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Essay · Product and buyers

Building Agility: what a communications platform business plan taught me about buyers

Buyers do not purchase features. They purchase a path from signal to a decision they can defend upstairs. Building a platform plan taught me to sell the path.

Essay · Published October 18, 2026 · Updated October 24, 2026

The plan, from the builder's side

As VP, Data Intelligence at PR Newswire, I led an organization of about 250 people through about six managers, with full P&L responsibility across the SaaS portfolio and the media research teams in the United States and India. Inside that job, I took Agility from business plan to launch, ahead of schedule, with a team of about 25 developers, partners and direct stakeholders. Agility was an integrated communications platform combining social listening, news monitoring, press release distribution, and journalist intelligence. The work included primary market research for a global media database of 650,000 journalists and influencers.

I am going to stay at the level of that paragraph. Pricing, customers, internal numbers and the product's later life belong to PR Newswire, and the lesson does not need them. What I can describe is what the act of planning did to my thinking, because it changed how I have read every buyer conversation since.

Here is the argument in one line. Communications teams do not buy monitoring, distribution or journalist data as separate features; they buy a path from signal to a decision they can defend in front of leadership. Writing one plan that had to join four capabilities forced that into view. The buyer guidance I have published over the last two years, mostly for my employer Fullintel and for trade outlets, keeps arriving at the same test.

What a business plan forces you to answer

A feature list is easy to write. A business plan is harder, because it asks questions a feature list never has to face: who uses each piece, in what order, what they hand to whom, and which output finally lands in front of someone with budget authority.

On a slide, four capabilities look like four products. Put them in one plan and the seams show. A communicator finds the right journalist, pitches or distributes a release, monitors what runs, listens to the social conversation around it, and then has to explain to an executive what all of it meant. Every step is a handoff. In a stitched together process, every handoff is where time, context and credibility leak out.

That is the builder's lesson, and I offer it as my interpretation rather than as a research finding: the unit a buyer evaluates is the chain. A best in class link attached to a broken chain still produces a report nobody upstairs trusts.

Data products teach a second, humbling point. Record count is what goes on the sales slide. Accuracy and relevance are what a working communicator actually feels on a deadline. At PR Newswire I also automated media research workflows to improve accuracy and productivity, and accuracy is the point: a database earns its keep when the right contact is correct at the moment someone needs it.

Monitoring is not the job

The clearest place to see the chain problem is the gap between collecting coverage and interpreting it. I have written about that gap directly in Media Monitoring vs. Media Analysis: monitoring gathers what was said, analysis explains what it means, and a PR strategy needs both. In a guide to media analysis for communications leaders, I described analysis as the step that turns coverage data into strategic insight, and laid out what a real analysis report contains.

Buyers already know this, even when vendors pitch as if they do not. Nobody on an executive team asks for more clips. They ask whether a story is spreading, whether a competitor is gaining ground, and whether the company needs to act. My guide to media intelligence for enterprise PR teams frames the category around exactly those jobs: detecting crises, benchmarking competitors and proving return.

Tie that back to a planning decision. When a roadmap includes news monitoring and social listening, the easy move is to compete on coverage breadth and alert speed. The harder and more useful question is what happens in the ten minutes after the alert fires. If the answer is a person copying links into a slide, the product has stopped one step short of the buyer's job.

Measurement is the buying criterion

If analysis is the job, measurement is how the buyer proves the job got done, and it is the real criterion in most evaluations. The question underneath every demo is whether the platform's output will survive an executive review.

Volume metrics fail that review. In From outreach to outcomes, written for ContentGrip, I argued that PR measurement has to move past impressions and advertising value equivalents toward metrics tied to reputation, sentiment, message pull through and business goals, with AI monitoring paired with human analysis. In Media Monitoring ROI, the case for value rests on reduced reputational risk, faster response and smarter decisions.

The most complete version of the test is the one I proposed for PRSA in Beyond Press Releases: a decision ready reputation scorecard that combines sentiment, message pull through, share of voice, narrative positioning and qualitative context across earned, owned and shared media. The same piece makes a point sellers tend to skip. A scorecard only matters inside a culture willing to act on it.

How the same platform output reads to two audiences
What the vendor showsWhat the executive asks
Mentions and impressions this quarterDid our reputation move, and in which direction?
Releases distributed and pickupsDid our key messages appear in the coverage that mattered?
Alerts delivered in real timeDid we respond faster than last time, and did it change the outcome?
Size of the journalist databaseDid we reach the reporters who shape this story?

The left column is a feature grid. The right column is the buying decision. A platform plan that only fills the left column has planned a demo, not a purchase.

The stack question, then and now

The fair objection deserves a straight hearing. Integrated suites often lose to best of breed tools. Buyers assemble stacks, swap components and resist being locked into one vendor's view of their work. A plan written more than a decade ago, before generative AI entered the workflow, says little on its face about how a communications team buys today.

I concede most of that. Buyers do assemble stacks. In Voice, Speed and Trust for PRNEWS, I organized the modern communications stack around voice, velocity and verification, and recommended auditing how AI describes the brand, building response processes before a crisis, and filtering high volume media signals through human judgment. My 2026 buyer's guide to brand monitoring tools walks through the components buyers compare now: real time alerts, sentiment analysis, global coverage.

What has not changed is the deciding test. Whether the stack comes from one vendor or six, someone has to carry signal to decision, and if the tools do not, the team does it by hand. That cost is real and usually invisible on the purchase order. The Hidden Costs of DIY Media Monitoring puts the spend on in house news briefs at more than $56,000 a year for PR teams, before counting the strain on the people producing them.

So my reading, and it is interpretation rather than a claim about any product's history, is this: the integration bet was never really about bundling modules. It was a bet that the buyer's workflow is the product. That bet still holds when the workflow runs across several vendors. The winners in a stack are the tools that make the handoffs cheap.

What this means for sellers and enablers

In my other PR Newswire role, VP, Public Relations Products, I owned product vision, P&L, sales enablement and brand management for subscription software products, with teams across the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and India. Enablement is where the builder's lesson either reaches the buyer or dies in a slide library. A team trained on modules will pitch modules, and a buyer evaluating a workflow will hear that as a vendor that does not understand the job.

Build discovery around the chain instead. Ask the buyer to walk through the last time something broke: when they first saw the signal, who they told, what they produced, and what the executive asked next. The gaps in that story are the deal.

Here is an audit a sales or enablement leader can run on the current deck this week:

  1. Count the slides that describe a capability and the slides that describe a decision the buyer makes. If capabilities win by a wide margin, the deck is a feature grid.
  2. Find the slide that shows what an executive receives. If it does not exist, build it first, using the buyer's metrics (reputation, sentiment, message pull through, response speed), not yours.
  3. Trace one realistic scenario from first alert to leadership briefing and mark every manual handoff. Each one is either a reason to buy or a reason to doubt.
  4. Strike database size and coverage counts from the opening. Move them to the proof section, attached to a specific job they make easier.
  5. Write down the hidden cost of the buyer doing it themselves, in hours and in risk, and give reps the language to price it honestly.
  6. Ask three reps to explain, in two sentences, how a customer defends the purchase to their CFO. If the answers differ, that is the next enablement session.

Building Agility taught me to look at a platform from the seat of the person who has to explain it upstairs. Buyers purchase a path from signal to a decision they can defend. The features matter only as steps on that path, and the sellers who pitch the path are the ones the buyer can take into the boardroom. More of how I think about this market lives on my writing page.

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