Why your PR team needs CRM software

Over the past couple of decades, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has revolutionized the workflows of your peers in other departments ranging from sales and customer support to marketing and hiring/talent acquisition.

These solutions have radically increased productivity and collaboration, becoming as fundamental to daily work as coffee and email. Like most PR professionals, there’s a good chance you’ve been forced to use archaic software with terrible customer service. Traditional PR solutions waste your PR team’s time with inaccurate contact info, complicated interfaces, disjointed workflows (i.e. having to jump between multiple solutions for researching reporters, sending pitches, and tracking coverage), and subpar support.

These legacy solutions don’t just waste your time and money—they keep you from building meaningful relationships.

If your sales team didn’t use CRM software, they’d be laughed at by colleagues at other companies. The vast majority of PR teams, however, don’t use CRM to maintain relationships with journalists (unless you count spreadsheets which, according to the State of PR 2019, nearly 60% of PR pros rely on daily).

So why haven’t PR teams flocked to CRM solutions?