Fathom vs Fireflies for PR Agency Media and Client Calls

Media pitch calls are high-volume and short: an account executive confirms interest, sends a follow-up, moves on. What matters is a quick, accurate log across dozens of these a week, so nothing falls through when a journalist says yes and then goes quiet.

Narrative and messaging calls are the opposite: fewer of them, but every word can matter, especially when a client is working through how to phrase a public statement on something sensitive. Precision here beats volume.

An account executive running dozens of media pitch calls a week benefits from Fathom's speed: a fast, clean log of who said what, turned quickly into an updated media list, without the overhead of building a deeply searchable archive for calls that are largely transactional.

A client's exact phrasing during a messaging or narrative-development call often needs to be checked again weeks later, when a spokesperson is preparing for an interview or a statement needs updating. A searchable transcript lets a strategist confirm precisely what was agreed on, rather than working from a summary that may have softened or generalized a carefully chosen phrase.

Most agencies run both call types simultaneously, which means the real decision is less about picking one tool and more about setting different expectations for different call types within whichever tool you choose. Treat media pitch calls as disposable after a short window; treat narrative and messaging calls as a durable record worth keeping and tagging carefully, since the cost of losing precise language is much higher on the second type. Write that distinction into a short internal guideline rather than leaving it to each account lead's individual judgment.

In the rush of daily pitch volume, it is easy to treat a client crisis call with the same light-touch capture as a routine media outreach call. That is exactly backward. A crisis communications call, where the agency and client work out exactly what will and won't be said publicly, deserves the most careful, precise capture of any call type an agency runs, since a misremembered detail here can become a public misstatement. Slow down deliberately on these calls, even when everything else that day is moving fast.

Confirm client consent practices for recording narrative and crisis calls specifically, since clients are often more sensitive about these than about routine status updates. Check whether the tool lets you set different retention or visibility rules for different call types. And build a habit of having account leads flag any call where exact wording matters, so it gets the deeper search and tagging treatment rather than getting lost in pitch-call volume.

Run through these checks before choosing a tool:

• Confirm that clients consent to recording narrative and crisis calls specifically, since they are often more sensitive about these than about routine status updates.
• Check whether the tool lets you set different retention or visibility rules for media pitch calls and for narrative and messaging calls.
• Ask account leads to flag any call where exact wording matters, so it gets the deeper capture and tagging it deserves.
• Treat media pitch calls as disposable after a short window, and narrative and messaging calls as a durable record worth tagging carefully.

Roughly 22% of B2B sellers hit quota in a recent industry dataset¹, a figure worth keeping in mind when a business development lead is pursuing new retainer clients on top of running the agency's day-to-day account work. Treating a searchable record of past new-business calls as a resource, what worked in a pitch that converted, what a prospect objected to, gives a small agency's limited BD hours a better shot at hitting that target than starting from a blank page each time.

Say a new-business call goes well and the prospect signs. Six months later, a similar prospect in a different sector needs a similar pitch. Searching back through the original call for the framing that actually landed, not just the final proposal document, gives the business development lead a genuine starting point instead of writing the pitch from scratch, and a genuine sense of which parts of the story to keep versus adapt for a different industry.