With talk of a recession in 2023, it’s more important than ever for organizations to shrink their sales cycle and close as much business as possible. An important step towards doing so is to adjust how an organization’s sales and PR teams collaborate.
Here are three key reasons for companies to integrate PR and sales.
PR Professionals Know Messaging
Messaging is a foundational component of any good public relations professional’s tool kit. Countless hours are spent working with executives to develop the exact wording and phrasing that are used across a company’s website, social media, press releases, and so much more.
PR pros can scale this work to aid business development, including supporting conversations that business development/sales teams are having with prospects.
Consider a sales/business development team that is creating a new email drip campaign for prospecting. Their PR team can lend an eye to messaging incorporated into that email campaign and make suggestions for how to add assets like media placements or customer success stories to build credibility.
Additionally, PR professionals know how to craft a good subject line and opening sentence to gain interest. Short attention spans and the saturation of being sold to means you need to know what makes your audience tick and how to capture their attention.
Adding PR Assets to the Sales Arsenal
PR pros know how to leverage announcements, news, and media coverage to showcase company momentum that a prospect might find interesting. Doing so adds another level of substance to a company’s prospecting efforts and separates them from a majority of sales outbound campaigns that rely on the traditional “haven’t heard from you and just following up” email or phone call.
Also, by adding important company news and media placements in an email signature, in one click prospects can ascertain credibility and value from the company that’s reaching out. This could be the reason why they click on your link or follow through on your CTA.
Sales teams can use PR assets further down the funnel instead of exclusively at the top. For example, media placements, especially coverage in a prominent outlet, can be a big draw for prospects in the “intent” and “evaluation” phases.
Again, this provides credibility to the prospect and shows that the brand has a strong presence in the market. Additionally, media hits can include backlinks that can reinforce referrals and direct organic traffic to your website. In order for this to be successful, strong communication needs to be maintained between both sales and PR.
Customer Success: A Win-win
Prospects love real-world examples, like customer case studies, since they’re tangible and provide an opportunity to evaluate quality of work. Most companies – including your clients – like to talk about business growth and the success they’ve seen, which also benefits you since you were integral in helping them achieve that success.
Having a close relationship with the sales team is critical because they will have their finger on every customer’s pulse. After working with the client, and if there is achieved success worth noting, sales can introduce the customer to the PR team to piece together a customer success story. Once this is developed across an appropriate medium(s) – written, video, audio, etc. – the sales team can incorporate it into their prospecting.
Most organizations see greater success when there is a deep level of inter-departmental collaboration instead of operating in silos, which is unfortunately all too common.
To learn more about Press Record Communications and how we can work with your sales team to increase your company’s revenue and ROI, we invite you to visit pressrecord.co, follow us on LinkedIn, sign-up for our newsletter, or contact us with any questions!
