I finally got some press releases put on our website about my local speeches and press interviews, but I had to write them myself. So be it. In a small company I tend to associate 'sales' and 'marketing' together, so I assumed this was something Jack would handle, but I finally just did it myself to get it out there. From a business perspective, what's the use of doing all these speeches if you're not going to use them in your own PR?
While our PR sucks, I was able to use my series of speeches in a sales meeting today. When a customer said that one of his employees was going to a particular trade show, I casually mentioned that I had given two talks their recently, and it was a wonderful conference. I won't say we got the deal because of this, but the meeting did go from (a) us trying to sell ourselves to them to (b) a long conversation where all I had to do was answer their questions. People can say whatever they want about PR, but this was a sweet six-figure deal, made much easier because I had given these talks and worked with the press.
