How are sales and PR related?

PR and sales are connected through trust: PR helps a brand to become a familiar, understandable and safe choice, and this reduces customer doubts and facilitates the transaction. But PR does not directly stimulate sales – it can expand the funnel at the entrance and greatly affects the quality of the audience entering the sales funnel.

PR doesn’t sell, but it sets the stage: it makes a brand or product recognizable, builds a reputation, explains the value of the product, and removes some of the questions even before the first contact with the seller. In other words, good PR does not «sell head-on,» but makes it easier to sell.

The connection of sales and PR is particularly visible in cases where the client takes a long time to make a decision. When several people are involved in the choice, and the cost of making a mistake is high, not only the offer is important, but also the brand’s sense of reliability. It is PR that helps to create this feeling: through expert comments, publications in specialized media, cases, studies, speeches and other formats that confirm the competence of the company.

PR affects sales through several mechanisms:

1. PR increases awareness: the client has already heard about the company and does not perceive it as a «noname». 
2. PR enhances trust: the brand looks more stable and professional.
3. PR helps at the selection stage, when a client needs arguments to explain his decision to colleagues, a partner, or even himself. 
4. After a deal, PR is also useful: it supports loyalty, helps retention and repeat sales.

Russian businesses often want to see this connection of sales and PR directly, to measure it the same way they measure advertising campaigns. But it’s like evaluating human relationships by the number and price of gifts. PR has its own metrics: the number and quality of publications, coverage, number of mentions, tonality, voice share, etc. To communicate with sales, there are more applied indicators: the growth of incoming requests, visits to the site from publications, the number of meetings after PR activities, acceleration of the transaction cycle.

In practice, PR support works best when it is embedded in sales, rather than living separately. It is important for teams to share insights: sales knows the typical objections of customers, and PR understands which topics and formats inspire confidence in the market. Then the PR content begins to cover the real questions of the audience even before talking to the manager, and not just «create an information guide.» That’s exactly what its business sense is: not in volume, but in reducing barriers to purchase.