Problem / Context

Most agencies spend a lot of time trying to sound smart.

They publish case studies, frameworks, trend pieces, pitch decks, and points of view. All of that matters.

But in new business, being smart is not enough. Buyers are surrounded by smart firms. The harder challenge is being remembered.

Often, people remember the parts that feel human.

The Signal

I was reminded of this twice recently.

At the POSSIBLE conference, I met someone who had read my newsletter and attended some of our webinars. They brought up a story I had written months earlier about my mom and her Parkinson’s disease.

Not a post about cold email. Not a piece about breaking through to CMOs. Not a webinar takeaway.

They remembered my mom, family, grief, and what it feels like to watch someone you love go through something hard.

A couple weeks later, at the Mirren New Business Conference, it happened again.

I invited a woman standing off to the side to join me for breakfast. She saw my name badge, recognized me, and said, “You have a daughter who plays tennis, right?”

She meant a story about my daughter Bianca getting cut from volleyball, then pivoting to tennis and making the team.

Again, not business content. A personal story.

Why It Matters

For almost six years, I’ve used personal storytelling in my newsletter and on LinkedIn.

The newsletter grew from zero to 80,000+ subscribers. LinkedIn grew from maybe 2,000 followers to nearly 20,000. Both became two of our top revenue channels.

But the real proof is when someone gets on a call and already feels like they know you.

People do not just hire capabilities. They hire trust, judgment, and people they believe understand the stakes.

Trust is often built through stories before it is built through a pitch.

The Mistake Most Teams Make

The mistake is thinking stories like this are separate from business development.

They are not.

Your origin story matters. Why the founder started the firm matters. The client moment that changed your team matters. The personal experience that explains your standards or point of view matters.

That does not mean every personal story belongs in public.

A story works when it reveals something meaningful about how you think, what you value, or how you show up. It fails when it feels forced, self-indulgent, or disconnected from the audience.

But many firms avoid the risk. They remove the human parts because they do not want to seem unprofessional, vulnerable, or cringe.

Safe content is often the easiest to ignore.

The Smarter Move

Do not turn every story into a pitch. That ruins it.

Use stories to help people understand the belief behind the business.

And this is not only a founder’s job. The stories that shape a firm usually come from across the team.

This matters even more now because so much content sounds the same.

AI can help write, edit, summarize, and package ideas faster. But AI has not watched a parent battle Parkinson’s. It has not watched a daughter get cut from one sport, then fight her way into another. It has not built a company or learned a lesson the hard way.

Those are human experiences. And human experiences are still what people remember.

How to Use This

Look at the stories already sitting inside your firm.

The reason it was started. The belief that shaped it. The setback that changed it. The client experience that sharpened it.

Maybe those stories belong in a pitch, newsletter, webinar intro, case study, or in-person conversation.

The point is not to make every prospect like you. It is to help the right prospects understand what your firm believes and why you show up the way you do.

In a noisy, AI-filled, content-heavy world, the story may be the thing that makes the insight stick.