Thanks to Pascal Landshöft - my colleague and friend from HubSpot - for this highly educating guest post! 

Sales is a core function of every business. PR people, however, often fail to integrate it into their communications activities.

In my current role as a sales expert at HubSpot, I personally found that the most successful agencies I work with prioritize and professionalize sales more than the less successful ones.

And they have a real process in place.

To help you define one for your PR agency, here are some thoughts on why and how to enter this thought process to grow beyond your current potential.

Why Should PR Agencies Care about Sales?

I’m a big fan of Spin Sucks. It’s where I learned about PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned) and how to leverage it in PR.

It’s a model that Gini Dietrich – founder of Spin Sucks – has been preaching a lot in the realm of PR for the digital age.

While reading her latest blog about PESO and PR, I was thinking, “Actually, my inbound PR concept fits into each of those quite nicely.”

Here's what they have in common:

• PESO is all about setting realistic expectations and plans, and so is Inbound PR.
• Both make it clear that PR today is a lot more than just media relations.
• And even if you do use media relations, you have to make it a part of a larger, integrated communications or marketing programme.
• They both get your “cash register ring” by fully aligning all activities with the overall business goals.
• Results don’t happen overnight, but if you stick to the plan and track and optimise regularly you’ll see the real ROI.
• PR today crosses all different media types – paid, earned, shared, owned – and uses tools such as email marketing, SEO, lead gen, influencer engagement, social media, native advertising and more.

As Gini puts it, “PR no longer is just about getting your name in print. It’s part of a strategic and measurable marketing program.”

That’s exactly what Inbound PR is all about. It combines the best of two worlds:

Turns out I’m not really normal. Let me ask you something: What do you usually do on a Saturday or Sunday morning? Rest, have breakfast, chat with your loved ones, prepare to spend the day somewhere nice or travel? Can’t say if that’s good or not, but my usual Saturday or Sunday morning doesn’t look like that.

I love waking up early on a Saturday morning, making myself a nice cup of coffee, snuggling on my sofa in my blanket with my laptop in my lap and catching up on all the reading that I’ve missed during the work week. That’s the perfect rest for me. And the additional perk – I learn that way.

Over the years, I’ve garnered a pretty long list of blogs and magazines that I religiously follow. And my little tradition on a Saturday morning is to open up my feedly – where I have all the RSS subscriptions of those blogs and magazines – and go over about 200 articles.

Reading inspires me and feeds my inner need to always learn.

Going over my feedly gives me energy for the rest of the day and the following week as well as new ideas – whether for blog posts that I could write or for advice, tips and new things (e.g. the ‘new kids on the block’ like blab.im) that I could implement at work or show my customers. To quote Jack and Suzy Welch in “The Real-life MBA”, this is my “learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow  technique”.

Thanks to Rachel MacDonald for this really interesting guest post! 

Imagine you are back at school now. You’re in science class. You have a thermometer and you are about to measure your own body temperature. Your temperature rises and so the thermometer’s sensor becomes more ‘red’, right?

That’s how social judgment theory works too. It states that people have a cognitive map that impacts the way messages are received and this map basically works like a thermometer.

The ego involvement you have with a topic determines how red your thermometer can potentially become. If you have a high ego involvement and hear a message that opposes your view on the topic, your thermometer will turn completely red and you’ll reject the message.

The basic premise of social judgment theory is that if the latitude of acceptance is greater than the latitude of rejection the recipient will likely accept the message. So, the theory focuses on low and high ego involvement.

Next to inbound PR, my latest area of interest and learning has been leadership. You may recall my recent infographic on the differences between leadership and management.

I’ve been reading a lot on the topic and recently finished one of the classics: Warren Bennis’ On Becoming a Leader.

It’s certainly a book that I can recommend to anyone, not just people interested in learning more about leadership, and so I thought I’d share with you my favourite quotes.

You can check out the leadership quotes in the SlideShare below, but there were a few other things that impressed me, so here’s some more food for thought for you:

"Change—relentless change—is our weather now. It is that constant and that unpredictable."