Confession: For 20 years, VSC has used some of the worst software compared with other marketing verticals. That's because every one of these tools was built for sales and marketing, not PR and earned media.
That was until we met a company whose product was so good, we not only signed up and parted ways with our existing tools, but we also invested in it!
Meet Propel.
Propel is an end-to-end PR software that helps professionals discover the right targets to contact, pitch them, track their campaigns, analyze what's working, measure return on investment and monitor coverage and results. From the very first demo, VSC's PR team was blown away. Then again, we shouldn't be too surprised because Propel was built by a former agency exec because he too understood what was missing from legacy platforms. .
Zach Cutler recognized many of the problems outlined above when he was running his own PR agency Cutler PR which he later sold to Kite Hill. Over that decade, much like VSC, Zach tried multiple customer relationship management systems and used a patchwork system of Google docs and spreadsheets and other apps but found they were designed for sales and marketing, not PR. So naturally, Zach and his CTO David Cohen built Propel's first product as a PRM — a CRM purpose-built for the PR workflow — which has over time has added a media database, media monitoring and social listening services as well.