SELL PR TO KEY STAKEHOLDERS WITHIN YOUR COMPANY
With PR, as with most things in life, it’s impossible to focus your energy everywhere. A strategic approach to PR means concentrating your efforts only on those areas that support your most important business goals, and building consensus for PR right from the start ensures that everyone will rally behind the specific plan you end up implementing later down the line.
As you consider leveraging PR to help you accomplish your goals, it’s critical that you gather support among key stakeholders in the organization. This means building support for PR as a strategic tool, some of the major PR activities you plan to implement, and the level of resources your organization is willing to spend on PR. By building consensus at the beginning, you eliminate the shots across the bow that will otherwise occur once you’ve developed your PR plan and have begun rolling it out. You also ensure that the specific plan you develop is in line with your organization’s resources.
If key stakeholders in your organization haven’t bought into PR, you can expect them to raise questions later during the process. They may not understand why PR is a priority. Or they may not have bought into the importance of the particular program you develop, failing to understand how it will bring about the company’s business objectives. Suddenly you’ll be operating in fire drill mode, wasting precious energy responding to people’s complaints rather than proactively implementing your program to achieve the results you seek for your company.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IN SYNC
Obtaining buy-in for your PR program from key stakeholders in your organization will ensure that everyone supports PR and the approach you’ve chosen. This step is critical because it will help you ascertain whether people are in agreement with the high-level objectives of the company and support your PR program to achieve those objectives. If people have differing opinions about the value of PR or the company’s goals, it will quickly become evident, providing the opportunity for dialogue and the ability to align everyone in a single direction.
“It really starts from the outset with understanding the senior executives’ objectives, and then communicating how PR can help,” says Rick Romatowski, former chief operating officer at Open Interface North America, a pioneer in Bluetooth technology. “When you build consensus around what your goals are and then wrap that into your PR message, you know that everyone from the executives down to the salespeople will be offering up the same message.”
Charlie Gillette, president and chief sales executive for Knowledge Anywhere, agrees. “I think the key is to explain at a high level how public relations will help the company achieve its business objectives and then gain consensus by bringing that to the board,” he says. “When we did this at Knowledge Anywhere, there would be a few questions as to why we were doing this and what we were really after. But as long as we knew where we were going, what our goals were and the results we were after, board members would quickly fall into place and say, ‘OK, I get it. I support that.’”
EMBRACING THE BEST IDEAS
Another reason that building consensus is important is that it provides the opportunity to obtain additional ideas and understand objections that may not have occurred to you. When you solicit others’ opinions, you obtain new ideas, data points, and perspectives that lead to a better PR program. By failing to build consensus, you risk missing opportunities to leverage the power of PR and how to best leverage it. Think of the political genius of Abraham Lincoln and his effectiveness at bringing together his rivals to create his cabinet after he won the presidency. In her book Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin documents how Lincoln, by embracing a wide range of opinions, was able to develop a course of action that ultimately allowed him to preserve the Union and win the Civil War.1
Similarly, PR managers can make wiser decisions by asking executives, the board of directors, and other key stakeholders to scrutinize their PR program. To develop the best course of action, they need to surround themselves with people who don’t always agree with them, listen to them carefully, and incorporate the best ideas into their program.
Building consensus for PR helps you develop lasting relationships with key stakeholders within the organization. It helps make them feel included and empowered and that their opinion is valued. Conversely, failing to obtain buy-in can quickly lead to bruised egos. People may think you purposely kept them out of the loop, or they may get fired up, believing that you’re not doing what they think needs to be done. Ultimately, they may fail to understand the value of PR and cut your budget in favor of other organizational priorities.
In Getting to Yes , authors Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton discuss how critical it is to allow others to participate in the process. “If they are not involved in the process, they are hardly likely to approve the product. It is that simple,” they write. “If you want the other side to accept a disagreeable conclusion, it is crucial that you involve them in the process of reaching that conclusion.”2
SHARING RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCCESS
By building consensus for your PR program ahead of time, you also make sure that all key decision-makers share responsibility for success. The success of the program doesn’t fall solely on your shoulders; it’s shared by the team as a whole. In the same way that the head coach is ultimately responsible for the success of the football team but relies on the offensive and defensive coordinators to call the individual plays, the CEO is ultimately responsible for the success of the organization but looks to the PR manager to recommend the best approach. Obtaining buy-in all the way up to the CEO level empowers the CEO to keep the board and investors informed about why the approach you’ve chosen makes sense. It also allows you to go back later and say, “We all agreed that this was the right approach. It wasn’t just me out there making the call.”
When you fail to obtain buy-in, the consequences can be devastating. For example, a PR professional who worked for one of our clients had great ideas but failed to build consensus for his program. Eventually he was let go because the company wanted a team player who was willing to solicit other people’s opinions and help the CEO keep stakeholders informed. Failing to share the PR strategy can put the CEO at risk with the board of directors, investors, and other company stakeholders.
By failing to assure collective agreement on your approach, you also run the risk that key stakeholders may undermine the company’s goals. When PR managers fail to build consensus for their program, company stakeholders are more likely to move in different directions, offering the media information to advance their own agenda rather than that of the company as a whole.
ADVANCING YOUR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
Conversely, building consensus ensures that you stay on message once it’s time to develop and roll out your PR plan. You can present your organization in a solidly unified way that advances the company’s overall business objectives.
Take Skytap, an early-stage technology start-up founded by a group of computer scientists at the University of Washington. The company was developing its technology under the radar and was not yet ready to announce it. Nevertheless, executives wanted to build excitement for the company by announcing the fact that two leading venture capitalists in the Seattle area had invested in the company. In addition, executives wanted to leverage PR to attract high-quality job candidates to the company.
To ensure that everyone agreed on these objectives, Skytap Chief Products and Marketing Officer Steve Brodie met with the board of directors to achieve their buy-in. Ultimately, the board agreed and gave the green light to move forward with the program. Brodie then developed a plan and brought it back to board members for their review. “We wanted to make the board members available to the press to answer questions, so briefing them on what to expect and ensuring they were in alignment was important,” he says.
By building consensus before rolling out the plan, Brodie ensured that everyone delivered the same messages without revealing too much or too little about the technology Skytap was not yet ready to announce. “It could have caused problems if one of the board members divulged more than we were prepared to, or if I divulged more,” Brodie says. “And it could have been awkward if we gave different information to different publications and didn’t give everyone a fair shake. Having everyone on board as to what we were and weren’t going to say ensured that we stayed on message.”
In the end, the approach worked beautifully. Skytap received coverage in nine publications, including the three it had targeted. In addition, several high-quality job candidates contacted Skytap as a result of the coverage, saving the company thousands of dollars in recruiting costs. “Coming to consensus as to what we were trying to achieve had huge payoffs,” says Brodie. “We got a lot of positive press. In addition, our recruit flow has really gone up and the caliber has been much higher than what we were seeing in the past.”