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?

This is a guest post by Mike Davies from ITPR.

Given that 99% of a PRs job is to understand the media and build relationships with journalists, it might sound a bit strange that the practice of “selling in” a story to a journalist can be so nerve wracking.

But this process of pitching stories is often the most daunting task for any new PR exec; and still conjures a few moments of hesitation for the odd seasoned professional.

Anyone who has ever caught a journalist on a bad day will understand why pitching stories can be so nerve wracking. Short replies and quick hang-ups can leave even the most thick-skinned with a feeling of trepidation.

As an ex-journalist, I must confess to understanding some of the frustration felt by my former colleagues.

Like any first in your life, I will never forget the first PR pitch I received as a young journalist that made me question what exactly these public relations people were being paid for.

Not only did the “pitch” start with a generic “hi there”, the story was completely irrelevant to the area I was writing about and had no value to my readers.

Worse still,

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.  

If you run an agency (or any business for that matter), you know how important sales is. After all, it's how you win new clients, expand your service portfolio and generate revenue. 

Through my experience as an agency consultant at HubSpot, I've found that every agency has different sales, service and account management processes. Unfortunately, many don't even have processes which is, put simply, bad business practice (or no business practice?). 

Don't believe me? 

I'll give you the hard facts. 

We recently surveyed over 1,400 agency professionals from around the world to uncover the biggest sales challenges and published those in a new report called 2019 State of Agency Selling. 

Through this survey, we found that 46% of agencies only have a somewhat defined sales process, while the next largest group of 31% doesn't have a defined sales process at all.