Why PR and RevOps Need to Work Together in Today’s Startup Environment
What do PR and RevOps have in common?
It’s a question we’ve gotten a lot since starting Shape & Scale given our services model breakdown.
It’s also one that we’ve asked ourselves.
You might be inclined to say “not much,” but hear us out.
One is about shaping perception externally; the other is about aligning the internal engine that delivers on it. However, in fast-growth startups — especially today — the two are far more closely connected than they appear.
The Old Way: Siloed, Slow, and Misaligned
In most companies, marketing and sales live in separate lanes. PR often reports up through marketing, while RevOps is frequently positioned as a support role under sales or operations, rather than as a strategic revenue driver.
What we both see on the ground is backed up by the data as well.
According to Muck Rack’s State of PR 2024 report, while 37% of PR decision-making still sits with the CEO, another 23% falls under marketing leadership — split between C-level marketers (12%) and marketing directors (11%).
In other words, PR is most often embedded within the marketing function. RevOps shows a similar structural pattern: 41% of RevOps professionals report to the Chief Revenue Officer, and just 10% to the COO (Openprise, 2024).
And with 45.7% of RevOps leaders coming directly from Sales Operations (Revenue Operations Alliance, 2024), it’s no surprise the function is still often siloed under sales rather than treated as a strategic, cross-functional growth engine.
With PR rolling up to marketing and RevOps anchored under sales, the fragmentation isn’t just structural, it’s operational.
Everyone has their own dashboards, their own KPIs, and their own definitions of success. It works fine… until the CEO one day asks, “Is this working? What’s the ROI?”
Cue the chaos. Marketing says yes, sales says no, and no one’s actually sure how to tell you if these efforts are working or not.
This disconnect isn’t new; it’s unfortunately how things have always been. But it’s also why the jobs of marketing and sales leaders have gotten harder and harder as the years go on. This siloed way of working creates friction, duplicate efforts, and missed opportunities. Startups are now building and scaling faster than ever, so this outdated way of operating simply won’t fly.
The New Way: Integrated from Day One
Startups today are moving too fast to tolerate internal confusion. The companies scaling effectively are completely rethinking how they build their orgs. And that means rethinking how functions like PR and RevOps fit together and work in unison.
When it’s done right, this new structure creates a continuous feedback loop for the entire go-to-market team. Instead of the disjointed, siloed model most teams are accustomed to, this version resembles a well-oiled system.
Sales, customer success, and marketing all contribute real-time insights into a shared system (shout out to HubSpot, amiright?). This includes things like customer pain points, success stories, and buyer behavior. The engine is able to analyze patterns and assess what’s working and what’s not.
PR and comms teams then use those insights to shape external narratives that actually reflect what’s happening on the ground. This includes things like the problems the product is solving, the results it’s delivering, and the value it’s bringing to real customers. These stories enhance brand perception, boost company relevance, and cut through the noise in a crowded market.
How It Works in Practice
Scenario: A mid-market B2B SaaS company rolls out a new onboarding automation feature aimed at enterprise clients.
Step 1: RevOps surfaces key signals.
Inside their unified HubSpot CRM — integrated with Service Hub and product usage data — RevOps notices two signals during their weekly go-to-market sync:
A 30% drop in onboarding time, flagged in customer success dashboards.
A 25% increase in deal velocity for opportunities tagged with the new feature in their pipeline, surfaced via a custom RevOps dashboard.
Because the RevOps team owns shared KPIs across Sales, CS, and Marketing, these insights don’t get buried, they get acted on fast.
Step 2: PR activates those insights.
The comms lead, looped into the same RevOps-aligned GTM engine, turns that signal into a story:
A customer success narrative gets pitched to relevant SaaS media outlets.
A press release —“Startup Cuts Onboarding Time by 30%, Accelerates Enterprise Sales Cycle”— goes live the following week.
Sales enablement assets and landing page messaging are updated to reinforce the story across every touchpoint.
Step 3: Full-cycle impact.
PR coverage drives a 40% spike in traffic to the feature landing page.
Prospects are showing up pre-sold. Media citations are doing the credibility work before reps even hit the call.
The story gets picked up by two industry blogs and a SaaS trends newsletter — feeding directly into the company’s generative AI–driven SEO (GEO) workflows.
Why does that matter?
Because over 90% of GenAI visibility is driven by citations from earned media—a stat that should electrify every communications pro, and that doesn’t even include top-tier outlets like The New York Times or CNN, which have banned GenAI usage entirely.
At this stage, PR becomes algorithmic fuel.
RevOps captures the inbound traffic lift, attributes new pipeline back to the campaign, and logs it as a playbook-ready model.
PS – Want to understand what media sources Google AI uses as citations when people ask questions about your brand? Check out https://inthemix.ai/ by CoverageBook.
What It Takes
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about vibe. It’s about structure.
If you want PR and RevOps to function in sync, you need more than goodwill. You need a culture that prioritizes cross-functional alignment at the operating level.
That means shared metrics. Shared systems. Shared leadership.
And people willing to ditch their functional silos and speak the same operational language, even if they were trained to optimize for different outcomes.
PR can’t be treated like an awareness side quest. RevOps can’t be the fix-it team duct-taping dirty data while the processes go untouched.
Both need to be embedded from day one — not just integrated, but strategically seated under the same executive owner.
More importantly, they need to be trusted.
Otherwise, you’re just running parallel tracks and hoping for alignment by accident.
Now you’re probably asking…so how do I do this?
Three moves in 90 days.
This is just one example, but it’s a play that you can run relatively quickly.
Who you need: Your RevOps lead (or whoever owns your CRM data), your PR/communications person (could be a contractor or agency), a customer success manager who can validate stories, and ideally someone from sales who can speak to which narratives help close deals.
What you need: First, connect your PR tools (Muck Rack, Cision, or alternatives like Prowly/Prezly) to your CRM through Zapier or native integrations—you need to see which stories turn into pipeline, not just coverage reports.
Second, start a weekly 30-minute sync where your RevOps person shares the data (faster onboarding, bigger deals, expansion wins), and your PR person immediately thinks, "How do we tell this story?"
Third, document what's working into a repeatable playbook—which customer stories drove the most qualified leads, what data points make the best headlines, and how long it takes from story pitch to pipeline impact.
Start here:
Week 1-2: Set up basic PR-to-CRM tracking (Zapier works great for connecting Muck Rack/Cision to HubSpot or Salesforce, even simple UTMs work)
Weeks 3-4: Launch the weekly sync with one agenda item: "What data can become stories?"
Month 2: Pick one customer win with real numbers and turn it into coordinated PR + sales enablement
Month 3: Document what worked and what didn't—this becomes your playbook
Why It Works
We recognize that PR and RevOps live on different sides of the spectrum.
But if you can manage to get them aligned, you’ve managed to close a significant gap in your business.
And when these functions are in sync, everything else follows: Internal reporting reflects external messaging, the customer journey becomes a natural extension of the brand narrative, and over time, the go-to-market engine becomes much more self-sustaining.
If you want to achieve alignment between marketing and sales, you can’t afford to let PR and RevOps live on different planets. The new way demands unity, and when done right, that unity becomes your edge.
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