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:

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.

On Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Waddington. It was an inspiring dinner of intellectual curiosity and thought-proving stories and conversatios. I think we both learnt a lot from each other.

Of course, we spent most of the evening talking about the PR industry and our experiences over the years and I kind of got to pitch my concept of Inbound PR and how the inbound methodology is the perfect fit for PR.

There are two main reasons, I said, why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people are natural content creators and storytellers.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

If you are familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, you will see that content is at the centre of inbound (refer to this page to learn more about it). And content is something that PR people do better than anyone in the creative industry – marketers, advertisers or digital experts.

However, the single biggest challenge that PR pros have been facing since forever is measurement. Just google PR measurement and you’ll see tons of articles explaining how AVEs don’t work, we need a new set of tools, how PR hasn’t adjusted to the new era of digital and metrics etc. (See here, here and here for example.)

Inbound makes measurement possible. Inbound also doesn’t work without content.

But there’s even more.

It was the first time I had ever participated in a digital-only congress and it was great fun. How it works you ask? Well, it’s online only – you sign up in order to watch the live broadcasts of the presentations on the designated date and time, and you participate in a live chat after each presentation.

I was invited as a speaker by one of the agencies I take care of at HubSpot (they organise the event) as they noticed that my background was social media and PR and I had written a dissertation and a book on the topic, so they thought it would be quite useful for the participants to learn more about this.

You can still watch the video here, but I thought I'd share the slides of my presentation with you as they very much summarise my findings from back then, adding up some more research and still making the point that PR pros are unfortunately slow to catch up with all that’s being happening in the realm of social media, 10+ years later.