Podcast interview questions for B2B guests.

What makes a question work

• It is about their work, not your product. "How did you..." gets more than "What do you think of...".
• One decision at a time. A question with two parts gets half an answer.
• It leaves room for specifics: a number, a date, a tool, a team.
• It is open, never yes or no.
• It is short. If you need a paragraph to ask it, the guest needs a paragraph to decode it.

A list to copy

Replace the parts in brackets, keep the questions that fit your guest, and drop the rest.

Opening
- What does a normal week in your job look like?
- What were you brought in to fix when you started in this role?

The decisions
- What is one decision from the last year that changed the numbers?
- What did you try first that didn't work?
- How did you get the team, or the owner, to agree?
- What did it cost, in money or in time?
- Which number told you it was working?

The disagreement
- What does your industry get wrong about [topic]?
- What advice do you hear a lot that you would not follow?
- Where do you disagree with your own peers?

The listener
- What would you tell someone in your role who starts on this next week?
- What would you do first with half the budget?

Closing
- What are you working on now that you can't stop thinking about?
- Who should we have on the show next?
- Where can people find you?

The follow-up does the real work

The prepared question opens a topic; the follow-up gets the answer. Three work on almost anything a guest says: "What did that look like in practice?", "Which number changed?" and "What would you do differently?" Listen for the moment the guest names something specific, and stay there.

What the answers became

On Future of Hospitality, answers to questions like these became ten answer pages and four whitepapers built on what guests said. Asked about staff turnover, Cindy Kasanmoeseni said to look at managers before pay, because extra salary holds an unhappy employee for about a month. Asked about direct bookings, Jonatan Joseph Tsuff said a hotel's own website has to be as easy to book as Booking.com. A specific answer like that can be quoted, found in search and linked back to the episode. A general one can't.

What to send the guest

Send the three or four main questions with the briefing, not the whole list; what else goes in the briefing is in our guide to podcast guests. A guest who sees every question in advance tends to rehearse, and a rehearsed answer is the one you can't quote. Coach writes the questions for every guest, and after the recording tells you which ones got the best answers.