Is PR all about sales?

I enjoy the RLM PR newsletter every month, there’s a whole mixed bag of content and they are an opionated bunch at RLM…. which is a good thing!

In this month’s newsletter, Erin Mitchell has a soapbox piece looking at the ROI from PR.

The article argues for a more common sense approach to measuring PR.  This is somthing I agree with, we need to tie PR back to a company’s business objectives and look at how well PR contributes to those objectives.  Of course that opens the debate on how we measure how PR is contributing.  Erin writes:

“To me, measuring ROI of PR programs has always been really simple: The purpose of a well-executed PR program (with few exceptions) is to drive sales. �Sales,� in this context, comes in different forms�prescriptions written, product purchased by consumers, legislation passed�you get the idea: it is supposed to contribute to the company�s tangible bottom line.”

Now there’s a lot of merit to that idea, but I’m not sure it’s always as easy as that.  If the company is selling directly from the web, then analysis of sales patterns to coverage might indicate performance, but where companies are selling through a direct sales force or indirectly through channel partners it becomes a more complex equation.  And there are other factors that might impact that analysis.  For example what if the company in question is weak at converting sales or has poor channel management.  How do we compensate for those factors?  If there’s loads of well qualified leads but no sales, has PR (and marketing) failed? Probably not. Surely what we have to do is look at what point PR hands over the opportunity to a different department, because it is hard to be measured on something that you have no control on.

One other area of discussion is Erin’s comment that “Some of us folks who toil in PR have forgotten the core purpose of what we do: deliver complete stories to the right media.”

Of course PR extends far beyond media relations. Some practitioners never talk to the media, they’re focused on internal communications, community relations, analyst relations etc. PR’s diversity is what makes it great, it’s also what makes it hard.