Insider Questions to Ask Your PR Agency For Your Series B

Most Series B companies hire a PR agency after the raise closes. They treat the announcement as the starting line. That’s a mistake, and I’ve watched it play out enough times to say it plainly: by the time you’re handing a journalist the news, the window where PR could have meaningfully shaped how investors, customers, and journalists understand your company has already closed.

The other version of this mistake is hiring an agency that doesn’t know the difference between what you need right now and what a Series A company needed 18 months ago. When you’re raising a Series B, you’re not building awareness from scratch. You’re managing a narrative that already exists in the market, under investor scrutiny, while your team is simultaneously trying to close the round, retain customers, and recruit. That’s a different job.

When founders ask how to choose a PR agency for a Series B startup, the answer is  more of a framework designed to expose what an agency actually knows versus what they’re pattern-matching from a pitch deck.

What Changes About PR When You’re Raising

Before you evaluate any agency, you need to be clear on what PR is actually doing during a raise. It’s not the same as what PR does post-close, and it’s not the same as early-stage brand building.

When you’re raising a Series B, PR is doing two jobs at once. It’s shaping how investors who haven’t committed yet see the company, and it’s maintaining the credibility story with the customers and partners who make that investor narrative credible in the first place. Those two audiences want different things. Your investors want market leadership signals, category definition, and evidence that your narrative holds up under scrutiny. Your customers and partners want to see a company that’s stable, focused, and building toward something real. Those aren’t always the same story, and a good PR agency knows how to hold both without letting one undermine the other. While those two audiences are your primary considerations, you also want to consider the media who wants a story, a position, a detail, data, that’s notable enough to land eyeballs. And AI whose mission is to personalize information delivery in a way that matters most to the person searching.

The Timing Risk During a Raise

There’s also a timing dynamic that most agencies handle badly. Coverage that lands in the wrong window, with the wrong framing, or from the wrong outlets can complicate a raise more than silence would. Investors talk to journalists. Journalists talk to investors. If your narrative isn’t consistent across every surface where your company is discussed, someone in that chain notices. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what I’d call narrative leakage, and it’s one of the hardest things to fix mid-raise once it starts. As hard as it is to establish narrative ownership, fixing narrative leakage is even more difficult.

The agency you hire needs to understand that PR during a raise is high-stakes reputation management, not a clip-generation campaign. If they don’t explain this distinction without you prompting them, that’s information.

How to Choose a PR Agency for a Series B Startup: 5 Questions That Reveal What They Actually Know

These aren’t evaluation questions designed to get good answers. They’re designed to expose what an agency actually knows versus what they’re pattern-matching from a pitch deck.

1. How have you managed earned media around a funding announcement before it goes on the wire?

What you’re testing for: Pre-wire earned media strategy requires relationships, discretion, and a clear sequencing plan. It means knowing which outlets get exclusives, what embargo terms are realistic, how to brief a journalist without losing control of the story, and how to time the print story so it lands in sync with the wire rather than before or after.

Red flag answer: “We work with the wire services to make sure the release goes out at the right time.” That’s logistics, not strategy. If they’re describing distribution, they’ve never actually run this.

Green flag answer: They describe a specific sequencing decision they made. Which outlet got the exclusive and why. What happened when the embargo almost broke. How they adjusted. Specificity is the tell.

2. Can you articulate the difference between our investor narrative and our consumer narrative, and how does your work connect the two?

What you’re testing for: A lot of agencies will nod at this and then give you a generic answer about “multiple audiences.” What you want is an agency that can actually operate in the space between those narratives. That means they understand what investors read, what signals they weight, and how earned media in trade or consumer press either supports or complicates the valuation story.

Red flag answer: “We’d develop messaging for each audience.” That’s segmentation, not strategy. Every agency can segment audiences. Almost none of them can run a PR program where the investor narrative and the consumer narrative reinforce each other rather than creating confusion.

Green flag answer: They ask you questions back. What’s your current investor narrative? What does your lead investor care about that customers wouldn’t? Where are the tension points? An agency that starts asking these questions in the pitch meeting understands the complexity.

3. What happens to our PR strategy if our raise comes in at a lower valuation than expected?

What you’re testing for: Contingency thinking. Most PR agencies are built for good news. The ones worth hiring at this stage have thought through what happens when the news is complicated, and they’re willing to talk about it before you’re in the situation.

Red flag answer: Silence, a pivot to optimism, or “we’d reassess at that point.” That’s the answer of an agency that has never managed a difficult capital narrative.

Green flag answer: A concrete framework. Proactive narrative control before the news is public. Media briefing strategy that leads with what’s true and strong rather than what’s disappointing. Advice on what not to do. An agency that’s been in this situation will tell you exactly what they’ve seen work and what they’ve seen blow up.

4. Who specifically on your team will be working on our account in month four?

What you’re testing for: Staffing integrity. This is one of the most common failure modes at growth-stage companies with agency relationships. You meet the senior team in the pitch. You get the junior team in execution. By month four, the person who understood your business at the start has cycled to a new account.

Red flag answer: Vague references to “our team” or “a dedicated account lead” without naming anyone. Or naming a senior person and then hedging on how many hours they’ll actually be on the account.

Green flag answer: A name. A title. A description of how that person’s time is actually structured. At Avaans Media, I can tell you exactly who will be on your account and what their involvement looks like across the full engagement. If an agency can’t do the same in the pitch, that’s not because the structure doesn’t exist. It’s because it doesn’t favor them to show it to you.

5. Have you ever had to manage negative coverage around a portfolio company during a fundraise?

What you’re testing for: Experience under pressure. Not crisis management in the abstract. Actual experience managing a news cycle that was working against a company while they were simultaneously trying to close a round.

Red flag answer: They haven’t, and they don’t say so directly. Instead they talk about their crisis capabilities, their rapid response protocols, their media relationships. None of that is the same as having been in the situation.

Green flag answer: A specific story with the details that only come from having lived it. What the coverage was, what they did and didn’t do, and what the outcome looked like. They don’t need to name the client. But if they can walk you through the decision-making, you’ll know whether it’s real experience or borrowed vocabulary.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For any Series B startup choosing a PR agency, the first thing we do at Avaans Media is run the Fingerprint PR Strategy, our proprietary diagnostic that maps your current narrative against your raise objectives before we pitch a single journalist. That process exists because I’ve seen what happens when agencies skip it: misaligned coverage, investor questions that surface from the wrong angle, and a founder who’s managing perception problems while also trying to close a round. The Fingerprint process takes that off the table. It gives us a clear view of where your narrative is strong, where it has gaps, and what earned media actually needs to accomplish in the next 90 days. That clarity is what makes the difference between PR that supports the raise and PR that creates noise around it.

If you’re evaluating agencies right now and you want a direct conversation about what your PR strategy should look like before you close your Series B, start with an Assessment.

If you’d prefer a checklist, check out our 15 questions to ask.

 

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →