I want to talk about the moment I stopped selling press to my clients and started positioning what we do as selling for revenue.

Stick with me, because this explains something you’ve definitely lived.

You’ve had a client who absolutely loved your work. They renewed every single month. They couldn’t stop singing your praises. They referred you to everyone they knew.

And then you’ve had another client who got similar results. Maybe even the exact same results. And they churned anyway. Gone the second their initial contract was up.

Same work. Same coverage. Completely different outcome.

Here’s the thing. It’s not about the coverage. It’s not about the placements. It’s about something that happens before the work even starts. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

I love this topic (obviously) because it’s all about making more money in your business without doing more. You keep doing what you’ve always been great at. You just retain clients longer and charge more for the services you’re already providing.

So let’s name the shift.

The version of PR most of us were trained to deliver

There’s a version of PR most of us were trained to deliver. You pitch. A lot of outlets. (We don’t do spray and pray around here, obviously. I’m talking timely, targeted, relevant story angles to a carefully crafted media list.) But you’re still hoping to land coverage in an outlet that has real meaning for your client’s audience.

And it goes like this. You pitch, you place, you report. Over and over, every month.

“Here you go, client. Here’s the coverage we got. Here’s the reach. Here are the impressions.”

And for a really long time, that was enough. I’ve been doing this 21 years, so trust me, that was enough.

Clients understood the value intuitively. Some would ask to see actual ROI, and that’s always been the tricky part of PR, because impressions aren’t automatically linked to a measurable dollar amount. But we could show the value of brand awareness, of the right people seeing your client featured in a targeted top-tier outlet. They knew being in the right publication meant something, even if they couldn’t draw a straight line from that placement to a number.

That era? The one I operated in for two decades?

It’s over.

And that’s okay.

It’s Not That PR Stopped Working

PR didn’t stop working. The business landscape changed around it.

Clients are more sophisticated now. They’re being asked to justify every line item in their budget. And when their CFO, their board, or even their own anxiety asks “what is this PR spend actually doing for us?”, impressions and reach don’t hold up as an answer anymore.

So what happens? They start to wonder if they even need you.

And no amount of fantastic, targeted, top-tier coverage will save that relationship if the lens they’re viewing your services through was wrong from the very beginning.

It’s that feeling of dissatisfaction. They’ve got expectations that aren’t being met. And usually it’s because those expectations were never clearly defined in the first place.

What Actually Keeps Clients in the Door

So what keeps clients in the door? What are the agencies with the highest retention rates actually doing?

It’s not that they’re landing better placements than everyone else.

What they’re doing differently is they’ve changed the conversation from deliverables to outcomes.

I’m going to say that again, because it’s the whole thing. **The conversation centers around outcomes instead of deliverables.**

What do I mean?

There’s a difference between telling a client “we got you into Forbes this month” and telling a client:

*”That Forbes placement drove a 40% spike in your branded search. It brought in three inbound inquiries. And two of your top 10 prospects have now seen your name in a context that positions you as the authority in the room, before you ever even get on a call with them.”*

Same placement. Completely different story.

And that second story does something the first one can’t. It makes you indispensable. Because now you’re not reporting on press. You’re reporting on the business impact of the features you’re landing.

And a client who understands that their PR is moving their pipeline? That’s a client who never questions the invoice.

You know that feeling. I always have it. Every month I make sure the report and the recap email pulls out all the juicy nuggets. We present the data and the features in a visual way that gives them real impact. I summarize it, make it exciting, and then I follow up quickly (it all happens on the first of the month) with our invoice. And I feel great sending it, because look at all the great work we did.

But if you don’t have those clear business impacts baked into how you tell the story of the press you’re getting, you’ll get a client who questions the invoice. Not because the work wasn’t good. Because they don’t automatically see the value of those outcomes.

This is what I mean by the business model shift.

It’s not about doing different work. It’s about connecting the work we’re already doing to the outcomes our clients actually care about. Their revenue. Their customer journey. Their new business pipeline. Their authority in the market. Visibility with the exact people who should be buying from them.

And Then There’s AI

Here’s where AI comes back into this.

AI search pulls from high authority sources. And those high authority sources? They’re the publications we’re getting our clients placed in.

That’s not just an interesting fact. It has me genuinely excited about the work we do, because it makes what we do more important than ever. We can directly impact our clients’ discoverability when people ask questions inside these answer engines and large language models. Those models pull from high authority sources. The exact places we’re landing features.

And that is a reporting opportunity almost nobody in this industry is using yet.

I’m repeating that one, because it honestly surprises me. We get to tie the results we’re landing back to AI discoverability. We can show a client where they started, then show them every month where they’re showing up now in certain searches. Most of our peers aren’t doing this. They’re leaving so much opportunity to serve their clients well on the table.

When your client gets placed in a high authority publication, that placement doesn’t just live in a press clipping. It feeds into how they show up when a prospect asks an AI search engine about their industry, their product, their services. It builds the digital authority that makes them the obvious choice in an AI-curated result.

That’s a business outcome. That has a pipeline impact.

We’ve officially shifted from a world obsessed with SEO to one focused on AEO, answer engine optimization. That’s the world we live in now. And the great news? We’re not competing on price anymore. We’re in a completely different conversation, because the results we get through strategic storytelling are the features that shape how answer engines pull content to share with people searching for answers.

The agencies that figure this out first own their market. The ones who keep reporting on impressions are going to keep fighting for budget and for room as a line item.

AI Doesn’t Replace What We Do. It Makes It More Valuable.

Now, I’m not here to tell you AI is so great and nothing else matters. I get it. As a PR pro, you know AI can write. (You can train it to write pretty well, honestly.)

But that human touch? That deep understanding of an industry? That’s still ours.

This is exactly why I’m always talking about niching down. When you have deep subject matter expertise, when you understand your niche, the players in it, the power moves happening in your space, all of that genuinely helps you. It’s a lever you can pull to amp up your revenue.

What we do as PR pros, leveraging relationships, really understanding the market, finding those nuanced ideas and creating a story out of a nugget, out of a nothing? I’ve tested a lot of AI tools built for PR that are supposed to automate pitching. I’ll tell you straight. It doesn’t work. It still comes back to connections, and timely, targeted, relevant story ideas tailored to each person you’re pitching. That’s what moves the needle. And those features are exactly what then show up as cited sources in the answers AI is sharing.

So AI right now is making our earned media success even more valuable to brands. That skill you possess, that I possess, the one we teach in my Pitch Lab? It’s more sought after than ever.

Some of the outlets worth pitching are shifting too. Press releases carried basically no weight in the Google era. But now company press releases, announcements, consistent messaging across every brand touchpoint, and trade publications mentioning a brand all serve as places AI considers high domain authority. Right alongside the heritage, top-tier outlets we already love.

Why This Only Works If You Niche

Here’s the catch. This only really lands if you’ve niched down.

A generalist agency trying to connect placements to pipeline outcomes across five different industries is going to struggle. But a specialist who owns a clear category and makes this argument to their clients wins every single time.

We own a clear category. We can make this argument in our sleep.

And I know niching down is the one decision so many people avoid, because it feels like you’re leaving money on the table. But it’s actually the thing that unlocks premium pricing. It unlocks your ability to set your rate for your dream client. It gives you a shorter sales cycle. It positions you as an essential service, so clients renew and roll over their contracts without being asked.

We’ve had clients ask for additional services once we’re in, once we see their goals and spot other tactics that would get them there faster. They increase scope, our fee goes up, and we stick around longer.

The shift from selling press to selling revenue is really important. But it’s not complicated.

It changes everything about how you sell, how you retain clients, and how you grow.

That’s the whole game. Put the work where the outcomes are. Own your category. And start telling the story your clients actually care about.

Want the complete system?

I’m hosting a free live masterclass on Saturday, June 20th: How PR Agency Owners Are Making Themselves More Sought After Than Ever in the Age of AI. This is where I walk through the whole thing. Not just niching down. Not just positioning your services for the AI era. The complete system: your positioning, your reporting, the frameworks that secure features for your clients, and the frameworks that make you the go-to authority in your niche.

Link in the comments.