ETL 40: Scott Smith on Podcasts That Stand Out From the Crowd

Transcript:  Scott Smith and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Hey, Scott, great to have you here to talk about podcasting, both video and audio, for B to B audiences, because you’ve had a great career at Gartner doing that. I also wanted to talk with you because, like me, you were a journalist and sportswriter at the first part of your career. Let’s start by talking about your career in journalism.

Scott Smith: Thank you for the opportunity here, Bob. I started my career at the Claremont Eagle Times, on the Vermont-New Hampshire border in Claremont, New Hampshire. This will become ironic once you hear why I got hired at Gartner, but they held the job open for me for about six weeks, not because I was some great budding journalist, but it was the late 80s and they were transitioning from typewriters to computers. We had had a very experimental computer system at our school newspaper, The GW Hatchet, and because of that the Eagle Times held the job for me.

Working in this small town in New Hampshire was the greatest thing I could have done. I learned so much by doing it. But again, because of that supposed technical expertise, I got hired. The job was a chance to be thrust right into it, learning to talk with people.

I’m a big believer in “You get out there and do it.” In journalism, as you know, you can only learn so much in a classroom. Everything you learn goes out the window. And the first time you meet somebody who doesn’t want to answer your questions, the first time you meet somebody who might be reluctant because it’s a difficult subject…you learn your people skills by doing that.

After a couple years in New Hampshire, I thought it was time to move back to Connecticut. I got a job as sports editor of a weekly newspaper in Darien, Connecticut, back in my old stomping grounds, for a year and a half. Then I moved from writing to the editing side, and joined the sports desk of Greenwich Time. I am proud to say we were named one of the top 10 small newspaper sports sections by the Associated Press when I was there. Eventually I worked my way up through tnews desks at the Greenwich paper and the Stanford Advocate, which is our sister paper, a bigger paper. In baseball analogies, if Greenwich was an Single A ball [minor league] team, Stanford Advocate was a AA team. But I was starting to see the writing on the wall that I was not going to hit the majors like The New York Times or something like that.

From Newspapers to Consulting

Bob: So then you decided on a career change. Gartner is based in Stamford, Conn., so I imagine you knew them before you applied there. But this is completely different than journalism,

Scott: Yes. So a few things were working there. One, newspapers were starting to their long slide.

The death knell wasn’t there for them yet, but jobs were getting harder to come by, at least good ones.  The other thing was, I had gotten kind of typecast with that double-handed pat on the back of “You’re too good. We don’t want to lose you doing the night shift.” So I could never get myself over [to the day shift]. My wife and I were looking to start a family, and she basically said, “I don’t want to have a life where I’m handing the kid to you as I walk in the door from my day shift and you’re going out on the night shift.”

I started looking around, and a former colleague of mine from the Stanford Advocate was working at Gartner, and said, “You may want to work for this company.” Now, here’s where the irony comes in. I told you I got hired because of my IT prowess at my first newspaper job. With Gartner, in 1998, it’s a key point. I think people forget now how technology was not ubiquitous in the business world back then.

Gartner was launching a new audio magazine called “Talking Business,” aimed to explain technology to business people. And I’m not talking about how to use the cloud or cyber security. I’m talking about, “what is the Internet and how can it help my business?” My computer is more than a typewriter; here’s how to maximize it.

It’s quaint now, but this is what the atmosphere was. They wanted somebody who would not be afraid to go in front of all of these world-renowned Gartner experts who knew their stuff, backward and forward, and say, “I don’t get it. Explain it to me again. Nope. It still doesn’t make sense. Explain it one more time.”

So essentially, I got hired there because I didn’t know technology — the complete 180 of where I started at. But again, it was all about not being afraid. It’s OK for good podcast hosts to appear to not know what they’re talking about…to say, “I don’t understand. You’re the expert. Tell me.”

I got hired as a writer and producer and learned my way along, including about the big difference between print and audio scripts. By the time I was done, after 26 ½ years, I was doing things that didn’t even exist at Gartner when I joined that company. I had a three-year plan to stay at Gartner, and I stayed about eight plus times that amount.

The Power and Challenge of Saying Things Simply

Bob: It must have been a good run. Gartner had grown when you joined it in ‘98 from less than a billion to $6 billion in revenue today. So it’s a much bigger firm and much more international firm. Having written for CIOs myself, starting in 1985 at Information Week and then afterwards, I’m wondering if it was a challenge to get the Gartner analysts who had used to been talking to IT executives to sort of  dumb things down for a business executives, who won’t understand the IT acronyms and lingo.

Scott: Yeah, it was a challenge. Gartner loves its acronyms, and a lot of people don’t know what that acronym is on first place, even somebody in that industry or sector. Or there were so many acronyms that could mean three different things, depending on which sector you’re talking to. You had to remind people to slow down and explain things better.

And it was hard, because they were used to being in a room with like-minded people. And at this point, the IT industry was branching out where your buying center was no longer going to be your CIO necessarily. It was going to be your head of sales or your HR director. They don’t know the technical side. You’ve got to tell them why this will change what they’re doing.

It is not as easy a shift as it might seem. And more importantly, it was brand new for people who were used to being in a strict, technical world back then.

Bob: Interesting, because I think a lot of employers like Gartner back then would have said, “Scott doesn’t get this stuff. We need to find somebody who gets this.” Right? So obviously, you were there many years, and they decided not to get rid of you. What did you do to win the confidence of the analysts?

Scott: It was a few factors. One of them was that the program I got hired for (“Talking Business”) lasted about three years and then got merged into a program called “Talking Technology.” Which was at that point, the flagship audio news magazine in the IT industry. The great thing there was it allowed me to be writing for both audiences and reaching them.

Just as important were the societal factors. That very thing I was hired for exponentially changed. It was like a rocket ship going up, and it quickly started coming together. As a result, that audience I got hired to write for started merging more and more with that CIO/IT leader audience of talking technology to the point where they needed to write for both audiences at the same time.

Just think of it like giving a presentation to two separate rooms: one with IT leaders and the other with business people. Now they knocked the wall down, and I’ve got to reach both of them at the same time. You don’t want to look like Woody Allen in “Bananas,” where he’s translating English to English. It’s, “here’s what it means now, businesspeople, this is what we mean, and you can do that.”

So I got a chance to grow with the industry, even if I stumbled at times. We were all learning our way through at that time. And I also think it was that willingness, as I said earlier, to be able to raise my hand and say, “I don’t get it. I’m not following.”

People trusted me because they knew I wasn’t trying to sell myself as the expert. My job is to set up the Gartner experts to explain Gartner’s expertise. I never got up there and said, “Hi, I’m the expert on how to use the Internet to improve your B2B efforts.” I’d be lying to them.

They knew I don’t know the answer to this question. Let’s go to somebody who does. That is a big thing, especially when you’re hosting a program. You don’t want to come across as “you know everything about everything.”

Casting the ‘Expert’

Bob: it sounds like that’s critical as well. “Who’s going to be the expert? Is it the host or the moderator, or is it the host’s guests? Let’s get clear on who the experts are going to be.”

Scott: I actually learned that as a 22-year-old sportswriter. I remember being on a football field in Windsor, Vt. The football coach had been this long-standing expert; defense was his key thing. And I thought, “Oh, I gotta go make sure he knows I know football, too.” And as I’m trying to ask a question about defense, his eyes just had that look of, “What are you talking about, kid?”

And I realized right in the moment, “Oh, right: He’s the expert. I’m not. Why don’t I just get to the question of, can you explain how that defense is going to stop that team’s top-ranked offense?”

I realized that no one’s tuned in to watch me. Now, some hosts do have expertise about something. If you’re talking thought leadership, you certainly can chime in and say, “I have run into this with my clients. I’ve helped coach them on this.” Nothing wrong with that. But that’s not my expertise.

If I’m interviewing you, I can’t sit there and say, “You know, if I were running the company, Bob, this is what I would be doing.” People would think, “What are you doing? Just ask him the question, please.”

Bob: Do you see that mistake being made often in podcast land and video and audio, podcast land, where the host is trying to act as the expert and the host really isn’t the expert?

Scott:  Two things can happen. Sometimes they are really not the expert, and they’re trying to sound like it. Then they take the airtime away from the actual expert, the guest who people have tuned in to listen to.

The flip side can be that even if you are the expert, if you’ve got somebody on your program and you wind up doing more of the talking, listeners will think, “Wow, you didn’t give that person a chance to get a word in edgewise.” Now they’re perceiving you as somebody who’s not going to listen to them, right or wrong. That’s the danger. So even when you are the expert, you’ve got to tamp down your expertise to use it, to set up the person who is who is appearing for you, to give their expertise. Of course you can chime in. But the key thing is always remembering the guest is there on limited time, so give them a chance to talk.

The Evolution of Gartner’s Podcasts

Bob: So let’s talk about the evolution of Gartner Studio 56 which led to the revamp of the ThinkCast, and its role in your career and your learning journey.

Scott: As they say, the media programs for several years were kind of the redheaded stepchild at Gartner simply because we didn’t quite fit into the marketing efforts at the time. We certainly weren’t a research arm developing something new. So we kept moving around.

Finally, as video was starting to emerge in the early 2000s as a really powerful tool across the business world, they decided they’d be better off developing an in-house studio, and our programs got moved under that. We also would do custom audio programs for clients who wanted Gartner expertise to appear alongside theirs, etc. And those were some great programs.  

In the course of that, I remember I decided we needed another segment. I’ll record the voiceover to the segment. My first time as a voiceover did not go well. People asked who the junior high school kid was that they had allowed on to do the recording. I had to learn how to modulate my voice and carry myself. Luckily, they said, “Scott, why don’t we work with you and then we’ll let you do it again?”

I bring that story up because a few years later, after a couple hosts had changed hands on “Talking Technology,” I stepped in to become the host and carried that over for nearly a decade. I can say I was at Gartner for 26 years, but I didn’t do the same job. They allowed me to grow and evolve. And that was a big thing. Nobody at Gardner ever said, that’s totally new; you can’t do that. You had to show it would work, but you did have the chance to experiment. We were able to grow, do more, and build up my reputation across the company, which, when the time came for podcasts, set me up well for that.

Bob: Let’s talk about the podcast. Did that begin as both a video and audio podcast or just an audio podcast?

Scott: No, that was strictly an audio podcast. Podcast had been out there for a few years, growing in the business world, Gartner and many other companies had not fully embraced it yet. It felt like more of an edgier thing. Gartner is by reputation, very staid and highly respected.

Finally, a couple of people from the marketing department and I said, “No, you really want to be out there and getting your voice out there. You’re going to lose a valuable marketing channel if you don’t.” So they said, “Go ahead, try it. Show us how it works.” We were able to get some great interviews on the idea we would be promoting Gartner research or a conference or something like that, by having a newsmaker or a thought leader talk with us.

The video was completely separate. We were doing video programs, but we were not looking to run it. At that point, a podcast was audio, and video was something completely different. But we got to grow the program and experiment and try different things. So it was it was a fun time, and a little bit of the Wild West. We weren’t going crazy. We still had to fit the Gartner “voice.” But it was a great time to be trying new things and taking audio in a different direction for the company.

What Makes a Podcast Successful?

Bob: You left this past fall (2024), and when you look back on the best podcasts that you did versus the others, what do you think are the key elements of success? What is the difference between a great podcast and one that’s merely OK?

Scott: The first thing I would say is something you would not even see or hear on the podcast: the strategy behind it. You need to know what you are trying to achieve and who you’re trying to achieve it for. Who is that audience? Without that, it’s just feels like you’re putting on a show. People start to say, ‘Why are you doing this? What’s the purpose?”

You want to try different things, as I said, But it starts with what you are trying to do, and that becomes your North Star. You’re always staying in line with that, and everything else is mixed and matched as you go through the next one.  

This is going to sound very self-serving, but I really feel that the host will make or break your podcast. Your host is always there. If they’re not that strong, I don’t care how good your guests are – people will  eventually say, “I could probably find that guest on another program. I can’t sit through listening to this host a lot of times.”

Bob: How do you answer people who ask how they pick the host?

Scott: I’m a big believer that most people can be very good hosts. But some are not, and others just need more work. So they will make or break your program, because they are the voice or face of it. They will help set up your guest to succeed or fail, or at least create a perception of whether that guest is succeeding or failing. You never want to have a high-powered guest say, “I’m never appearing on that program again. They talked over me. They didn’t seem to listen to what I was answering, and then asked me the exact same thing afterward.”

How many times have you watched a program and wanted the host to just throw the script away and just relax and ask the question? Too many people don’t want to do that.

The third thing, and this is part of what I said about strategy, is finding a unique voice. Your competition is not just your business rivals with a podcast or a video program. You are also up against the hundreds of thousands of podcasts that people can listen to during their day, in entertainment, politics, and sports.

What makes you different? You want to find a voice that fits your organization. But you also want to be comfortable enough to try something a little different. You want to show a little bit of a lighter side, not suddenly go off into a song and dance program or anything. You want to get everybody to relax so it is more conversational.

Bob: It’s very tempting for some podcasters to look at [Pat] McAfee on ESPN and say, “We need something like that — in his short sleeves, with his buddies, and they chime in – and we need to do that for our business podcast, to loosen it up.” So what I guess, what I hear you saying in part is, well, that might be entertaining. McAfee may be entertaining, but a McAfee-type podcast may not work.

Scott: I’m going to give you a perfect example of that. If it doesn’t fit your personality, don’t do it  because it comes across as fake. We both started as sportswriters. We both love sports. We both know the terminology.

You know sports fans: They can be the most critical of what are you trying to say. I watched bosses get up there, and you could tell their scriptwriter had given them a sports analogy, especially when it was time for the World Cup or the Olympics. But they looked like they didn’t know what they were talking about. It wasn’t their fault. Someone thought they were being clever, but it didn’t fit them.

It’s okay to try something different, to be a little more relaxed, but if you can’t do it, don’t try to become something you’re not. When I say find that unique voice, it doesn’t mean doing a Pat McAfee-style program, it’s figuring out, “What do I feel most comfortable with? How do we develop that into something where people will want to go for advice or to find the top news makers?”

Every host has a different style. You need to find your style. It could be as simple as the scriptwriting. One of the things I learned coming out of print as I started to write for the spoken word was how different it is. Most importantly, when you’re writing for somebody else, as I was in those early days, you’ve got to be careful of what words you put in. Maybe they don’t pronounce them well, maybe it doesn’t sound like them.

I had a boss in the early days who just couldn’t get words like myth or fifth out. And we had a list of seven myths, about leadership or something else to know about. We tried for several recordings, and the fifth myth kept sounding like Swiss Miss, and we’re not talking about hot cocoa here, folks. So we just learned how to change things to the number five. Little things like that, if they go wrong, undermine your authenticity and stature. It can really change the course of your program.

Putting Nervous Guests at Ease

Bob: What if I client asked you to interview their CEO, and that person is pretty stiff, with a voice that is not emotive? You might be wondering if there could be someone else, but the client is insisting that  this is who you’re going to work with. What would you do?

Scott: A few things. First, before you even get that microphone, I would sit down, let them do their thing, and then start gently critiquing and practicing. A lot of it is just repetition, and going through and saying, “Let’s try something different here on the practice side,” and finding out their voice.

Maybe they’re the type of person who feels they have to be overly prepared, and they’re staring at a script the whole time and afraid to go off script. There are ways to loosen them up. I had a CEO as a guest one time, and he had the microphone. The camera is a very unforgiving audience. Many will freeze up and then tell you, “I don’t get it. I’m used to speaking in front of 10,000 people. But that lens, that microphone, they’re not laughing back at your joke. They’re not nodding and going, ‘Wow, great point.’”

You’re just left to flounder and say, “I hope they like what I’m saying.” He was so nervous, to the point where I said, “Okay, hold on. Let’s just pause a moment and relax. It’s okay. Why don’t we start with an easy thing. I’m bumping into you in an elevator. I love what your company is doing. Can you give me 30 seconds on why your company is outstanding?”

This CEO’s reaction was, “Can I call my marketing team?” He literally said that. So we had to figure out another way. It might be the questions. It might be just the tone. You have to identify what is their tone, what relaxes them, and then work with them again.

By doing this before you go live, you can say it’s just you and me. Let’s try this. Let’s try more conversation. Okay, you’re right. It failed. Nobody else will ever see this. It’s confidential. You need to have room to do that.

Sometimes you need to ask a company up front: are you insisting on this person because they run the company, and you’re afraid to say no to the boss? I get that. If the boss wants to do an interview, you can’t say no. A lot of these programs are vanity plays, and sometimes there’s just no way around it.

The other factor, though, is the company might think, “Well, everybody wants to hear from our CEO.” But the key thing to consider is: Who is your best storyteller? Who can convey your message the best? Because unless it’s a top name like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, I want to hear what that person has to say after five minutes. If this person can’t seem to get two words together, or this person seems stiff, people won’t care about that title or name anymore. You need to have this compelling, engaging story.

Putting People in the Right Role

Bob: I know top people in companies who are considered thought leaders in their field, and they have a lot of personal brand power. A lot of clients or potential clients might listen to a podcast presided over by that person, simply because they like his or her ideas, writings, or books. What if that person needs a lot of work before he or she can go on the air? Would you tell the company, “Look, I think I understand the brand value of this person, but it’s going to take some time and some work to develop that person into a really good host.”

Scott: You have to be honest, but also ask them about their goals in having this person in that role. Maybe being an interviewer is not the best spot for them at the time. You can work with them to improve. But if the company wants them there because their expertise makes them the equal to the guest, I would suggest they do a panel with that person as an expert, and have somebody else do the moderating so they look more comfortable. This removes the pressure on that expert to always need to  explain things since they’re the expert: “Oh, that’s my field of expertise. Let me tell you a story.”

When things like that happened, the audience evaluations would include comments like, “Why didn’t the host let the other panelists speak?” They expected the host to be a moderator, not a co-expert. But if you put them on the panel, you can let them be an expert. You don’t need to keep them off the air — In fact, we can work with them and help them transition into that host role.

It’s critical that any professional services or B to B firm that does podcasting or video to figure out who should play the moderator role, host, and guest roles, whether it’s a panel of guests or just one guest. They are very different roles and certain thought leaders may not be great hosts. Everybody might think that because they’ve got a microphone and know how to ask some questions, they’d be an excellent. host, but they need to remember they’re setting up the guest to give those answers. That doesn’t mean you can’t exchange stories, but good hosts understand there’s an art form to doing that, a back and forth.

The optics of an interview are just as important of what’s being said, because the audience will take away what they perceive as the personality of the hosts or guests as well as their expertise. If the company puts somebody who seems very rude onto the program, potential clients may wonder if they  really want to do business with that firm, whether the firm will listen to them when they call up. You have to factor all of that into account.

And that’s part of what I call the chemistry fit. You might see someone who wrote a book or Harvard Business Review article lead an interview, or be interviewed by somebody else, and you say to yourself, boy, that person is arrogant. I don’t think we’d ever want that person in my company. They’ve disqualified themselves. Or you listen to the interview and realize, “We got to do that.”

His New Venture

Bob: Okay, so let’s talk about your new company, and what’s next up for for Scott Smith,

Scott: Next up is my new venture is called Penbury Consulting. I want to take this expertise I’ve learned over more than 40 years as an interviewer, but particularly from those 26 ½ years in the media world at Gartner, and help individuals, companies, and organizations to go out and develop the best media program possible. What is the best way to get their message out there?

I also want to help their people to become those best hosts that they can be, so that they have staying power that helps them stand above the crowd and continue to grow as hosts. I believe people can be outstanding hosts if they just know those little tricks of the trade and practice and just get better at it. Many of my own early interviews are now cringe-worthy to me, but I got the chance to grow. I listened to it, improved on it, and tried something different. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but I just kept interviewing. And that’s one of the keys. But I also had people suggesting that I try different approaches, and when you’re a good host, listening is your best skill.

And obviously, Gartner has invested more resources in podcasting over the years. Gartner must have decided that it’s something they need to continue to do. It helps get their name out there, and maybe even generates business when someone shares a link to the podcast with someone who’s not a Gartner subscriber or client.

Today, beyond ThinkCast, which is considered the Gartner-wide program, individual research teams now have their own podcasts to go out there and dive deeper into their area. So they’ve expanded the use, and there’s a Gartner family of podcasts out there now expanding their reach. They’re seeing that value, and hitting different constituencies. It’s a very valuable tool to have out there.

It’s a really good sign that B to B podcasting, video, audio, and webinars are the way the world is going. For companies that sell expertise — whether it’s a law firm or a research firm, an accounting firm or consultants like Gartner or or McKinsey — just delivering expertise through prose or 2000-word white papers is not enough. They need to get their people out there where their ideas can be heard and seen through video and audio.

One of the things that I hate hearing in any program is that hard sell — where the guest is prodded to talk about how great your company is. It’s far better to ask them about the issue they’re dealing with. Have them tell you, and how your company may have helped them solve it. That soft sell is a far more powerful tool.

Bob: Absolutely. Well, Scott, it’s been great talking about your career and where you’re going from here and the future of visual and audio communication in business. I wish you all the best in the next chapter of your book. So to say,

Scott: Thank you, Bob, I’m very excited for that next chapter.