Knowing how to grow your business with podcast interviews is the single most underused competitive advantage available to entrepreneurs, B2B leaders and thought leaders in 2026. In Episode 148 of The Profit Minds Podcast, Dr. Steven Kirch sits down with Tom Schwab – founder and Chief Evangelist Officer of Interview Valet, U.S. Naval Academy graduate and the engineer who brought military-grade precision to podcast guest marketing.
Tom’s clients are not running a sales funnel. They are running a sales cylinder. Instead of talking to 1,000 people to convert 1 – they talk to 5 targeted prospects and convert 4. And in a world where 70% of the internet is AI-generated content, human podcast conversations have never been more valuable or more searchable.
In this episode, Dr. Kirch and Tom Schwab break down exactly how to grow your business with podcast interviews using the nearbound marketing strategy that is transforming B2B marketing in 2026:
Tom Schwab graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and spent years running nuclear power plants on aircraft carriers. He then went into the corporate world with Stryker Corporation, helping surgeons place artificial knees and hips. He started his own e-commerce business which became HubSpot’s first e-commerce case study. After selling it, he identified that podcast interview marketing could do for businesses in 2026 what guest blogging did in 2012.
He founded Interview Valet, built a team of 20 – two-thirds of whom are military spouses – and has since helped hundreds of B2B companies, thought leaders and founders become the only choice in their category through targeted podcast guesting.
Most businesses are running a sales funnel – and they are exhausted by it. Thousands of cold emails. Hundreds of cold calls. Mountains of social media content. All to convert a fraction of a fraction into paying clients.
Tom’s clients do it differently. They run what he calls a sales cylinder. One podcast interview. Five ideal prospects in the audience. Four become clients. The difference is precision targeting. Knowing exactly which podcasts your ideal clients are listening to. Introduced by a trusted host who transfers their authority to you. Arriving as an expert in the room before you say a single word.
As Tom explains – it is not a numbers game. It is a focus game. And knowing how to grow your business with podcast interviews using this approach is what separates the businesses that are winning in 2026 from the ones still chasing cold leads.
Outbound is cold. Inbound is warm. Nearbound is the gap in between – and it is where the biggest opportunity in B2B marketing lives right now.
Nearbound is about tapping into the existing trust and authority of others to expand your orbit. It is not about yelling to everybody on social media. It is about getting introduced by the right people – the centers of influence who already have your ideal client’s trust. One podcast interview with the right host introduces you to an entire audience that already respects and listens to that host. That trust transfers to you instantly. And as Tom’s client discovered – sometimes the best referral source is not your ideal client but the person who has 10 ideal clients.
Here is something most marketers have not fully understood yet. AI is indexing podcasts. And as 70% of the internet becomes AI-generated content – AI is actively hunting for human content to train on. Podcasts are largely considered human content by AI models.
This means that getting on podcasts is no longer just about reaching human listeners. It is about getting found by AI. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who they should hire for a specific problem – the AI recommends the people it has the most credible content about. Tom calls this the shift from Google to AI discovery. And the businesses that are building their podcast presence now will be the ones AI recommends in the future.
Dr. Steven Kirch is the creator of the Profit Minds™ Growth System, which helps entrepreneurs and professionals accelerate profits through productivity, scalable systems, and AI-powered business strategies.
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