You have to forgive even the most experienced and capable business people when they fail to understand where PR sits in the list of needs for their organisation.

It's something we have to explain time and again in various settings and it's not getting any easier to do because the lines between sales, marketing, advertising and public and media relations continue to blur, mainly due to technology.

Sell, sell, sell

For every commercial organisation everything comes down to selling, when all is said and done. Companies are established with growth as their very reason for being and their directors have a legal duty to work in the best interests of the company to make that happen.

This sets the priority for an organisation formulated this way and every action from that point needs to be a function of achieving profitable sales.

Public relations is absolutely a part of this, but its practitioners regularly find themselves facing demands for their work to tie directly to commercial outcomes.

While this is as it should be, it rarely proves to be as straightforward as it might be for the salesperson or marketer to achieve.

An advertising campaign can be measured either by hard numbers in digital tracking or matching the patterns of phone calls with a new creative campaign going live.

While this can sometimes be the result of PR activity (like a really strong, newsworthy story or a social post or campaign that hits the mark) the public relations toolbox also contains some very powerful tools that need to be used, but are much harder to track and quantify.

Show me the proof!

  • Where on the graph does it show the £8m contract won because we engineered the CEO being on a particular panel with the perfect selection of peers and a totally targeted audience?
  • How can we attribute that full pipeline of deals to the months of work to create goodwill in the community that made you the perfect partner for all of those similarly civic-minded customers?
  • Unless the buyer who calls you because they saw you in the trade magazine tells you so, we'll never know that we just helped land the biggest deal of the year.

These are just a handful of the ways in which PR creates the conditions for the sale and, very often, the kind of work we do is laying the groundwork for the big outcomes that come from deep relationships, powerful evidence of capability and strong links to the community or the industry you're part of.

Creating the conditions for sales

The places a great PR team will put you, the doors they will get you through and the relationships they will create for you can often be the single most transformative activity for growing businesses. They make the difference between going under the radar or being the next most talked about thing.

How to capture and report these things is a constant source of conversation in the PR industry and it's in our own interest to keep finding and implementing as many ways as we can to evidence the impact we make on that all important bottom line.

It is, however, always likely to need enlightened and trusting leaders to understand and know how to interpret the ways in which reputation building is a key support to sales - its just the one with the longest tail.

In the meantime, we'll gladly carry on educating everyone who wants to understand our somewhat dark art and how it can help them achieve that ultimate business aim - growth.