"Reflecting the views of more than 1,500 professionals, #StateofPR returns for 2019 to paint a picture of a commercially robust industry that isn't always the people-focussed profession it aspires to be."

This is the first thing that I read about the latest research into the UK PR profession by the CIPR and I'll be honest, it didn't exactly make me want to read more. It sort of depressed me.

But it's important to know what's going on in the PR industry, especially on my quest to help transform it with my book Inbound PR so I wanted to dig in to understand why this statement as a summary of the research.

I cover the StateofPR every year (here's 2018, for example, which to me was all about the need for business acumen in PR). This year, I noticed 5 key issues that I want to share with you below. 

#1 PR is growing but still has a skills gap

Republished with permission from ITPR's blog. 

New is always scary, so when we sat down as a team around a year ago and decided we were moving away from ‘traditional PR’ to Inbound PR, it’s fair to say I was a little apprehensive. 

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, plus I’d only ever worked in the ‘old’ version of PR, so moving to something I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of at the time took me a little out of my comfort zone. 

As it turns out, Inbound PR isn’t scary, doesn’t mean learning completely new skills, and certainly doesn’t take long to realise the benefits – especially for our clients, of which there are quite a few new faces!

Inbound PR resonates!

It’s fair to say the Inbound PR way of life has resonated with a lot of our clients, especially those who’s bosses have been sceptical in the past about the value of PR as a business function.

There's a new way of doing media relations - the inbound way. 

It's a much more personalised and effective approach to working with the media and achieving results but to be successful at it, you need to really know your media counterparts. 

As part of that, you need to understand what's important to them and what's going on in their industry. 

That's why I want to run you through some key trends within journalism, media and tech for 2019 that I learned about in a study done by Reuters Institute.

There's a ton in the report so I'm going to share what I found particularly important or interesting. 

7 Tech Trends in Journalism and Media to Watch Out for in 2019

I recently re-read The Challenger Sale. 

Granted, I don't work in sales but everybody sells - whether it's a product, a service or your personal brand. 

I also believe that sales skills are essential for any consultant because they teach you to think differently when you're trying to provide solutions, are doing presentations and pitches or are simply talking to a customer about a difficult situation.

Especially when it comes to solutions, you need to help your customer get to the solution on their own by probing them with questions and guiding them rather than point-blank dropping the solution onto them because that's not how they'll truly adopt it - they need to come up with it on their own so that it sticks and so that they firmly believe in it. 

Back to the book - it lays out the ideas and strategies behind some of the most successful sales teams and sales reps and how they perform the job in today's world of sophisticated buyers.

Most of the selling approaches used nowadays are no longer effective because buyers are fed up with being interrogated without receiving any value.

There's a better approach to successful selling that the book promotes - the Challenger model.

Why the Challenger Sales Approach Works?

In only 14% of organisations, the PR and communication department is going through a process of digital transformation. 

This seems rather odd to me compared to 42% for the marketing and advertising department. 

14% to 42% is a big gap. 

I recently discovered one of the reasons for this. 

I flew to Copenhagen early this month to attend an internal training for a rather large organisation where I was asked to be their keynote speaker and specifically present on digital communication and digital communication trends. 

As it turns out, fear is one of the key reasons why the PR/communication department is behind when it comes to digital transformation.

Comms professionals fear technology. They fear the unknown. They fear experimentation and failure. They fear change. 

But as I said in my presentation, fear only holds us back. 

Digital transformation requires change. Yes, change can be scary and change can create resistance but change is good because change means progress.