Selling isn’t about pitching products—it’s about telling stories that resonate with real problems. In the video above, I share how I use Storytell.ai to remix external web information about an enterprise prospect with internal data about our platform and my bio, background and interests to compose personalized outreach to an enterprise prospect.

The “STORY” Sales Method

Sellers know BANT or MEDDIC — in this age of Agentic AI I’d like to introduce the “STORY” sales method, which stands for:

* Search: Have AI continuously search company intelligence across the open web, including news, social, SEC filings, LinkedIn, blogs, websites and more to understand what a prospect’s realtime objectives and challenges are

* Triangulate: Have AI match those objectives and challenges to the capabilities your solution offers and find the best personas — or even better, the exact right people — for you to reach out to

* Opportunity: Have AI create an in-depth dossier on each specific opportunity for you to add value, tailored to the prospect you’ll be engaging with.

* Remix: AI combines the external intelligence it’s gathered with the personalized solution dossier to create targeted messaging that will resonate with your prospect

* Yield: All this means you are positioned to have high-value conversations equipped with deep intelligence, aligned capabilities, and messaging that speaks directly to what your prospect cares about right now

The STORY Sales Method is a strategic approach to sales outreach that leverages curated knowledge and personal narratives to identify and engage prospects based on actual problems they face. Instead of generic cold outreach, you create a “knowledge fence” around your expertise and use storytelling to connect authentically.

Before You Begin: Build Your Foundation

Before you can effectively use the STORY method, you need to prepare three critical components that will fuel you use of Storytell for AI-powered outreach.

Curate Your Knowledge

Create a project in Storytell that’s all about you. In my case, I called it “DROdioGPT.” Put anything in there that is representative of you — your resume, blog posts, expertise, and interests

I even put a FounderCulture podcast episode and my parenting blog into it.

What to focus on adding:

* Identify your core areas of expertise and experience and put as much content in as you’ve got that showcase those items

* Determine what knowledge is most relevant to your target audience

* Create Labels or Collections to organize different types of knowledge — this helps establish clear criteria for what stays in and what gets excluded from various sales narratives

Gather and Organize Your Company Assets and Capabilities

In a separate project (we cal ours Storytell Sales), collect all the materials that support your story and demonstrate your expertise. I wrote a full how-to blog post on how we created this GitHub Gist file that outlines the capabilities of Storytell, along with over 150 use cases around how different personas can get value from Storytell.

Then copy the data about you from your personal collection over to this sales project and give it all al label like “About Me” (or just preserve the existing labels)

Assets to include:

* Techn`ical White papers

* Case studies and success stories

* Industry research and insights

* Personal experiences and lessons learned

* Client testimonials or results

* Relevant data and statistics

How to organize:

* Label each asset with appropriate labels to taste — for example, based on the problems they address. You can do as much or as little of this as you wish

* Ensure easy access when AI needs to remix this information

Optional: Mine Your Personal Information for Story Gold

Your personal experiences are the secret weapon in creating authentic connections.

What to extract:

* Challenges you’ve personally overcome

* Mistakes you’ve made and lessons learned

* Breakthrough moments or insights

* Industry observations from your unique perspective

* Client interactions that revealed deeper problems

A great way to get this data is to load Otter, Granola, Zoom or other transcripts into Storytell and have it extract all of these gold nuggets into a dossier that you then “Add to Project Knowledge” to incorporate Storytell’s summarized output into your knowledge corpus.

How it helps: These personal stories become the foundation that AI will use to craft authentic narratives that demonstrate understanding rather than just selling.

The STORY Method in Action

Now that your foundation is built, here’s how to apply the STORY framework to turn prospects into conversations.

Step 1: SEARCH Company Intelligence

What’s happening: Have Storytell search the open web to gather real-time intelligence about your prospect’s world. Here’s a sample prompt from the video above:

Storytell can:

* Scan news articles, press releases, and industry publications

* Search social media posts from company leaders and employees

* Analyze SEC filings, earnings reports, and investor presentations

* Review LinkedIn profiles, company pages, and job postings

* Examine company blogs, podcasts, and public content

* Track recent company initiatives, product launches, or pivots

What you’re looking for:

* Current business objectives and strategic priorities

* Challenges or pain points mentioned in public forums

* Recent changes (leadership, strategy, market position)

* Industry pressures or competitive dynamics

* Growth initiatives or transformation projects

Why it matters: You’re building a picture of what your prospect actually cares about right now—not what you assume they need.

Step 2: TRIANGULATE Problems with Capabilities

What’s happening: Have Storytell match the intelligence gathered in Search to your specific capabilities and finds the exact right people to contact.

Here’s the part of the prompt where I used Storytell to do this in the video:

Storytell will:

* Analyze the prospect’s challenges against your curated knowledge base

* Identify where your expertise, stories, and solutions align with their problems

* Map specific capabilities from your assets to their stated needs

* Find personas or individuals most likely to own these problems

* Prioritize opportunities based on problem-capability fit

Key questions Storytell will answer for you:

* Which of their challenges do we solve best?

* What stories from our experience mirror their situation?

* Who in their organization owns this problem?

* Which of our capabilities are most relevant right now?

Why it matters: This isn’t spray-and-pray prospecting—you’re identifying genuine alignment between what they need and what you offer.

Step 3: Create OPPORTUNITY Dossiers

What’s happening: Storytell will create an in-depth, tailored dossier for each specific opportunity to add value.

What’s included:

* Summary of the prospect’s specific challenge or objective

* Relevant personal stories from your experience that mirror their situation

* Specific capabilities or insights from your knowledge base that apply

* Context about why this matters to their business right now

* Suggested value-creation angles for conversation

The dossier answers:

* What problem does this prospect have that we can address?

* Why does this problem matter to them specifically?

* What unique perspective can we bring based on our experience?

* How can we create immediate value in the first conversation?

Why it matters: You’re not just identifying an opportunity—you’re building a complete narrative framework for meaningful engagement.

Here’s a screenshot from this example dossier Storytell compiled on Netflix

Step 4: REMIX Into Personalized Outreach

What’s happening: Storytell combines external intelligence, your curated assets, and your personal bio and stories into targeted messaging that resonates.

The remix process:

* Takes the opportunity dossier from Step 3

* Weaves in relevant personal stories that demonstrate understanding

* Incorporates specific insights from your knowledge base

* References the prospect’s actual situation from Search intelligence

* Crafts messaging that invites conversation rather than pushing a sale

Here are some Netflix examples from the video above:

Storytell will also compose tailored outreach based on this remix of data:

Storytell wil...