Saul Marquez, Founder & CEO at Outcomes Rocket, a marketing agency that helps health tech and med tech companies accelerate growth.
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PR often enters the growth conversation later than it should. By the time communications is brought in, the company has usually already defined the market narrative, identified the buyer priorities and finalized the core message. At that point, PR is expected to create visibility around the strategy rather than help shape whether that strategy feels credible, timely and relevant to the market.
That model no longer fits how buyers make decisions.
Today’s buyers are forming opinions long before they speak with a company. They are learning through search, media coverage, executive commentary, analyst perspectives, thought leadership and AI-generated summaries that pull from information across the web. By the time a formal sales conversation begins, buyers may already have a strong impression of which companies seem credible, informed and worth trusting.
PR Is Becoming Part Of The Revenue System
PR’s strategic value shows up in the way it strengthens how the market understands a company. Through earned media, executive visibility and credible third-party coverage, PR reinforces the company’s position in ways that owned and paid channels cannot always achieve. It also gives leaders room to explain the market problem they see, the perspective they bring and the reason their voice belongs in the conversation.
Convey Communications’ “State of B2B Public Relations” reports that 90% of respondents see strong integration between PR, sales and marketing as highly beneficial to their go‑to‑market strategies, emphasizing PR’s expanded role as a business outcome driver rather than a stand-alone awareness function.
Those numbers point to a broader change in how companies are thinking about PR. Increasingly, PR is being connected to reputation, trust, authority and the commercial story buyers encounter before they ever speak with a sales representative.
What The C-Suite Should Do Differently
For leadership teams, the first shift is to bring PR into the strategy process earlier. Communications should have a voice when the company is defining its market position, pressure-testing its narrative and determining which industry conversations it has the credibility to lead. If PR is only brought in after the message has been finalized, its role becomes narrower by default. It can still drive visibility, but it has less ability to shape whether the message is differentiated, believable and aligned with what the market is already questioning.
The second shift is to treat executive visibility as a strategic business asset, not a reputational add-on. In complex markets, buyers are rarely persuaded by product claims alone. They want evidence of judgment. They want to understand how leaders interpret change, what problems they believe deserve more attention, and where they see the market moving next. When executive visibility is handled well, it creates confidence in the company’s direction before a buyer ever enters a formal sales process.
The third shift is to create a more disciplined connection between PR, marketing and sales. These functions do not need to say the same thing in the same way, but they do need to reinforce the same commercial narrative.
Finally, measure PR through a business lens. Coverage volume, impressions and share of voice still have a place, but they do not fully capture PR’s role in modern growth. Leadership teams should also examine how PR influences branded search, referral traffic, executive authority, account engagement, campaign performance, sales conversations and credibility with priority audiences. The goal is not to force PR into a narrow attribution model. The goal is to understand how credibility, visibility and trust contribute to the conditions that make revenue easier to create.
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