When you’re in PR, you get very used to “the big question:” How does any of this boost revenue?
It’s a fair question. The relationship is not as direct as any of us—even PR pros—would like. The fact remains that no single placement closes a sale on its own. An interview doesn’t add an email to the mailing list.
Connecting the dots between brand awareness to pipeline demand is something our team is always exploring.
Meet the Experts
Read on to get their perspectives on PR’s role in modern marketing and sales strategies, how earned media influences buyer decisions, and why cross-functional alignment drives brand elevation.
Aligning PR With Business Goals
Let’s start with the question that comes up in almost every leadership conversation. How does PR actually connect to revenue?
Grace Torrance: From a PR perspective, the starting point is alignment with business goals. Earned media strategies should reflect the industries a company wants to lead, the audiences it needs to reach, and the markets where it intends to grow.
When PR priorities align with those business objectives, media coverage places the brand directly in front of key decision makers. Not to mention, it equips sales and marketing teams with powerful proof points that can be leveraged for customer and prospecting conversations, offering real-world examples that resonate in specific industries.
Melody Curran: Yes, we see that this kind of outside validation carries real weight. A salesperson who can reference recent coverage in a respected publication immediately establishes credibility. Third-party recognition reinforces the brand’s authority and gives sales teams something tangible to reference in outreach.
GT: Absolutely; media coverage, customer stories, and thought leadership give sales teams tangible results they can bring into conversations with prospects. The influence may not always show up in a simple attribution model, but it plays a real role in shaping purchasing decisions.
It remains an earned discipline that builds credibility and trust over time. The outcomes often show up in reputation, visibility, and market perception. Those factors influence purchasing decisions even when they are difficult to quantify. Understanding that long-term impact is an important part of evaluating the value of PR.
MC: When organizations bring PR, marketing, and sales together under an integrated strategy, each earned media placement becomes more than a single moment of visibility. It becomes part of a larger system that supports awareness, credibility, and business growth. And that is how a press hit contributes to pipeline.
Turning Coverage Into Pipeline
So, if simple models don’t capture the reality of the impact, how do you position it to leaders? What’s your strategy to help them understand?
MC: One way to explain how PR connects to revenue is through a revenue credibility framework:
- PR earns third-party authority
- Marketing scales its impact
- Sales activates it with buyers
- Revenue follows
GT: Yes, I love that. It captures the importance of integration. PR creates the story and the credibility. Marketing expands the reach of that story. Sales teams use those insights to strengthen conversations with prospects.
I’ll add, though, that I also encourage clients to redefine PR. It should be viewed as the “brand awareness engine,” rather than the sort-of crisis-control lever that it’s often perceived as from the outside—you know, the idea that PR is for responding when things go wrong or managing the message around a difficult decision. That’s a part of the job, but it’s not the core of it. The real work is building a solid foundation through consistent engagement, so they’re operating from a baseline built on familiarity, credibility, and trust.
MC: That’s the ticket: familiarity. It really is critical to understanding the link between PR, marketing, and sales—especially in B2B environments. Major purchasing decisions happen relatively infrequently. When buyers do begin evaluating options, they usually start with a shortlist of companies they already recognize and trust.
PR creates the credibility, marketing amplifies the story, and sales activates the opportunity. When those teams work together, press coverage becomes a pipeline driver.
GT: Yes, and that simple shift in thinking at the outset helps reset expectations and clarify the value, because it provides a framework that justifies ongoing PR engagement and direct metrics that we can track to demonstrate that we’re fulfilling our promises.
Breaking Down Internal Silos
What about internally? How will PR and marketing teams need to adjust if they want to reposition in the ways described above?
GT: Many organizations struggle with internal disconnects. Marketing teams often operate separately from sales teams, and both are separate from PR and communications. These groups are working toward the same overall objectives, but they do not always share information, coordinate efforts, or even use metrics that align with one another.
When teams remain siloed, valuable insights from media coverage or marketing campaigns do not always reach the people who need them most.
MC: Yes, and that’s something that has come to light on both sides as Matter has moved toward deeper integration and collaboration. It not only helps client programs, but it helps us be better at our work. It’s like the “everything is a nail” phenomenon; when you’re stuck in one camp or the other, the answer is always the tool you have.
But when you open up to that other world, it becomes so obvious that your go-to strategy isn’t always the right one. On the marketing side, we’ve learned alongside leaders that if a brand has not been visible in industry conversations, they’re unlikely to even make it onto buyers’ lists of contenders. Earned media helps ensure the brand remains top of mind in a way that advertising often can’t, because—frankly—a lot of brand marketing blends together, especially when we’re talking about overlapping tools.
An integrated approach helps bridge that gap. PR and marketing teams can package insights from external communications in ways that sales teams can easily use in conversations with prospects. That translation layer is often the missing link between visibility and revenue.
Why Trust Drives Conversion
You’ve mentioned trust—credibility—a lot. How does that fit into the big picture?
MC: Trust sits at the center of everything we are talking about.
GT: It’s everything. Trust often sits behind the decision to buy, and that’s ultimately what we’re working toward for every client. We establish that trust, marketing reinforces it, and sales maintains it when the buyer is ready to act.
MC: That’s the thing—organizations want their audience to believe three things: they have expertise, insight, and solutions. All of this relies on trust, and media coverage plays an important role in building that. Consistent visibility in respected publications signals authority and expertise. Marketing then reinforces that credibility across channels, so it stays top of mind.
When you step back and look at the entire funnel, trust determines whether awareness turns into business relationships.
To many practitioners, PR’s resilience amid economic and cultural volatility is proof, itself, of PR’s critical role in the sales cycle. Unfortunately, business cases aren’t written in anecdotes and theory. They’re built on hard numbers, measurable progress, and outcomes achieved. And the key to finding those proof points lies in seeing PR as part of a much bigger initiative, working in close concert with marketing and sales to strengthen credibility, build trust, and grow pipelines over time.