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October 21st, 2025

Public Relations and Marketing: Don’t underestimate the soft sell (podcast episode #154)

  1. Public Relations and Marketing: Don’t underestimate the soft sell (podcast episode #154) Kelly Coulter 39:53

Some of the best conversations I have with my kids are during filler time. Not the quality time you hear hyped up – just a side conversation over breakfast, or driving to an errand, or putting together Ikea furniture.

Marketing and public relations can be the same. Instead of focusing all this attention on forcing a customer to take an action, give them value in other ways and naturally bring up your product. Like this episode’s guest’s story about selling insurance by bringing owls and foxes to schools.  It’s not an aggressive sales pitch, it’s the side conversation.

Which is why a key lesson for this episode’s guest is – ‘don’t underestimate the soft sell.’

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Kelly Coulter, head of marketing, Private Advisor Group [https://www.privateadvisorgroup.com/].

Private Advisor Group has $35.2 billion in advisory assets under management. Coulter leads a small but mighty team of five at the investment service firm, a team located all across the country.

Lessons from the things she made

  • Learn from your mistakes and “let it go”
  • Preparation is the key to success
  • Collaboration is powerful
  • Invest in your Mental Health
  • Don’t underestimate the soft sell
  • Don’t be afraid to ask for help

AI Executive Lab

Join us for AI Executive Lab: Transform billable hours into scalable AI-powered products [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-executive-lab-transform-billable-hours-into-ai-powered-products-tickets-1777237287569] on Thursday, October 23rd at 2 pm EDT.

Discussed in this episode

Marketing Leadership Lessons: Kill snakes, create the category, assume noble intent (podcast episode #61) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-leadership]

CMO-CPO Collaboration: Bridge Marketing and Product for collaborative growth (podcast episode #95) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/CMO]

DTC Ecommerce: Your worst friend is still better than your best marketing (podcast episode #132) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/DTC]

Marketing Mentorship: 10 digital marketing lessons your fellow marketers learned from their mentors [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/best-practice/mentorship]

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

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If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

Daniel Burstein is the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MarketingSherpa and the host of the ‘How I Made It In Marketing’ podcast, where he talks to marketing leaders about the lessons learned through their careers.

He also reports on successful marketing campaigns and industry data in MarketingSherpa articles, and helps facilitate the AI Guild from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute.

Daniel has 23 years of experience in copywriting, content writing, interviewing, speaking, business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.