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Join for freePosted: Mon 9th Nov 2026
Do you turn to AI for help, only to get something that sounds like everyone else? Or end up posting the same updates about your services and wondering why nobody engages?
In this Lunch and Learn, Heather Baker takes you through how to build a story bank: a growing collection of stories that build your reputation, earn trust, help you build relationships and make customers want to work with you.
Every small business is full of stories. The customer you rescued at the last minute. The mistake that taught you something.
The reason you started in the first place. The opinion you hold that others in your industry don’t. These are what get you noticed, remembered and trusted, yet most of them never make it out of your head.
In this session, Heather shows you how to spot the stories you already have, capture them so you never run dry, and turn a single story into content for your website, social media, PR and sales conversations.
Find your stories: How to spot the customer wins, lessons, origin moments and opinions you already have
Capture them: A simple system for building a story bank, so you always have something to say
Use them to win customers: How to turn one story into a LinkedIn post, a PR pitch, a case study and a sales email
Heather is the founder of The AI Edit, which helps B2B businesses find and win the customers that need them the most. She has spent more than two decades in PR and lead generation and has generated over two million leads.
Heather has built, scaled and sold a seven-figure business, and grown another to eight figures. She now works with businesses to help them build sales and lead engines.
Check out Heather’s Substack, More Leads.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona O'Connor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses. I'm pleased to introduce Heather Baker, who's the founder of The AI Edit.
In this session, Heather takes you through how to build a story bank – a growing collection of stories to build your reputation, earn trust, help you build relationships, and make customers want to work with you. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email to you with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Heather.
Heather Baker: Thank you so much. It's really good to be here. Hi, everybody, and welcome.
This session is about the only content that actually brings customers to you. So if you know you should be posting on LinkedIn, pitching to the media, sending out a newsletter or a Substack, but every time you sit down to write, nothing comes, then this is for you.
While AI might seem like the answer, you've probably noticed, or even found yourself, that the content AI produces is the same as everybody else's content. So you don't really stand out, which means that your content doesn't really work.
But every small business is full of stories – beautiful stories. The customer you rescued at the last minute, the mistake that taught you something, the reason you started in the first place, the moment you realised you were going to do this, the opinion you hold.
These are what get you noticed, remembered and trusted, yet most of them never make it out of your head – until today.
So if you don't know me, I'm Heather. I'm the founder of The AI Edit, and I help B2B teams build and run their own high-performance sales and lead gen engines. I've spent 20 years in PR and lead generation, and I've generated more than two million leads and built three businesses off the back of it.
My philosophy is that if you want to run a high-performance sales and lead gen engine, you need to combine five things. You need a brilliant offer, you need to be continuously building your brand, and you need real humans doing this – sorry, your AI agent can't do it.
Then you need to combine brilliant outbound with beautiful inbound, all human-led, and you've got to be really consistent. That is how you generate more leads and more sales.
But AI has really changed the whole content game, and we're going to start with that. If you were good at this five years ago and you feel like you're struggling a bit now, it's not you – it's because the game has changed.
What's happened is that, as I'm sure you know, AI can produce so much content so quickly. At first glance, that feels really exciting, because thank goodness we've got this tool that can help us do more in less time – more content than at any point in history.
But if everybody has the same tools, then everybody's getting the same type of content, which is why most of it is slop. AI is flooding every channel with generic, mediocre content, so the quality bar has risen.
You have to be better to be visible, because there aren't more eyeballs. People aren't consuming more content, but the supply has increased quite dramatically. So if you want to make a real impact, you've got to be up there in the top.
The problem is that AI is producing the content that used to work, but it can't produce the content that is working now. So there's not really much point in doing that, which is why originality has become the moat.
What works now is the stories the machine couldn't have written – the stories your competitors can't replicate because they come from something inside you and your business. Your experience, your point of view, your data, your scars – not just some summary of what's on the internet, which is what AI produces.
So how do you build a bank of stories that win customers? Well, there's a system. It works, and you've got to do most of it, but you can use AI to help you.
It cannot be fully automated. But if you're prepared to put in the time and the effort, and do it properly and to a high standard, you will absolutely reap the rewards.
I'm going to talk about the nine sources of great stories, because most content doesn't bring you leads or customers, but there are nine sources of stories that do. These are actually the same nine sources that I would have recommended 15 years ago.
So the list hasn't changed, but how you execute each one, and the meanness of each one – as in me-ness, not meanness – has changed.
As we go through this, I recommend you get a pen and paper, think of your own experience and write down four ideas for yourself for each of these sources. Then we're going to go through your list at the end and work out how you whittle it down into ones that will really have an impact.
So the first of my nine sources is: what do you feel strongly about in your industry? Where do you have an opinion that goes against the grain? What would you defend in a room full of people who disagreed with you?
AI can summarise what everybody thinks – boring. It can't form a view. Strong views come from your own experience – years of seeing things go right and wrong.
They come from scars, and AI doesn't have scars. Here's an example of something I feel strongly about, and this was my third piece about it: smart glasses.
If you're wearing AI smart glasses, then definitely read this piece, because it's about the privacy concerns of Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses. The purpose of this piece was to get people to sign a petition that has now passed 10,000 signatures, which is great.
The second source is: What irritates you? What really irritates you about something that you encounter in your day-to-day, your business, or something that affects your customers? What are you so tired of seeing?
What makes your heart sink? What makes you want to write a strongly worded LinkedIn post like this? Irritation is specific – it comes from your experience, and it can be subjective.
AI can't generate the small, sharp annoyance of watching the same mistake happen for the seventh time this month, and that is where you're going to find a great piece of content. Here's a strongly worded LinkedIn post that I wrote, and the thing that irritates me is automated, fake-personalised cold email outreach.
This one really took the cake. My Substack is called More Leads because I help people generate more leads, but this AI had decided that my first name must be Moore and my surname must be Leeds. These guys had sent me an email marketing cold outreach email to my personal email address, addressed to "Dear Moore".
The third source is: what data do you have? What data do you have from running your business that nobody else has?
What patterns have you spotted? What numbers would surprise people if they saw them? Your data is yours, and nobody else's AI can pick up your data – your AI probably can.
If you think you aren't sitting on data, you almost certainly are, but you can make your own as well. You can survey your audience, commission research or ask the same question every time you speak to a prospect. Or you can look at publicly available data in a way that nobody else has looked at it.
This is an example of a piece of research that I produced and commissioned in April, in which I asked a bunch of consumers to think back to the last product they had bought and tell me where they found it. 46% of them had found it via a Google search, which meant that SEO is definitely not dead.
The next source is: What have you done brilliantly? What have you done for a customer that made a huge difference? What problem did you solve that nobody else could crack?
What is the most interesting outcome you've ever delivered? You've really got to be honest about it, because case studies need to be specific and truthful. AI can say this strategy will probably do this, but it can't tell the actual story.
This was a WhatsApp message I got from a client in July, two and a half months after I'd started working with them. He was really excited because he had generated £40,000 worth of revenue in July.
He was honest – August bookings were minimal – but he ended up having a £40,000 month in August. By the end of August, he was fully booked to the end of October.
That is very specific, and it shows very honestly the work that I do and the results I get. So I was very happy to share that as one of my stories.
What do people not know, but they should? What is something that you wish your prospects understood that they don't?
Where do you find yourself explaining again and again? Where do people ask you the same sort of questions? AI can make educational material for everybody, but it doesn't know what your specific buyers understand or misunderstand.
I have a second Substack called The Humans in the Loop, where I help people think clearly about AI. This piece was written three weeks after I first tried Claude Cowork when, despite the huge amount of content out there on how to use Claude Cowork, I really had to battle my way through to work out how it worked. I shared that because I thought people would find it helpful, and they did – the Substack post did very well.
What's on your calendar? What dates matter to your buyers? Think of anniversaries, special days like National Talk Like a Pirate Day, financial year ends, regulatory deadlines, industry events and seasonal patterns.
What is coming up in the next 12 months that gives you an opportunity to talk about something? AI can help you find those dates. A good tip is to ask AI what anniversaries are coming up this year – one-year, five-year, 10-year and 20-year anniversaries – because those are good hooks.
But AI can't tell you which ones move the needle for your buyers and why. So here are two examples. The first is that Claude was making some quite significant changes to its privacy policy, and I did a post explaining those, which did very well.
The second was Halloween. Halloween might have nothing to do with my business, but I ran an analogy about the similarities between growing vegetables and building a lead gen engine – it's one of my pillars. So that post did well because it was Halloween.
The important thing to remember is that you must launch these posts ahead of the date, not afterwards. If you're talking about Halloween, you want to be talking about it in the week before Halloween, because content takes time to get traction.
What's new? What has just happened? What's in the news in your industry, your category or the world that affects your buyers?
What's the take that nobody else is going to give? AI can reproduce the news – the facts. The BBC does that very well, and most national newspapers do that very well.
So you don't want to be competing with those guys – you're very unlikely to win. What you've got is: what does this mean for your specific buyer?
News without a point of view is just a commodity. The same story with a sharp take from someone in your industry who actually knows becomes valuable.
I don't know if you remember, but a couple of months ago, some Claude chats were found available on the open web, and it raised this question that people were asking: are my AI chats private? It turns out they're not as private as you think.
So I did this video and this Substack post to help people get an answer to that question. Both of them rank in search results as well, which has been really good.
How cheeky can you be? What is the bold, slightly or very risky thing that you can do that would get attention? What little mini stunt or big stunt could you pull that's true to you, true to your brand, but unexpected?
What would make people stop scrolling? Stunts require nerve, and AI can offer creative ideas, but they're always quite safe. A model has nothing to lose, so it never does.
Here's a little stunt that I pulled earlier this year. It was an open letter to Anthropic, and this is also a data story, because I looked at their website and found that Anthropic was recruiting for 30-something enterprise salespeople, but zero small business salespeople.
So Anthropic was not going to help small businesses adopt their tools. Anthropic was focusing on the enterprise, and the gap between small businesses and enterprises was going to widen.
So I wrote this open letter to Anthropic, and a few weeks later, they did announce a small business product. I cheekily took credit for it, although I'm sure I don't get to take all the credit for it.
And finally: what can you teach? Educational content used to be really valuable – guides, ebooks, free courses – and it is still valuable, but it's got to be bespoke to you, because anyone can ask ChatGPT how to write an ebook.
What they can't get from a chatbot is how you specifically do it. What is your method that really works? Your shortcuts, your hacks, the mistakes you learned along the way.
This video about sycophancy and AI is a really good example, because Anthropic did its own video explaining sycophancy and AI, but it missed a very important point about sycophancy that was quite helpful for Anthropic to miss. So I gave the good, the bad and the ugly of sycophancy in AI, and this video, along with the Substack post that accompanied it, did very well.
So you've got your nine sources. You've worked through all nine and written your four ideas for each, so you've now got 36 story ideas – but some of them could still be told by anyone.
An opinion on its own is just an opinion. A trend everyone's noticed is really just a trend. What makes the story yours is the specific thing only you can add to it.
So go back through your 36, and for each one, ask: where is the moment that I can insert myself into this? The customer experience that I had, the number from my own data, the time I saw this happen and it went wrong.
You've got to layer that in, because the idea will get you noticed, but your experience is what makes it impossible to ignore and impossible to replicate. Once you've added your experience, you've then got to filter, and there are two questions that you need to be asking.
The first is: do I have the right to tell the story? Is it built on my real experience, my real data, my real knowledge, my real encounters, or am I just commenting on something that anyone could comment on?
As an example, I could probably write you a passable article about the football this weekend, but I know nothing about football. I've got no football expertise – I really am utterly useless when it comes to football – so I don't have the right to tell that story. Claude could probably help me write a pretty good article about football, but I'm not going to do that.
The second is: does it serve my business? I might have a brilliant story about football, and I might have the right to tell that story, but does it connect? Is that going to help me reach people who need help with sales and lead gen?
If the answer's no, it's not a story worth telling for your business. Don't be precious. This filter forces you to be ruthless, and you're going to whittle your ideas down from 36 to probably about 10 or 12.
So you've got your stories, and now you've got to capture them. The great thing is that once you understand the types of stories that work, new ideas are going to keep popping into your head as you go about your day-to-day work.
I actually have a chat in Claude where I just brain-dump my ideas as they come in, and Claude then adds them into my story bank. You need some way to keep and manage all of your ideas – you need a system, and your system has to have three things.
The first is a content calendar, which is where your ideas can be ordered by the date they're going to go out and sorted by where they are in the pipeline. Some will just be an idea; others will be researched, planned, scheduled, drafted, ready to publish or published. You need to be able to sort your content calendar by that.
The second is a way of clustering similar stories together. Content clusters are absolutely brilliant for brand building, building your authority and lead gen.
What you do is come up with a bunch of similar stories related to the same topic over the course of the year, and find a way of sorting them so that you can connect them. What Google and chatbots really love is seeing that you are an authority on a topic, and the best way to show that is to show you've been talking about this topic for quite a long time.
Every time you write about this topic, you want to link to the other times you've written about it, published on it or done a video on it. If you link to those, you are giving the algorithms direction on where to go to find that you are an authority on this.
Finally, it must be connected to some sort of task list. If a piece of content is scheduled for next week, there's a whole lot of activity that has to happen to get it ready to go.
It's got to be researched and written, and it needs an image and a meta description. So you need to connect this to your task list so that you can be sure that all of that activity happens.
I don't care what tool you use. I use Notion because I use Notion for my whole business, but if you're a monday.com evangelist, or if you love Asana, Excel or Google Sheets, it really doesn't matter. My advice is to use the tool that you're most comfortable in and the one that ticks those three boxes.
So you've got your story bank. You can sort it by date, by cluster, or by where things are in your pipeline and how close they are to being published.
So how do you use them to win customers? Well, the bit that turns stories into customers is repetition, trial and error, and listening to feedback.
Don't think, "This is for my blog, and this is a LinkedIn post, and this is for LinkedIn." Most stories can be tailored to pretty much any channel, so don't get hung up on rules about what belongs where.
A good story can be a blog post, a LinkedIn post, a video, an email or a PR pitch. The story doesn't change – you just have to tweak the framing, maybe the hook. What changes is just who's reading, what they care about and what you want them to do next.
As an example, this very session that I am delivering right now began its life as a presentation in April called Stories That Attract Leads. That then became a mini course that I filmed and sold via my website.
It then became a Substack post that I published, I think, just a couple of weeks ago, called "Where to find content ideas ChatGPT will never think of". I've done a number of LinkedIn posts, including one around the seven-experiment study, which talks about why ChatGPT can't produce original content.
I'm delivering it here to the Enterprise Nation community, and it forms part of my outbound sales emails. If I see a company that I want to work with and I think their stories are the problem, I will direct them to one of these pieces of content, or I might even offer to give them free access to my Stories That Attract Leads course.
It's formed part of a so far unsuccessful PR pitch, where I pitched it to Small Business News, saying, "Would you be interested in a story about the nine sources of stories?" I'm still working on it.
I've done one LinkedIn post, but I'm turning it into a series where every Friday I feature a story that I found in the wild. So every single story can be repeated in multiple formats to help you meet many different potential viewers and a massive audience.
You don't have to be starting from scratch. The beauty of AI is that once you've said it in your very own words, AI can help you repeat it in your own words in different formats. Don't get AI to rewrite it or summarise it – get AI to do it in your words.
Two things go wrong. One is that people think saying something once means their audience has heard it. They really haven't – your audience is busy, and they scroll past most of what you publish.
If you publish something on LinkedIn, probably 10% of your audience gets to see it. So you have to say it again and again and again, until your audience is a bit bored of hearing the same old story from you. That's roughly when they're starting to hear you, and when their subconscious is registering that you are associated with this topic.
And just remember, not every story will land. Some will do brilliantly, some won't do very well, and some will just bump along for six months and then take off, particularly if you're on YouTube or Substack.
But the key is consistency. Keep going, keep learning from what works, keep applying those learnings and keep improving.
The people who do brilliantly – the people who generate leads from their content – are the ones who keep going. The ones you see taking off are not the ones that started yesterday; they started a year ago. Some of the best creators in the world have been doing this for a decade, and they did it for five years before it went anywhere.
So here's what I'd leave you with. The stories that are going to win your next customer already exist. They're sitting in your business – in your experience, your data, your opinions, your work, your nerve.
Nobody else has them, and no machine can invent them. The businesses that stand out from here are the ones that can mine that raw material, tell those stories and keep doing it. That is the whole game, and it is completely within your reach.
Those stories will build your brand. They will help your inbound and your outbound, and those are three of the key ingredients to generating leads and sales.
If you want more of this, please do check out my Substack. It's called More Leads, and I share at least one post a week – most of it completely free – which helps you stay up to date with everything in lead gen.
Thank you very much for being here. Please do connect with me, and if you have any questions, I'm very happy to answer them.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Heather. We just had a question from Gideon asking if the session is recorded. Yes, just to confirm, the session is recorded, and we will share that with you later today.
If anyone else has any questions, please do pop them into the chat. In the meantime, I have a question here: what are some of the most overlooked stories that businesses tend to miss?
Heather: What is going on in your own business is probably the most overlooked. You don't even need to tell a client case study – tell your own story.
Why did you set up? What was the moment that made you set up? Maybe it wasn't some epiphany or light-bulb moment for you – maybe it was something a little bit more mundane or boring.
Maybe somebody just asked you if you could do something, you did it, you realised you were good at it and you started doing more. Tell that story – that authentic, real, true story – because people are genuinely interested in that. Whatever's going on inside your business, tell that story, because that is what people care about.
Caitriona: Thank you. What's the easiest way for a busy small business owner to start building a story bank?
Heather: If you go onto my Substack, I've got a post about this, and I've given you a whole bunch of prompts and a worksheet that you can follow. But really, you want to go through every single one of those nine sources of stories and come up with four ways that you can apply each one to yourself.
You can upload the worksheet into your AI and get your AI to interview you if you're not feeling that creative. But don't ask the AI to answer the questions, because the stories are inside you.
Once you've done that, you really just want one story a month. One story can be one piece of content, five pieces of content, 10 pieces of content or 20 pieces of content. If you're focusing on one story a month, that's half a day a month creating that story, turning it into the different pieces of content and getting it out there.
Set yourself a goal for your very first one to flop dramatically, because it probably will. Probably nobody will care, but that's OK.
You want to see what sort of data you can get from it. What can you try slightly differently next time to get that slight incremental improvement every single time?
Caitriona: Thank you. Then we have a question in the chat, and someone's asking, "Other than calendar-related content, can you work through this slowly?"
"I'm the only person in the business, so time management is tricky. And how do you help overcome not necessarily wanting to share what feels personal or private?"
Heather: I actually don't share a huge amount that's personal or private myself, because I think we all have to understand that there are tools scraping LinkedIn and Substack and building a picture of you and your life. So I exported all my LinkedIn data and got Claude to go through it and find any time I'd mentioned anything personal, and I deleted all those posts.
So I'm actually not an advocate of sharing your deepest, darkest personal thoughts. But you only need one story per month, so it is very manageable for one person to do it.
Whatever you come up with, a good thing to do is to say to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, "What is the likelihood that an AI would have recommended this to somebody else? Give me a number out of 10." If the likelihood is high, then ask for variations of the topic that are closer to a one or a two, so that you can do something that is very different.
Caitriona: Thank you. Then we had another question, and someone was asking, "Are you able to show what the content calendar, topic groups, etc look like in the real world?"
Heather: Yes, I am. I'm just going to hide my bookmarks, which I should have done already, and then I will share my screen again.
So this is my content calendar in Notion, and I might move it back a few months. You can see every single piece has its title and the platform it's going on, because I do YouTube, Substack and LinkedIn.
The purpose of that one was to sell that mini course, and this is the cluster. The cluster was websites that generate leads, and I did a whole bunch of content specifically about that cluster.
If I filtered by cluster, you would be able to see exactly what I did on that cluster. I did two blog posts, I did some YouTube, and I did some Substack and another blog post.
So this is my content calendar. I actually share a template version of this on the Substack post to do with this, and I can maybe send it out with the resources. I've got a Google Sheets template as well, which I think you can just save as Excel if you use Excel, and that'll enable you to do this more easily.
Caitriona: Thank you so much. We've just come to the end of the session now, but thank you so much, Heather, for your presentation.
Thanks to everyone who joined us today. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. Thank you.
Heather: Excellent. Thanks very much, everybody – I really appreciate you having me. Cheers.
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