The PR sales call is one of the more asymmetric conversations in professional services. The firm has run it hundreds of times. The buyer is running it for the first or second time in their career, usually under some pressure, and usually without a vocabulary for the thing being sold. The result is that a great deal of PR is bought on impression rather than on terms.
This is a list of twelve questions that surface the terms. It is deliberately adversarial, because the questions a firm finds uncomfortable are the ones that tell you the most. If you want the broader buyer’s framework rather than the interrogation, we keep a fuller checklist at how to choose a PR firm. This post is the narrower version: the specific questions that separate named-outlet editorial work from volume that has been dressed up to look like it.
The deception these questions are built to catch
Most disappointing PR engagements are not fraud. They are inflation, and it works through a specific mechanism worth naming before the questions make sense.
A press release goes out over a distribution wire. The wire syndicates that release, verbatim, to some number of affiliate sites, aggregators, and low-traffic news portals. Each of those copies is a URL. The report at the end of the month lists them, sometimes with a combined “potential audience” figure derived from the theoretical monthly traffic of every site in the network.
None of that is a lie in the narrow sense. The URLs exist. The sites exist. But no journalist read the release, no editor chose to run it, and no human being encountered it in a context where it changed their view of anything. One reporter deciding your story is worth writing produces more value than two hundred syndicated copies, and the report format is designed to make those look comparable.
The questions below are all, in one way or another, ways of asking: is this earned, or is this syndicated?
Four questions about what you will actually get
Which specific publications are you targeting, and will you name them in the contract? The single most useful question. “Tier-1 outlets” is not a commitment, and neither is a list of logos on a capabilities deck. A firm doing real editorial work can tell you which desks are plausible for your story and will write the targets into the engagement letter. A firm that stays vague is preserving the right to substitute.
Is this staff-reported, contributed, or syndicated? Every placement falls into one of these. Staff-reported means a journalist employed by the outlet wrote it. Contributed means someone outside the newsroom published under the outlet’s banner. Syndicated means your own text was distributed. These have wildly different value and firms often blur them. Ask which one, per target, and listen for whether the answer is immediate.
Does the report count syndicated copies as placements? Ask to see a real client report with the names redacted. Then count how many of the listed items are distinct pieces of journalism and how many are the same text on different domains. This one question resolves most of the ambiguity in the category.
What is the impressions number derived from? If a firm reports impressions, ask for the calculation. Sitewide monthly traffic multiplied by the number of syndicated copies is not readership of your article. Article-level analytics, where the publication shares them, is. Most firms cannot produce the second, which is fine. What matters is whether they present the first as if it were.
Four questions about how the work is done
Who does the pitching, and can I meet them? Business development often is not the team that runs the account. Ask who writes the pitch, who has the relationship with the desk, and whether that person is in the room today. Firms that separate the seller from the doer completely tend to disappoint in month two.
Which reporters have you placed with in my category in the last twelve months? Not publications, reporters. A firm with genuine relationships can name individuals and describe what those individuals cover. A firm reselling access cannot, and will redirect to publication names.
What do you need from me, and how fast? Earned coverage runs on news cycles. A firm that does not ask about your availability, your approval chain, and who can speak on record has not thought about execution. For regulated clients this is decisive. The law firm and medical practice engagements we run are built around review workflows precisely because a pitch that cannot clear counsel inside a news cycle is not a pitch.
What happens when a target says no? Every campaign gets declined. The answer describes how the firm actually operates: do they re-angle and go back out, move to an adjacent desk, or quietly pivot to a surface they control? Ask what the second and third moves are.
Four questions about terms and accountability
What does the engagement letter commit you to? Ask for a sample before you are asked to sign one. A firm with a clean document will send it. A firm that produces the contract only after a verbal yes is managing your attention.
What is the remedy if the named target is not achieved? Editorial outcomes are never certain, because the publication decides. That is the honest position, and it is compatible with accountability: the contract can state what happens if the target is missed, whether that is continued work, a revised target, or a fee adjustment. Firms that promise certainty are selling something other than editorial. Firms that accept no consequence at all are selling effort.
What is the notice period, and what happens to work in flight? Long lock-ins with short notice windows are where buyers get trapped. Ask specifically what happens to a pitch that is live when you terminate.
Who owns the relationships and the materials afterward? The bios, the data, the media list, the drafted angles. Some firms treat all of it as their property, which makes leaving expensive by design.
Red flags
Some answers should end the conversation.
A guaranteed placement in a named tier-1 publication, stated without qualification, means the placement is not editorial. No agency controls a newsroom’s decisions. When a guarantee is real, it attaches to a specific surface, and that surface is usually contributed or paid.
A refusal to name any target publication in writing, while naming them freely in conversation, is the clearest signal in the category.
Reporting that leads with impressions, reach, or audience value rather than the list of articles is a report designed to obscure the list of articles.
Case studies with no client names and no article links at all. Anonymized case studies are legitimate and often necessary, particularly for high-net-worth principals and regulated clients. What is not legitimate is a firm that cannot show a single live article anywhere, under any name.
Pricing that is dramatically below the market range for the outcome described. Earned tier-1 work carries real labor cost. A monthly retainer far under the going rate for the promised outcome is usually funding wire distribution.
Pressure to sign inside a short window. Editorial timelines are driven by news cycles, not by the end of the firm’s quarter.
How to check the references you are given
Every firm will offer references, and every reference a firm offers will say something positive. That does not make the exercise useless. It means you have to ask the reference the questions the firm cannot script.
Ask what the first ninety days actually looked like. Positive references describe momentum. Disappointing engagements have a recognizable shape: a strong onboarding, a quiet second month, and a report at the end of the quarter that leads with reach numbers. The reference will tell you which one happened if you ask about the sequence rather than the outcome.
Ask what got missed. Every engagement misses something. A reference who cannot name a single target that did not land is either a very short engagement or a rehearsed answer. What matters is what the firm did next.
Ask who they actually worked with day to day, and whether that person is still at the firm. Account turnover mid-engagement is one of the more common causes of a campaign losing the thread, and it is invisible in a capabilities deck.
Ask whether they renewed, and if not, why not. A reference who did not renew and will still take the call is usually the most informative conversation available.
Then do the check the firm did not offer. Search the client’s name and read the coverage yourself. You will see, in a few minutes, how much of it is staff-reported, how much is contributed, and how much is the same paragraph on eleven domains.
What the engagement letter should state
A clean document covers seven things. Named target publications or a defined tier with examples. The surface for each target, stated as staff-reported, contributed, or syndicated. The timeline, with a defined placement window rather than an open-ended retainer. What the firm delivers, by count and type. What you are responsible for, including availability and approval turnaround. The remedy if the named target is missed. Term, notice, and what happens to in-flight work.
If those seven are present and specific, you can evaluate the deal. If any are missing, the missing one is where the disappointment will come from.
The honest summary
Choosing a PR firm is mostly an exercise in getting vague things written down. The category is full of capable people doing real work, and it is also full of firms whose reporting is engineered to make distribution look like journalism. The difference is not visible in a pitch deck. It is visible in whether the firm will name the publication, name the surface, and put both in the contract.
Ask the twelve. The firms worth hiring will find them reasonable.
The PR Summit Editorial writes for founders, partners, and principals on the editorial work behind tier-1 coverage.