If your company runs a podcast, here's a slightly uncomfortable thought: the intro has probably been heard more often than any ad you've ever paid for.
Do the sum for a second. Every episode, every listener, the same eight or ten seconds. A show with a few thousand listeners and a new episode every week plays that intro well over a hundred thousand times a year, and plenty of TV spots never get anywhere near that. Yet in most cases nobody ever properly chose it.
How intros usually happen
What tends to happen is that somebody needed something for episode one, found a track on a royalty-free site the night before, cut out the bit that sounded vaguely upbeat, maybe stuck a whoosh on it, and that was that. By episode ten it felt too late to change, and by episode fifty the team had simply stopped hearing it. The listeners hadn't, of course (they hear it every single time).
What a good one does
A decent intro tells people where they are within a couple of seconds, before anybody has said a word, and it sounds like the rest of your brand so that someone who knows your ads recognises the podcast, and the other way round. The part people usually get wrong is repetition. Your most loyal listeners hear the intro more than anyone else does, so something that feels exciting on episode one can be grating by episode thirty. In my experience short and warm beats long and dramatic pretty much every time.
A few things I'd do
I'd keep it under ten seconds, because people came for the conversation and they'll be glad you got to it. If you've got a sonic logo, the podcast is the obvious place for it (it's free airtime, really). It helps to have a version without the logo for transitions, plus a short sting for ad breaks or chapters, so that the whole episode hangs together. And please check the level against the voices that follow, because an intro that's far louder than the speech makes people dive for the volume button, which isn't the first impression you're after.
If your intro came off a stock site in a rush, it's quite possibly the easiest sound upgrade your brand can make.