Sim Aulakh

They describe the standard agency sequence as building a static media list, personalizing the first sentence, blasting it to 200 reporters, following up twice, and calling it effort — "volume disguised as value."

• Instead, track what individual reporters publish, find a pattern in their output, and pitch a story that continues a conversation they're already having.
• The pitches described go to one reporter, carry no attachments, and reference their recent article plus a specific fact.

Aulakh contrasts two pitches.

• If a journalist has just published "AI is reshaping mid-market manufacturing," a note saying your CEO is available to talk about innovation is invisible.
• A note saying "You recently covered AI adoption in manufacturing.
• What hasn't been explored yet is how mid-market players are using AI for revenue acceleration, not just efficiency" continues the conversation instead of interrupting it.
• The same logic applies to founders who think their company is "not a story": reporters cover what's happening — a regulation, a layoff, a survey, a competitor's funding round — so the job is to connect the client to a live news moment.

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A cybersecurity buyer trusts Dark Reading, an HR leader trusts HR Executive, and a manufacturing buyer trusts IndustryWeek.

• The niche publication, not the national one, builds category authority with the people who sign contracts.
• Aulakh splits this into layers: top-tier outlets such as Forbes, Inc. or CIO create an instant credibility signal that lowers resistance; trade publications carry the middle-of-funnel weight; AI citations now handle late-stage validation.
• Most B2B companies underinvest in the buyer-facing trade layer because the national logo is more satisfying to collect.

Aulakh writes that for a health tech company, a placement in a health tech trade publication often carries more weight than Forbes because that's where the actual buyers are reading. Those buyers then encounter the coverage again when they validate vendors.

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In this account, press releases alone don't move the needle, sponsored content gets ignored, and brand-owned blogs carry limited authority on their own. The practical instruction is to build coverage in the sources these systems retrieve and treat the resulting citations as a deliverable with a place in the buying process.

Aulakh cites Muck Rack's Earned Media Report for the figures that 94% of links cited by AI are non-paid media and 82% come from earned sources such as news articles, third-party blogs, and industry analysis. A separate post describes a fintech client where Perplexity appeared as a pipeline source in the CRM for the first time after coverage was built — a research channel became measurable revenue attribution.

Earlier posts present earned coverage mainly as a way to shorten sales cycles and reduce buyer risk. Later material reframes earned media as an input to AI-generated recommendations, making it a search-visibility and late-stage-validation task as well as a sales task.

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Marketing hands sales polished claims instead of market validation, so account executives rebuild credibility from scratch on every call, handling every objection and every "why should we trust you over the bigger vendor?" live in the meeting.

• The fix is to embed coverage at each deal stage: trade features in follow-ups, podcast clips in outbound, top-tier articles to remove perceived risk in committee, and AI citations when buyers validate vendors.
• The failure mode is a link sitting unused on a press page.

In the health tech case, the Becker's Hospital Review feature went into outbound sequences within 30 days, enterprise prospects referenced the article on calls, branded search lifted, and one previously stalled hospital deal re-engaged. Aulakh's counter-example is a sales team that forgets to use the article in follow-ups.

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The point is to avoid newsjacking a story the client has no business being in — when AI regulation drops, "400 SaaS companies have a take," and reporters can tell.

• A companion idea: reporters respond not to what a product does but to what a perspective reveals, so the pitch should carry an angle rather than a feature list.
• Aulakh names seven reusable angles: enemy, hidden cost, macro shift, counterintuitive, underdog data, prediction, and first-mover.

Aulakh describes a client running AI across legal and procurement for global enterprises.

• While enterprise AI coverage framed governance as the brake on innovation, the client's own experience pointed the other way: the companies moving fastest with AI had the strongest governance.
• Aulakh's team built the contrarian angle around the CEO's line "AI doesnt make decisions, people do" and sent one pitch to one Forbes reporter whose recent work fit.
• The resulting piece, with the CEO quoted throughout, is described as published July 2, 2026.

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Aulakh frames this as a multiplier on top of the other channels rather than one more channel, and treats an invisible executive team as a trust bottleneck in enterprise deals.

Aulakh walks through a buyer's behaviour: sees an ad, gets an email, visits the site, then searches the founder and leadership team to answer one question: "Are these people worth listening to?" The same post notes that a top-tier feature travels further when there's a person attached to the story.

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The model's argument is that a placement starts the work; it doesn't end it. The firm repurposes one article into many sales touchpoints and explains why a press release won't close enterprise deals.

A post built around The Devil Wears Prada 2 sketches the unglamorous version of the job: rewriting a founder quote late on a Saturday night, pitching 47 journalists for two replies that both ask whether it's sponsored, and handling clients who want Forbes but also want it not too salesy, focused on revenue, and viral. The post also shows Aulakh acting as a connector, not just a vendor: they relay two Fast Company features in development — on manufacturing AI infrastructure and on AI pay packages that factor in marital status — and invite PR and comms contacts to send relevant experts.

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Sim Aulakh describes a mid-stage HealthTech client selling into hospital systems.

• Instead of sending a generic pitch about innovating patient care, the team watched for market signals: reporter coverage trends, funding announcements, CMS reimbursement updates, and stories about workforce shortages and margin pressure.
• A Becker's reporter had published three articles in ten days on hospital margin compression, digital tools reducing operational waste, and CFO-led cost containment.
• The team treated that topic velocity as the signal, not the outlet.
• They reframed the client's story as 'How Hospital CFOs Are Recovering 7-Figure Revenue Leakage Without Adding Staff' and sent a pitch that referenced the reporter's recent margin-focused article, a specific stat from a hospital case study, and why the timing mattered during budget planning season.
• The response came in 48 hours.
• Within 30 days, the sales team added the feature to outbound sequences, enterprise prospects referenced it on calls, branded search lifted, and one stalled hospital deal re-engaged.

For brands planning a campaign

For a health tech campaign aimed at hospital CFOs, this is the closest template in the posts. It shows a repeatable approach: monitor what a reporter is writing about, reframe the product around the financial pressure they’re covering, pitch with a specific reference and timely reason, then give sales a reason to use the placement in outbound sequences.

Sim Aulakh describes a client that runs AI across legal and procurement for global enterprises.

• That summer, every enterprise AI article framed governance as the brake on innovation, but the client saw the opposite: the companies moving fastest with AI were the ones with the strongest governance.
• Their engine flagged the governance narrative as it peaked.
• The team built a contrarian angle around the client's CEO's real experience and the line 'AI doesnt make decisions, people do.' They sent one pitch to one Forbes reporter whose recent work fit the angle.
• The result was 'Why AI Governance Is Becoming A Corporate Competitive Advantage,' published July 2, 2026, with the CEO quoted throughout.
• A companion post adds the filter they use before writing: every signal is rated for standing as strong, partial, or none, and only strong moves forward.

For brands planning a campaign

A health tech client can test the same move: find the live consensus in hospital trade coverage, then show where the client's first-hand experience contradicts it. The method makes timing, standing, and a well-matched reporter central to the pitch.

Sim Aulakh lays out the old model: build a static media list, draft a generic pitch, personalize the first sentence, blast it to 200 reporters, follow up twice, and call it effort.

• They argue that this is volume disguised as value: journalists now publish faster, cover narrower beats, track real-time industry shifts, and instantly ignore templated outreach.
• The core problem is that traditional PR pushes messages while modern media rewards signal alignment.
• For example, if a journalist just published 'AI is reshaping mid-market manufacturing,' a pitch about your CEO being available to talk about innovation is invisible.
• A pitch that says 'You recently covered AI adoption in manufacturing.
• What hasnt been explored yet is how mid-market players are using AI for revenue acceleration, not just efficiency' continues the conversation instead of interrupting it.
• The post lists the replacement capacities: industry signal detection, beat-level journalist mapping, article pattern analysis, gap identification, engineered story angles, and contextual pitch crafting.

For brands planning a campaign

Use this as the diagnostic before a health tech campaign.

• If the pitch could have gone to any health tech reporter last year, it follows the old model.
• The replacement is beat-level mapping and a pitch that continues a specific reporter's conversation.

Sim Aulakh argues that reporters respond not to what a product does but to what a perspective reveals.

• The post lists seven pitch angles with example lines.
• The enemy angle calls out a problem buyers silently hate.
• The hidden-cost angle exposes a consequence leaders overlook, such as the quiet cost of poor RevOps alignment being CFO distrust, not pipeline leakage.
• The macro-shift angle connects a niche to an industry-wide change.
• The counterintuitive angle flips a market belief, such as 'Your product isnt losing deals.
• Your lack of third-party credibility is.' The underdog-data angle shares a stat that contradicts the narrative.
• The prediction angle forecasts a shift buyers can already feel.
• The first-mover angle shows why something matters right now.
• With a strong angle, they say, you stop sounding like a vendor and start sounding like a source.

For brands planning a campaign

For health tech, the hidden-cost and counterintuitive angles are immediately usable: expose a financial consequence hospital leaders overlook, or flip the belief that the best product wins. The examples show how to make an angle specific enough to pass a reporter's relevance test.

Sim Aulakh cites Muck Rack's Earned Media Report: 94% of all links cited by AI are non-paid media, and 82% come directly from earned sources such as news articles, third-party blogs, and industry analysis.

• They argue that PR work no longer sits beside the AI ecosystem; it powers it.
• In enterprise buying cycles, a buyer hears about a company and then searches in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google.
• Brands that keep appearing across trusted media sources become the safest choice in the room.
• Press releases alone do not move the needle, sponsored content gets ignored, and brand-owned blogs have limited authority by themselves.
• They note that some smaller B2B companies are suddenly outranking much larger competitors inside AI-generated answers because they earned visibility in the right places.

For brands planning a campaign

For a health tech client, a trade publication placement may matter more than a top-tier logo because AI tools may pull from it when a hospital CFO asks for vendor recommendations. Treat AI citation as a measurable bottom-of-funnel outcome, not a vague brand benefit.

Sim Aulakh says most B2B tech PR strategies stop at the top of the funnel.

• Press releases go out, coverage gets shared, traffic spikes, then nothing.
• Awareness alone does not move deals; the middle and bottom of the funnel do, but only if teams use coverage inside the pipeline.
• At the consideration stage, trade publications speak directly to the buyer's problem, while industry podcasts add depth and point of view.
• The common miss is treating these as nice-to-have exposure instead of sending trade features in follow-ups, using podcast clips in outbound, and equipping account executives with industry-specific credibility.
• At the decision stage, top-tier features remove risk in enterprise conversations and AI citations show up when buyers validate vendors.
• Winning teams embed PR into every stage and conversation instead of leaving links on a press page.

For brands planning a campaign

The health tech campaign should include a sales-enablement plan from the start: which trade feature goes into which follow-up, which podcast clip goes into outbound, and which top-tier feature helps remove risk in an enterprise conversation.

Aulakh says the fastest way to damage a reporter relationship is to newsjack a story you have no business being in.

• Every trending story tempts brands to jump in.
• When AI regulation drops, suddenly 400 SaaS companies have a take, and reporters can smell it instantly.
• Before writing a word, they run every signal through a filter they call standing, rated strong, partial, or none; only strong moves forward.
• In one example, every enterprise AI piece framed governance as the brake on innovation, but a client running AI across legal and procurement for global enterprises had real standing to argue the opposite.
• The team pitched the contrarian angle, and it ran in Forbes with the CEO quoted throughout.
• Aulakh uses three questions to decide in under ten minutes whether a client has the right to be in a story.

For brands planning a campaign

Before pitching a hospital cost or AI governance story, score the client's standing. If it is partial or none, collect missing primary evidence or choose a different angle rather than add another generic take.

Aulakh uses the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 to contrast the glamorous image of PR agency life with the actual work.

• In their version, it is Saturday night at 11:47pm, and the founder quote is being rewritten because it is not visionary enough.
• You pitch 47 journalists and two reply, both asking if it is sponsored.
• Clients say they want Forbes, but also not too salesy, focused on revenue, thought leadership, and viral.
• Sales teams forget to use the article in follow-ups.
• Landing coverage is when the real work starts: repurposing, turning one article into ten sales touchpoints, and explaining again why a press release will not close enterprise deals.
• Aulakh says the difference between a good PR firm and one clients complain about is treating media as a system rather than a moment.

For brands planning a campaign

This sets expectations for the health tech engagement: placement starts the work, rather than ending it. The campaign plan should budget for repurposing, sales enablement, and the unglamorous follow-through that makes a feature useful.

Aulakh rejects the standard agency sequence — build a list, personalize the first sentence, send it to 200 reporters, follow up twice — in favor of tracking individual reporters' output, spotting topic patterns, and pitching a story that continues a conversation already underway. The approach is usually to pitch one reporter, without attachments, referencing their recent article and a specific piece of supporting evidence.

Track a target reporter's output for topic velocity, then frame the client's story around a pressure the reporter is already covering, not a product or launch. In the clearest example, a health tech platform becomes a hospital CFO revenue-leakage story after a Becker's reporter publishes three articles in ten days on margin compression, operational waste, and CFO-led cost containment.

For brands planning a campaign

For a health tech brief aimed at hospital CFOs, build the pitch around what a health-system reporter has published recently — margin pressure, cost containment, workforce shortages — and connect the client's data to that tension instead of announcing a platform.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6 · Source 7

National outlets create an initial credibility signal, trade outlets build category authority and carry more weight with contract signers, and AI citations provide late-stage validation. The posts repeatedly say most B2B companies underinvest in this middle, buyer-facing layer.

Aulakh does not dismiss national press. One post assigns top-tier outlets the job of reducing buyer resistance fastest, making the argument about their relative weight for a specific audience, not abandoning Forbes-style coverage.

For brands planning a campaign

For a hospital-CFO brief, target Becker's Hospital Review and comparable health-system trades first; treat a national outlet as a secondary credibility add, not the goal.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

Those systems pull from third-party earned sources rather than owned pages, sponsored placements, or press releases.

• One post cites Muck Rack's Earned Media Report for the claim that 94% of AI-cited links are non-paid and 82% come from earned sources.
• Another describes a fintech client where Perplexity appeared as a pipeline source in the CRM for the first time after coverage was built.

Build coverage in the third-party sources these systems retrieve; press releases, sponsored council posts, and brand-owned blogs are not enough on their own.

For brands planning a campaign

Frame the placement as a citation asset as well as a logo: appearing in the third-party sources AI systems return for queries such as "who solves X for hospital systems" is a stated deliverable, not a side effect.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6

They describe sales reps carrying the trust burden on calls because marketing supplies claims instead of third-party validation, and lay out stage-by-stage use: trade features in follow-ups, podcast clips in outbound, top-tier articles to reduce perceived risk in committee, and AI citations when buyers validate vendors. The failure mode is coverage left as an unused link on a press page.

For brands planning a campaign

Include mid-deal use in the deliverables — outbound sequences, follow-up templates, and re-engagement of stalled deals using the article — as in the Becker's health tech case.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6

Aulakh frames it as a multiplier, not another channel, and treats an invisible executive team as a trust bottleneck in enterprise deals.

For brands planning a campaign

Pair the company placement with founder bylines, quotes, or podcast appearances so the health tech CEO appears in the research a hospital CFO or committee member does before a first call.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

Another rates whether a client has standing in a story (strong, partial, or none) and pitches only when standing is strong. Its example is an enterprise AI client that runs AI across legal and procurement and takes a contrarian line against the prevailing "governance slows innovation" consensus.

For brands planning a campaign

Give the health tech pitch a point of view, not a product claim. Before positioning the client in a margin or cost-containment story, check whether they have documented operational evidence in hospital settings.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

A mid-stage health tech company selling into hospital systems placed in Becker's Hospital Review after a reporter published three articles in ten days on margin compression, digital tools reducing operational waste, and CFO-led cost containment.

• The post claims the article went into outbound sequences, was referenced by enterprise prospects on calls, lifted branded search, and re-engaged one stalled hospital deal.
• A Series A cybersecurity startup was placed in DarkReading and ITProToday.
• An enterprise AI client's CEO was quoted throughout a Forbes piece on AI governance as a competitive advantage, described as published 2 July 2026.

For brands planning a campaign

Sim Aulakh's posts describe a health tech placement aimed at this exact buyer set, giving a campaign targeting those buyers a described approach to follow rather than a new one to test.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The topics are manufacturing AI infrastructure and AI compensation terms that factor in an executive's marital status. It highlights a connector role alongside client work, bringing reporters and expert sources together, including for non-clients.

For brands planning a campaign

A useful low-commitment entry point for a brand, but supply and timing are unpredictable, and the opportunity is not scoped to a specific client outcome.

Examples: Source 1

A separate humorous post lays out the unglamorous side: rewriting a founder quote late on a Saturday, 47 pitches for two replies, clients asking for Forbes while also asking that coverage not sound salesy, and a sales team that forgets to use the article.

For brands planning a campaign

Sets expectations for an engagement: a small senior team will use its reporter relationships on the client's behalf, and is willing to be measured on deal outcomes rather than clip volume.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The posts say “we” but do not state their role, ownership stake, or employment arrangement. Ask them to clarify their relationship to the business.

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The publication is a placement target for agency work, not a sponsor, affiliate, or client.

View example

A second post also says the CEO was quoted throughout the piece. Forbes is a publication where agency client coverage appeared, not a sponsor or client.

View example

The publications are coverage targets, not sponsors or clients.

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Clark reviews themes in brand-journalism stories, while Sim Aulakh explains how timely earned-media coverage can build buyer trust and support sales.

Clark’s examples focus on enterprise brand journalism and editorial trends; Sim Aulakh’s focus is earned media, reporter pitching and sales use of coverage.

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Hassan’s examples center on prospect lists, messaging and outbound sequences; Sim Aulakh’s center on journalists, editorial angles and earned coverage.

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Gregory’s explainer outlines PR’s role in earned coverage, messaging and reputation; Sim Aulakh offers detailed examples of pitching and using coverage.

Gregory’s post broadly introduces PR practice, while Sim Aulakh focuses on B2B technology, signal-led pitching and links between media coverage and pipeline.

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For a campaign seeking earned coverage a sales team can use in hospital CFO conversations, Clark’s posts describe building and running brand journalism programs: reviewing a year’s worth of enterprise content published on Forbes for emerging patterns, and hiring journalists into brand editorial roles, including at SAP.

• If the agency can already get a reporter’s attention but the executive byline or contributed piece reads like vendor marketing, Clark’s newsroom background is the better tool.
• He is the stronger pick when the deliverable is a genuinely readable article carrying a named executive that holds up next to the trade publication it runs in, or when the agency wants reporters’ news judgment inside the client’s content pipeline.

The posts reflect on enterprise trends and journalists moving into brand roles, but do not document client pitching, reporter-beat tracking or landing a trade placement. Pairing Clark’s editorial work with Aulakh’s pitching method is closer to the needs of a campaign aimed at hospital CFOs than swapping one for the other.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

For a campaign seeking earned coverage for hospital CFOs, his explainer post makes a plain case for what public relations is and is not: earned credibility through independent coverage versus paid placement, what an outside firm provides, what results to expect, and why it is neither free nor immediate.

• That is the conversation an agency has when hospital executives say “we need some PR on this” or ask whether a website launch is newsworthy.
• He also describes 15+ years leading sales and marketing growth across energy, real estate, technology and manufacturing, including enterprise sales and partnership development.
• He is the better choice when the agency needs to make the PR case in commercial language to a skeptical board, or when the engagement is expected to include business-development work alongside communications.

The posts show no repeatable placement method or reporter-level pitching, and nothing connects to health systems, hospital finance or trade press.

• Aulakh’s second post is an open-to-work notice listing target roles; ask about their availability for commercial work.
• As a substitute for a campaign seeking earned coverage for hospital CFOs, the posts offer client education and commercial range, not a route into the publications those buyers read.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

His posts argue that good copy cannot rescue bad timing and lay out a signal-based outbound framework: no signal, no send; find the trigger, match the message, build the sequence around the pressure, layer channels, tag every lead by reason-to-buy in CRM.

• He lists the trigger types he works from, including a funding round, a leadership hire, a compliance deadline, a competitor move and an unfilled role.
• For a health tech campaign seeking earned coverage for hospital CFOs, that is the work that comes after publication: getting the trade feature into sequences and follow-ups, and making sure the sales team works accounts with a live trigger rather than sending generic email.

Aulakh’s signals are purchase-intent triggers for prospecting, not editorial signals for reporters.

• The posts show no media relations, earned coverage or trade-publication placement.
• Ask how they would handle reporter-beat tracking and topic velocity to secure coverage in hospital trade press.
• Taking their framework without the pitching half produces well-targeted outbound with nothing earned for the sales team to reference.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2