The Guest Is the Prospect: How MSPs Use a Podcast to Land New Clients
By Jim Punzenberger, founder of Managed Prospecting System and former MSP owner
Here is how MSPs use a podcast to land new clients: invite the owners you want as clients onto a short show about their business. The relationship then does the work a cold pitch cannot, because the conversation is about them, not about IT.
Why Owners Ignore the Pitch but Accept the Invitation
Your best prospects already have an IT provider. They also have a full inbox, a voicemail box they avoid, and a LinkedIn feed full of strangers offering a free assessment.
A pitch asks them to spend time on your agenda. Many decline, and the research points to why. Gartner found that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a sales experience with no rep involved at all.
An invitation flips the request. Instead of asking for their time, you are offering them attention, a finished video, and a platform. The owner who would delete your fourth follow-up email will often make twenty minutes to talk about how they built their company.
People Make Time to Talk About Themselves
This is not a marketing theory. It is a well-documented trait of how people are wired.
Harvard researchers Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell found that people spend roughly 30 to 40 percent of their speech telling others about their own experiences. In their experiments, participants gave up money for the chance to answer questions about themselves instead of about other people. Brain scans showed that talking about the self also activated the brain’s reward system.
Now think about the owner of a 30-person accounting firm or machine shop. People ask that owner for things all day. Think about when someone last asked that owner how the business started, what they would do differently, or what they want the next five years to look like.
You can be the one who asks. That is the whole opening.
How the Guest Show Works Without Pitching
The mechanics are simple. Build a short interview show aimed at the owners on your prospect list. Invite them as guests. Record a focused conversation about their business, then hand them a set of finished assets they can use in their own marketing.
The guest walks away with:
- A full video episode they can post and share
- An audio version for podcast platforms
- A short clip cut for social media
- A quote card with their best line from the interview
Each of those assets carries your show’s name. Every time the guest shares one, their network sees them being interviewed by you.
The one rule: no IT in the invitation
Nothing in the guest outreach mentions IT. Not the connection request, not a single email, not one question in the interview. The moment the invitation looks like a way in, it becomes the pitch the owner was already ignoring.
That rule is harder to follow than it sounds. Instinct says to slip in one line about what you do. Leave it out. Your profile tells them who you are if they look, and that is fine. The invitation itself has to stand on its own.
Name the show after the audience, not your company
Anchor the name to the place and the people you serve. A show for manufacturing owners in your region tells a prospect it is for them. A show with your company name in it tells them exactly what it is for.
Keep episodes short
Episodes on my own show, Prophets of IT, run seven to ten minutes. The short format is a big part of why guests say yes. A busy owner can give you ten focused minutes far more easily than an hour. Length is one of the quieter parts of how MSPs use a podcast to land new clients, and one of the easiest to get wrong.
The Closing Question That Opens the Relationship
End every interview on the same question: who are you looking to work with?
The guest answers on camera, on your channel, describing their ideal customer. You have just given them free exposure to the exact people they want to reach. You have also learned what they care about most, in their own words.
That answer gives you something useful to do for them afterward. An introduction, a share to the right person, a mention to another guest. Help that starts with the guest’s own goals does more for the relationship than any amount of talk about firewalls.
What Happens After the Recording
The interview is the start, not the sale. What turns a guest into a client is a follow-up track that runs on a schedule, with each touch doing one job.
| When | What you send | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Same day | A thank-you and a question about who else belongs on the show | Fills your guest pipeline through referrals |
| On completion | The video, audio, clip and quote card | Delivers on the promise you made |
| Week 2 | A useful note with no pitch attached | Shows the relationship was not a setup |
| Weeks 4 to 6 | The opening, built on something the guest said in the recording | Starts the business conversation naturally |
| Months 2 to 12 | Scheduled value touches, with the buying window tracked | Keeps you first in line when timing changes |
Weeks four to six are where IT finally enters, and it enters through the guest’s own words. Maybe they mentioned opening a second location, or a cyber insurance form that took three weeks to finish. Those are the same events that push owners to switch IT providers, and you heard about them before any competitor did.
This timing is the part owners tend to skip. They record a great episode, then send a sales email the next morning. The guest feels set up, and the goodwill is gone.
Your Content Gets More Credible at the Same Time
Every episode is also content. Not a stock photo with a security tip, but a real local owner talking about their business on your show.
That kind of content carries weight with buyers. The 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 73% of decision-makers trust thought leadership more than marketing materials when judging what a company can do.
The audience is there, too. Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2025 found that 55% of Americans aged 12 and up now consume a podcast every month. You do not need a large following for the show to work, because the guest is the point. Any listeners you gain are a bonus.
Your profile matters here. A prospect who checks you out mid-conversation should land on a host with a catalog of episodes, not a vendor with a list of services.
The Front Door Still Matters
The podcast is the back door. It reaches owners who ignore sales messages. Still, the show is only half of how MSPs use a podcast to land new clients, since a small team can only record so many interviews a month.
So the same prospect list gets worked from the front door too, with direct cold email and LinkedIn outreach. Those prospects are now warmer, because they have been seeing your show and its guests for weeks. See how the MPS system fits those pieces together.
The two engines feed each other. A prospect who declines the interview may still reply to an outreach message. A guest who is not ready to buy may refer a peer who is.
Where MSP Owners Tend to Stop
The idea is easy to like. The workload is what stops people. Four recordings a month means all of this, every month:
- Four episode edits
- Four audio cuts
- Four short clips and four quote cards
- Four sets of show notes
- Roughly two dozen platform uploads
- Ongoing guest outreach to keep the calendar full
That list does not include the follow-up track, which multiplies with every guest you add. A common pattern is three or four episodes, then a busy stretch of client work, then a show that goes quiet.
The results also take time. A guest recorded in October may not have a reason to change providers until spring. That lag is normal for any channel, and it is worth reading up on how long MSP lead generation takes to work before judging the show on its first month.
What to Track in the First 90 Days
Revenue will not show up in the first quarter. These numbers will tell you whether the show is building toward it:
- Guests booked per month against the number invited
- Episodes published on schedule
- Referrals to new guests from past guests
- Conversations opened in the weeks four to six window
If guests are saying yes and referring others, the engine is running. The conversion comes later, on the guest’s timeline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an audience before starting a podcast for prospecting?
No. The audience that matters most is the guest you are interviewing. Listeners help, and a library of episodes builds credibility over time, but the show works from the first recording because the guest relationship is the goal.
What if a guest realizes I run an IT company?
Many will, the moment they look at your profile. That is fine. The rule is that the invitation and the interview are not a sales pitch. What owners resent is not who you are. It is being tricked into a sales call.
How long before a podcast guest becomes a client?
It depends on the guest’s timing, not yours. Some will have a reason to switch within weeks, others not for a year. That is why how MSPs use a podcast to land new clients comes down to the follow-up schedule as much as the interview.
Book a 22-Minute Pipeline Review
The owners who ignore your pitch will still answer an invitation to talk about their business. Your guest list and your prospect list can be the same list.
Managed Prospecting System runs content, back door prospecting with podcasts, cold email + LinkedIn outreach for IT firms with 5 to 50 employees. In a 22-minute pipeline review, we will look at your target list and show you how a guest-first show would work for the owners on it.
Book Your 22-Minute Pipeline Review
About the Author
Jim Punzenberger is the founder of Managed Prospecting System. He ran his own IT company for ten years before selling it in 2012, and has since worked with more than 145 MSPs on their prospecting.
He hosts the Prophets of IT podcast, where technology business owners talk about what is working in their companies.
Sources
- Gartner, “B2B Buying: How Top CSOs and CMOs Optimize the Journey.” Share of B2B buyers who prefer a rep-free sales experience. https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey
- Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell, “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012. Share of speech spent on personal experience and willingness to forgo money to self-disclose. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3361411/
- Edelman and LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. Decision-maker trust in thought leadership versus marketing materials. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2024-02/_2024%20Edelman-LinkedIn%20B2B%20Thought%20Leadership%20Impact%20Report%20Final.pdf
- Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2025. Monthly podcast consumption among Americans aged 12 and older. https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial-2025/
