How Sales Teams Use PR Assets

Getting press coverage is great, but if you're not taking that coverage and merchandising it, you're barely scratching the surface of PR's value. Posting it on social media doesn't cut it! Earned press coverage = third party validation you should be shouting from the rooftops. Here are some ideas on how to merchandise that coverage: 💡 Have your CEO and/or quoted spokespeople or byline authors share coverage on LinkedIn with additional insights or a discussion prompt. 💡Showcase your thought leadership by including links to recent press comments and articles in your customer newsletter. 💡Add media logos to an "As Seen In" section of your website (make sure you license the logos, if needed!) and sales decks. 💡Use paid ads on social media to drive prospects and customers to press articles that reinforce your POV, show thought leadership, or positively highlight your product. 💡Hype your press wins up with salespeople and other employees and ask them to share it with their networks (provide copy-and-paste posts they can use!). 💡Send personalized, one-to-one notes to high-value prospects about thought leadership content that hits on their needs ("thought you might be interested in what our CEO shared on Bloomberg after our conversation on this topic last week"). 💡Consider incorporating REALLY significant mentions (e.g., Top publication names you as one of 25 companies to watch) into email signatures of folks who interact with customers, partners, etc. 💡Give press hits a shout out in your employee all hands. Seeing the products and services you work on featured in the press can be motivating and inspiring for employees!

Your press hit dies in 24 hours because you're wasting it. Got featured in the WSJ last month? Congrats 🥳 Now what? Most companies treat press coverage like a lottery ticket—celebrate when you win, then move on to chasing the next hit. Meanwhile, the coverage you fought so hard to get disappears into the digital void after less than a day. One good press placement should fuel your content engine for weeks, not hours. Companies of all sizes are missing the mark on this one. That WSJ feature? Turn it into: - A LinkedIn multi-post series exploring each key point from the article - Sales enablement content your team can reference in conversations - Website copy that reinforces the narrative the journalist highlighted - Press page content that shows your media wins - Newsletter content for current and target stakeholders - Social proof for your marketing campaigns and investor materials The companies maximizing their PR understand that coverage isn't the finish line—it's raw material for everything else they're building. I've watched clients turn a single media mention into three months of marketing content, sales conversation starters, and follow-on coverage opportunities. The story keeps working for them long after publication. Your press hits aren't trophies to collect. They're assets to deploy across your entire go-to-market strategy. Most PR agencies hand you the article and consider their job done. The smart ones help you squeeze every ounce of value from the coverage you earned.

One press placement can fuel your pipeline for weeks if you run it through a 3-step check first. I see sales and marketing teams leverage their press team's coverage once and on one channel all the time. We need to shift that mindset since media coverage can be rocket fuel for lead generation. But, I advise both teams to run media coverage through a quick 3-step check before putting that coverage into a touchpoint with prospects. Audience fit → Does this outlet actually reach the people that they care about? Sometimes a niche trade pub will move the needle way more than a big-name headline. Reach metrics → I look at unique monthly visitors. Not just impressions. That number tells me if it’s really worth amplifying. Content depth → Do I have enough material to spin into other formats? A full feature gives me way more to work with than a tiny mention. When media coverage passes that 3 point check, I turn it into 5 revenue touchpoints: add it to sales decks pull it into nurture emails drop it into DMs repurpose for paid ads recycle into case studies This way, one piece of press can show up across a team's whole funnel, instead of just living in Slack for a day and then fading. It’s been a game changer for me. Maybe it helps you think differently about your own coverage too. How do you decide which wins are worth amplifying?

Founder: "PR just doesn't work." Me: "Or did you not WORK IT?" Founders: Don't be passive and assume once you got the backlink from your dream outlet that your website will be flooded, your sales team will be overwhelmed, and your potential VCs will be emailing you. Chapter 12 in my book is, "Making a Media Flywheel to Enable Sales." Here's a snippet: The bottom line of this chapter is that if you’re now investing in earned media, which you likely are if your startup is gaining traction and you understand the power of PR, you’ve gotta squeeze the utter life out of it. When you secure earned media, nab an award, or get to speak on a stage, make completely sure your sales and marketing teams are leveraging those wins. I’ve used this analogy with some founders who speak better in “money”: Your shoes are untied because you’ve been running nonstop. I put one hundred dollars on a table, separating sixty dollars from forty. I tell you to keep running and offer, “You can take the full hundred dollars, but you’ll have to tie your shoes first. Or just take the sixty dollars and continue to run.” What are you going to do? Most founders will take five seconds, tie their shoes, and pocket the hundred dollars. This is a founder who ensures public relations, marketing, and sales are humming together. The other founder takes the sixty bucks and keeps tripping.  So take all the money off the table. Spend a few moments to ensure your sales and marketing people are in sync with PR and doing everything they can to make earned media work with owned media, as we covered in Chapter 1. Here’s a fundamental checklist for the sales and marketing teams to leverage when you get a PR win, award, or speaking opportunity, which we use for the startups we represent as well. In fact, we have an “amplify” team at BAM, rather like a mini marketing arm, that executes a lot of the following. If you’re not doing this in house, you can surely outsource it... #pr