slowly working toward it, there was a big chunk of time when we spent almost no time on pitching and promotion, because the work of building the podcast and getting clear on what it was we were building was so consuming that we didn’t have time for anything else. I often bemoaned that at the time, but looking back, I can see that it was actually a big benefit to not be pitching for a while. It allowed us to focus on getting better at making episodes and creating content that our listeners could enjoy for months and even years to come.

We’ve also learned this through trial and error. Early in Shelter in Place, a podcast network approached us because they liked our show. The network had about 50 podcasts, and almost all of them were about football or reality TV. There wasn’t a single narrative podcast in the bunch, and none of them were the kinds of podcasts that we naturally gravitated toward or regularly listened to ourselves.

At the time, we said yes to that partnership because they said that they wanted to expand the variety of their shows and they thought that they could grow our audience. We hoped that by working together, we could get some help with promotion, which we'd had almost no time for. And the people we worked with were great. We all really liked each other.

But very early on, it was clear that it wasn't a great fit. They loved our show, but growing a narrative show requires a completely different set of tools than growing a show about, say, Nebraska football. They were too busy to reinvent the wheel for one show and an area where they didn't have much experience. Meanwhile, we were doing our best to drum up enthusiasm for promo swaps with shows that we normally wouldn't listen to ourselves.

What we learned from this experience is that “I see myself” is an important prerequisite to that “I see you” statement. In retrospect, if we had gone and seeing ourselves and that network more clearly, it would have been obvious to all of us that the fit wasn't right from the beginning—even though we genuinely enjoyed the people we were working with and knew that they believed in our show. Another lesson there is that just because you like someone doesn't always mean it's a fit.

With podcasts and partners, we need to have a clear sense of who we are and what we really need so that we don't chase people or opportunities for the wrong reasons. It's why we start this course with that why create question, and why we keep coming back to it. Because seeing ourselves and our work clearly helps us to understand what we have to offer others, and also what we're looking for in partnerships and collaborations. 

We hope that the exercises and conversations in this module help you to see yourself and others so that the next time you pitch a story to a magazine or promote your podcast to a podcast newsletter or apply for a job or pitch to a network, that you'll think first about I see you, I love you, we belong together. Because whether or not that pitch is accepted, you deserve to find a place where you can see and be fully seen.