Picture placing a billboard in Times Square to sell enterprise security software.
Who’d care?
Hundreds of thousands of people pass by. Almost nobody clocks it. The handful who do would need to be there at exactly the right moment, thinking about that particular problem.
It’s obviously absurd.
But that’s exactly how most b2b tech companies measure their PR. Reach. Impressions. Coverage volume. Numbers built for mass-market brands selling toothpaste, running shoes and soft drinks, where success depends on getting in front of as many people as possible.
You’re not one of them. You need to convince a very specific few.
Buyers, not billboards
You want to influence the small group of people who shape decisions: buyers, investors, analysts, partners and the journalists your market trusts. That’s a completely different challenge, as you’re dealing with complex products, long sales cycles, six-figure contracts.
Awareness isn’t the goal, it’s a by-product.
What founders and leadership teams really want to know
Nobody lies awake wondering how many mentions they got last quarter. What keeps them up is whether the right people are noticing and whether their message is resonating with those who matter. Is their brand building real authority in their category? Are they gaining ground on the competitors going after the same conversations?
Those are the questions that steadily drive a business forward. Measure the wrong things and you’ll chase the wrong outcomes, then spend the rest of the year wondering why proving impact seems so hard.
Volume tells you activity happened. It doesn’t tell you if any of it made a difference. Every agency claims they’ve cracked measurement. In reality, most of them still just count eyeballs and call it insight.
The better question isn’t how many people saw something. It’s if it changed how your market thinks about you.
So we built our own
We grew tired of reporting numbers that looked impressive but didn’t answer the real question.
DRIVE is our proprietary evaluation platform, built specifically for b2b tech companies. It doesn’t measure how much PR you’re putting out. It measures how much you’re shifting perception.
Every piece of coverage is analysed by AI and reviewed by our senior team for relevance, message penetration, sentiment and authority. Those signals combine into an Impact Score: a single number that shows the quality of your coverage, not just the volume. Not a vanity metric. A commercial signal.
Time to do better
B2B PR has spent too long justifying itself with metrics never designed to capture its value. It has created a credibility chasm between what comms teams know they’re achieving and what they can prove.
The fix isn’t a better spin on the same ol’ numbers. It’s measuring what makes a real difference, what makes a brand unmissable: influence, authority and presence where it counts. That’s what DRIVE was built to do.
This is the standard we hold ourselves to. The rest of the industry should too.
No nonsense. No bullshit.
Want to know exactly where you stand? We’re opening a small number of free Brand Impact Audits for b2b tech companies. [Learn more.]
