What Your PR Team Really Needs to Help Set You Apart
AI has exponentially complicated the challenge of standing out in the noise of the cybersecurity market. A strong story and a differentiated brand are critical for founders who want to build a powerful, durable presence and command the valuations that come with it. And it’s true at a far earlier stage than in the recent past.
Despite the continual predictions of its demise, public relations is more important today than ever. While GEO is making earned coverage more relevant, AI is also making authentic conversations, influencer interactions and media coverage critical to building differentiated storytelling. Where previous generations could afford to hold off on PR, today’s innovators must move fast to stake their claims and illustrate their innovations.
But, this new push for earlier-stage companies to engage the media has also accelerated a challenge that once fell on the head of marketing to navigate. Today, in many cases, it’s a challenge to be mediated between the PR professional and the founder.
At the earliest stages of a new company, the founder is integral to every aspect of operations. They are critical to all early successes, but as Charles Gold points out in his recent post, if the company is to scale and succeed, this phase has a shelf life.
While sales and marketing are the most obvious and immediate areas where the founder needs to loosen the reins, the Founder Dependency Problem rears its head in just about every other aspect of the business, from recruiting to engineering and more publicly in the realm of public relations.
The Founder-Led Opportunity
At the beginning, the founder is supported by media that may know them from previous positions and value their insights and opinions. Their name is the brand and their pedigree is the differentiator. They are the new kid on the block and benefit from the excitement that comes with it. The founder is offered a platform to start telling their story, resulting in stories that build ‘Founder Buzz.’
The CEO plays a critical role in building early awareness, but ongoing media interest or coverage relies on a deeper and more consistent story anchored by innovation, uniqueness and credible supporting points.
At later stages, PR is critical to building and amplifying the brand, but at this early stage it serves to first create awareness and visibility, educate on an unsolved customer challenge, and ultimately soften the ground for critical first sales. But, here’s the rub. Once the founder’s story has been told, the media needs a story that feeds their readers – one anchored by context, data, insights and customer challenges/solutions.
The Founder-Led Challenge
During the Founder phase, stories are unrepeatable because narratives largely reside inside the founder’s head. This means there’s inconsistent alignment to overarching company messaging and each conversation is different; each story follows its own agenda and many have no direct affiliation with the company’s goals. Compelling conversations are confused with strategic positioning, which can, and should, be tailored but must build consistency.
A PR consultant, if engaged at this stage, has a charismatic entrepreneur who can sell the company story passionately, but has not yet committed to the best version of that story.
The PR person is faced with one of the greatest startup opportunities —
- Inconsistent storytelling, which cannot be replicated
- Messaging that is constantly changing, based on the last sales or investor meeting
- But also, a blank slate to start sculpting the story, once the founder commits
Building Beyond Founder-Led
And that’s the key – founder commitment and operational alignment. At this point the Board wants third-party stories that add credibility to their sales pitch, but without the ICPs that Charles Gold talks about and associated messaging, cultivating media interest is akin to Sisyphus’s battle with the boulder – burning hours and budget for little ROI. And then if a story does run, it can be potentially unusable or damaging because it undermines the company’s most strategic sales and growth opportunities.
The reality is that in today’s landscape there are fewer journalists, and even fewer who are able to write singular product stories. It’s a stark difference, from even five years ago. Today, reporters need to tell bigger stories with broader importance and for a vendor to earn its place, it must provide industry context, proof points and outside voices – at a minimum.
In an industry built on innovation, cool and new solutions are not inherently newsworthy. The opportunity is to create a compelling, credible company and technology story, based on critical industry insights.
Expect Growing Pains
Like any good pivot, the transition will be slow at first. Media needs to be educated through repeated outreach and conversations. The PR people and new spokespeople need to be consistent and compelling. The story may lose some of the founder excitement, but that can be replaced with new components that tell a richer, more detailed story. This is a feature not a bug; it means that the company is gaining industry relevance.
At the beginning, it’s easy for the founder to assume that the story isn’t being told correctly or that his team doesn’t have the relationships. At this point, patience and measurement is key. As the founder’s story is replaced by compelling news stories, data and insights, the media engage. And, that engagement is critical – is it resulting in coverage? Does the media see the timely and compelling story? Or, do we need to rethink the approach, messaging or assets? This is not failure; it’s an opportunity to reassess and refine.
The result? A foundation that will serve the company’s longer term goals and see them through the next few phases of growth.
Making the Pivot – Two Possible Paths
Without the right team, ICP and messaging, all related go-to-market functions suffer similar fates. Here are two possible public relations scenarios, one which falters and another, where all of the pieces are in place.
Scenario 1: Founder hires PR firm and is immediately frustrated by all the requests and questions. The founder, accustomed to talking about themselves, their company, their tech and what makes them innovative and unique, struggles with a messaging platform that requires a more surgical approach, one anchored on customer challenges and supported by real data insights, anecdotes, research and objective data points that illustrate the greater challenges and opportunities facing the industry.
For the program to scale, the PR team needs a messaging platform that can be repeated by multiple voices from multiple perspectives. This repetition can feel stale to the founder, but in fact it lays the foundation to ensure the consistency that allows for scale. For founders that get bored with repeating the same messages, it’s important to note that three solid messages that can be repeated, reused and reworded, always beat nine disparate ones that leave the audience struggling to connect the dots themselves.
Unfortunately, in this scenario the founder can’t resist the urge to constantly tinker. They want to review every communication, obsess over every word, become paralyzed by potential competitive challenges, grind the machine to a halt and quickly become frustrated by the team’s lack of creativity, seeming unwillingness to engage media, inability to land stories exclusively focused on the company and its tech.
The PR pro, their counsel merely frustrating the founder, continues to assist where they can but no longer bring the same level of enthusiasm, creativity or risk taking, understanding that the stories the company can support are not the stories a reporter will write or the industry will read.
Scenario 2: The founder invests time and resources into the messaging platform, ICPs and sales pitch. They select a PR professional, firm or consultant who’s also experienced in tailoring these materials for wider conversations within their industry.
Here’s the worst-kept secret among sales, marketing and PR people: While consistency is critical, the media want a story, messaging and support points that are tailored to their audiences. Think of this as a venn diagram, where the interests of your customers, prospects, partners and investors all overlap with various components of media coverage.
So now, PR has a platform that speaks to customer concerns without being an overt sales pitch. It has the support points and data that build credibility and a platform that allows for consistency, while also serving as the springboard for creativity.
A PR playbook is created with a variety of topics and angles tailored to all of the critical outlets and influencers. This empowers the team to create a consistent cadence of coverage, leveraging a bench of spokespeople. Stories illustrate the company’s momentum, innovation and vision. One building on the next to create a surround sound of coverage that feeds the marketing engine.
The big takeaway: Founders are renowned for their sense of urgency and dedication to the mission, but this can only fuel the engine for so long. Soon, the company must take a more measured, repeatable approach that may feel slower at first but quickly builds speed and scale. This is where awareness, credibility and market leadership are built.
Structuring for Success
The key to success is process, structure and people. Here’s the checklist we use with our emerging clients.
✅ Structured messaging platform. More than a company backgrounder or data sheet, this platform will discuss market and competitive opportunities and challenges.
✅ Asset Repository. A database of anecdotes, supporters, data and proof points that add credibility to your story
✅ Executive Bench. Who else can tell the story? Bringing in different experiences and perspectives to tell a more complete story and tailor conversations to a reporter’s focus.
✅ Clear Goals. And, an understanding of where PR can help and where it can’t. For example: PR is great for raising awareness and generating assets to be used in demand generation programs. It is not your best tool for lead generation.
✅ The Right Partner. There are a lot of PR professionals, consultants and firms. When making the transition, it’s important to have someone who knows your space, how to work with your CEO and how to evolve the program into what it needs to be.
✅ Structured Collaboration. More than just about any other partner, the PR team must be an extension of every aspect of the business, not just marketing, but finance, the C-Suite product development and research. The more the team knows the better it can align and remain agile when the unexpected happens. The greater level of trust, the better the outcome.
Scaling Your PR – Where to Start, a Checklist
| Company POV | Ensure your message is repeatable and consistent |
| Product Benefits | Spotlight innovation through the customer lens, highlighting outcomes and customer value |
| A Structured Messaging Platform | Step 1: Ensure Alignment A structured messaging platform and marketing program help ensure all activations are tied to a specific desired outcome |
| A Structured Messaging Platform | Step 2: Add Context Innovation cannot exist in a vacuum; where does it fit in the industry and your prospect’s environment? |
| Proof Points | Credibility is king. Document customer and technical evidence to support your messaging |
| Expand Your SME Bench | Leverage your experts to tell the company and technology story from various perspectives, anchored in each’s area of expertise |
| Prioritize Your Topics | The industry narratives, related to your company where you have the expertise to lead the conversation or add perspective |
| **Bonus Points for Expert Commentary** | Task your team with talking about industry challenges, opportunities and trends without talking explicitly about your company or product |