Fearless Partnerships: How Robin Generated 3,000 Leads From One Podcast Interview – In Just 7 Minutes with Robin Waite

Resources/Links:

• Improve your sales strategy and boost your profits. Click here: https://www.robinwaite.com

Summary

Have you ever felt like your marketing efforts are more of a grind than a growth strategy? You’re posting on social media, sending emails, and doing everything the so-called experts recommend, yet the results are frustratingly slow. It’s exhausting, and worse, it feels like you’re bending your ethics and personality out of shape just to keep up. What if there was a smarter, more genuine way to attract leads without all the noise?

Robin Waite is the Founder of Fearless Business, regular speaker at various business events and bestselling author of several books, including Online Business Startup,
Marketing Machine and the recent popular release, Take Your Shot.

In this episode, Robin cracked the code by focusing on intentional relationship-building. He reveals how one strategic podcast interview landed him 3,000 leads. Learn to achieve with less effort and more authenticity.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 02:08 – How Robin generated the 3,000-lead in one podcast interview: Get hyper intentional.
• 03:06 – Robin’s valuable top tip to generate 3,000 leads: Align my marketing by hanging out with cool people [top 10 people in your list to get hyper intentional with]
• 10:40 – Encouraging words from Robin: “When they see somebody like Ali Abdaal or Dan Priestley they don’t want to approach them. And I think they are only people. You go and speak to them, have a conversation. Be a little bit fearless. And just start that conversation and see where it goes.”

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“Be intentional, write that list (10 people to get hyper intentional with). I need to make sure I'm getting into the same room as them.” -Robin Waite Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Welcome everyone to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. Got a special treat for you today. I have got Robin Waite here all the way from. Robin, good day from down under, where are you calling in from?

Robin Waite 00:20:
I’m in Gloucestershire. So, southwest of the United Kingdom.

Tom Poland 00:24:
So if we are down under that must mean you’re on top of the world.

Robin Waite 00:27:
Absolutely, yeah. Always.

Tom Poland 00:29:
Yeah. Compared to me, literally. We’ve done a little bit of work together in terms of the joint venture space, but he absolutely blew it out of the park in terms of supporting us. And you know, I was just so impressed with not just the size of the following that Robin has, but the responsiveness from his people, which always tells me that this is a person who looks and does the right thing by people including his subscribers. So I’ve invited Robin onto the show to share a bit more with you about some of his marketing magic. For those of you who don’t know Robin, he’s the founder of Fearless Business. He is a regular speaker at various business events and bestselling author of several books including Online Business Startup, Marketing Machine, and a very more recent but very popular release of Take Your Shot. So I just want to underline that Robin’s marketing is fresh, it’s authentic, it’s original, it’s common sense, and it works. There’s not a BS thing going, there’s no smoke and mirrors required. What you see is what you get. So that’s very refreshing. Subject today is, Fearless Partnerships: How Robin Generated drum roll… 3,000 leads from one podcast interview. Folks, I’m going to start the seven-minute time in a second, but I’m going to abandon the normal seven questions that you are used to because there’s a bit to unpack here and I want to make sure we get the time to unpack that. Robin, as time starts now, how did you generate 3000 leads from one podcast into you?

Robin Waite 02:08:
Well, yeah, like you said, a lot to unpack, but essentially it started at the end of 2022. After 18 years in business, I was just fed up with all of the Noah’s Ark style marketing that all the gurus and everybody else purported that I’d been following for quite a number of years. So what I mean by that is like social media posting every like five times a day doing all the usual sort of video marketing, short form content, all of that sort of stuff. I was just fed up with it. It literally felt like Noah’s ark, like one by one by one by one in terms of lead generation in terms of enrolling clients. It was slow. I was tired. Like I know I’m only 40, but it would just reach that point where enough is enough. I think a lot of people…

Tom Poland 02:46:
…are singing off the same hymn shit as you, right? I think a lot of people have a similar experience.

Robin Waite 02:50:
That’s it. And we’re all fed up with the cold dms that are out there in rife and the emails arriving out of the blue that are just by my stuff, by my stuff.

Tom Poland 02:58:
You just send the requirement to bend your personality and your ethics out of shape and the hard labor of the cold face of posting and posting and posting and hearing crickets.

Robin Waite 03:06:
That’s it. So, I just decided to abandon it altogether. I just gave up. I didn’t know at the time specifically what I was going to do instead. But one of the nice things is when you stop doing something, it gives you space and time to think about what might potentially work and the thought which kept on rolling around in my head is like, what if you know, my dog Wilber was going to get it if in a week’s time I didn’t get capture a thousand leads, what would I do? And it was none of that old stuff, right? So I just set myself this target and realized that I was really good at building relationships with people and sort of getting into people’s worlds and being able to help them and add value and things like that, right? I also noticed that these people like yourself, Tom, are just generally really fun, cool people to hang out with. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could align my marketing with hanging out with these really cool people? So that started the journey really. So 1st of January, 2023, I wrote a list of 10 people that I would just love to hang out with. They were just really great fun people doing awesome things.

Tom Poland 04:08:
About 18 months ago.

Robin Waite 04:09:
About 18 months ago, that’s it. Yeah. And so that list included people and some of these people, your listeners might know, some maybe not, but they were important in my world. Ali Abdaal, who’s a Productivity YouTuber, that’s Daniel Priestley, who’s written goodness knows how many books. Incredible entrepreneur, yeah. Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO, there were two guys, Andrew and Pete. Anyway, I wrote this list down of 10 people who I just thought would be fab to spend some more time with and then got hyper intentional. I was like, right, how am I going to nurture these relationships with these 10 people that are on my list? And by that I meant not just kind of pithy, just a bit of support here and there, but actually really get into their world and really show that I care about them.

So the first tip was kind of like, be intentional, write that list. But the second thing then was right, I need to make sure I’m getting into the same room as them. I think in 2024, like nowadays, and you must get this Tom as well, it’s really easy to just hide behind a computer and just that’s what drives the social media marketing like gurus type stuff these days. I was like, no, I need to get out and actually put myself in a room with these people. And not only that, but add some value. So where this starts, I recognize we’re halfway through now, so I’ve got a motion now, but some, and do, stop me if you’ve got questions. So where the 3000 leads came from in that one podcast interview, everything started to center around Ali Abdaal and I’d already pre-built a bit of a relationship with him.

We were part of a mastermind together several years ago. So I kind of knew of him and he knew of me. But, I went to an event and I just showed up. I started being helpful. I was giving, there’s like 500 people that see Ali. I started giving people directions, helping them out, talking to them about making sure you’ve got your Ali’s book handy so you can get it signed. And I noticed as well that he captures a lot of content, but people were asking questions and they didn’t have a mic and I noticed one at the front of the room. So I just went down and picked up the mic and started handing it out. So, and his team were kind of looking at me, but they knew me anyway and, but it was just like, oh, Robin’s just been helpful, right?

So this kind of continued, I got to know his team over that sort of first six months last year and started just giving them a bit of free coaching. Because that’s what I do. It’s my wheelhouse. Six months of just solid, just nurturing that relationship and the others as well. That’s right. And just being helpful. I think I gave about half a dozen coaching sessions across his team through that first six months. So obviously my time’s valuable, but it was a worthwhile investment. And then one day one of his team said, listen Robin, this has been so incredibly helpful. Is there anything that we can do for you? And I said, well perhaps there is because maybe you’ve got, yeah, it might be. So I said, I know the chat was about Ali’s podcast manager, Amber. So I said, look, I know if you can just pop a note to Amber and just say, listen, I know Ali’s got two seasons recording coming up, so, and he does a dozen episode per season and he does it in person and they do it all back to back.

So that’s 24 interviews back to back over the course of two or three weeks. And I said, listen, if one of them doesn’t make it, because I will fly in from all four corners of the globe. I said, put me on the subs bench. I don’t want to ask you to put me on the podcast because I know that’s a big deal. And he’s had Ben Francis from Gymshark and I’m not that, but if an opportunity comes up, somebody doesn’t show up, put me on the subs bench. So finally in June last year, I got the call on a Thursday afternoon from Amber, ‘Rob, we’ve had somebody drop out, on Tuesday, can you come down?’ Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. Absolutely. And I hung up the phone and I was like, crap, I’ve got two podcast interviews, a coaching client, I’ve got the school drop and pick up to do.

My wife’s up in Birmingham working, so I had to cancel and rearrange everything. And then it was just a train journey down there, we recorded and Ali’s got bearing in mind, he’s got 6 million subscribers. So I knew it was going to be good. But the crux of it was like, and I think a lot of people where they get podcasts wrong is a lot of the time they’re kind of like, hey, look at me. Look how amazing I am. And they forget about this again, this notion of being intentional and adding value to the audience, right? So, what we did is about five minutes before the interview Ali said to me, oh, you know that coaching thing, which you did with SAF one, one of his team members. Do you think we could do that on the podcast? So the first two hours of the show we spent, he just gave me a couple of business-like ideas and we just workshopped them.

We just coached around them and it was amazing. Like the feedback was just incredible. So, and then about two hours into the interview he finally went, oh, it’s a deep dive about Robin, we should probably learn a little bit about you. And so then the last part of it, we talked about my background and things like that, but the kicker was at the end of it, again, leading with value. So what we’d agreed to do was sign 15 copies of my book, Take Your Shot. And we were going to give those. So both of us jointly signed it. I kid you not, those 15 books went within the first five minutes of the podcast launching.

Tom Poland 08:59:
Wow.

Robin Waite 08:59:
So they didn’t even watch the podcast, they just went and clicked and grabbed the link and these requests kept on coming in and I just kept on sending books out. So in the first 90 days we did 15 hundred requests for the book. I think I sent out 600 physical copies to everywhere all around the world, all at my expense. I cover the printing and postage costs. It’s obviously part of my marketing and it’s since gone on to generate 3000 leads. And for context it took me old school, Noah’s Ark marketing, it took me the best part of three and a half years to generate 3000 leads doing all of the grindy sort of work. And I did that in one.

Tom Poland 09:39:
Phenomenal story. I mean a key takeaway for me is that all too often we are impatient. So, we meet someone and we ask them can I be on your podcast, for example? Or we do one thing for someone, then we pounce and you see this on LinkedIn all the time. You know, people connecting, oh, I’d love to add some value on the next day. It’s like, oh, do you need a new website? So, key takeaway for me is, first of all, you talk about being intentional. You are very strategic. So I want to be in the room with as many of these top 10 as I possibly can be. Secondly, you were incredibly patient. Thirdly, you gave and you gave and you gave over six months without a requirement for a return. And if nothing had happened, I’m no doubt you would’ve walked away and gone, well I did some good in the world. Anything you want to add to that? Because I’ve got to wrap this up, but they’re the key takeaways for me. Anything I’ve missed? Anything you want to encourage other people to do if they’re looking to get into the world of developing influences?

Robin Waite 10:40:
Yeah, so the key thing is I think a lot of people are shrinking violets and they’re too afraid. You know, a bit of imposter comes out and they see somebody like Ali Abdaal or Dan Priestley and they don’t want to approach them. And I think they are only people. You go and speak to them, have a conversation, like be a little bit fearless. And just start that conversation and see where it goes.

Tom Poland 11:01:
Fantastic. Love that. And yeah, it’s just good stuff folks. It’s gold. But so glad you’ve shared it with us. I’m so glad you accepted my invitation to come on the show and we got this out. We’ll sprinkle around the internet like confetti at a wedding because the world needs more of this. Robin Waite, thanks so much for your time.

Robin Waite 11:19:
My pleasure.

Tom Poland 11:20
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.