Ryan Baum 🌱

A journalist by training and product marketer by accident, I've spent the past two decades navigating the fascinating waters of digital think tanks, global publishing agencies, and B2B technology companies. 

In 2025, I launched Storyline to bridge the gap between brand and product marketing, positioning and messaging, content and communications. We specialize in helping B2B tech companies move upmarket with a more compelling and resilient story. Based in Montreal, I work with visionary executives and their teams around the world. 

Dan Levy

When I launched my consultancy a year ago, the decision felt counterintuitive.

The tech market was uncertain. Marketing roles were getting cut. AI was changing everything. Going out on my own seemed like the riskier move.

But when I really thought about it, building my own business actually felt less risky than finding another job. More sustainable long-term for me and my family.

So I launched with a thesis: storyline work would be project-based. I'd come in, help you find the story, craft it, bring it to market, and send you on your way.
But that's not how it played out.

What I found was that to make the storyline stick, my clients needed more than a handoff. They needed ongoing support, advising, editorial direction. The in-and-out model wasn't enough.

So a few months ago, I transitioned to retainers. And that shift changed everything. It gave me stability and predictability in my income. It let me work with fewer clients, longer-term, solving a really clear and specific problem. It made the whole thing feel sustainable in a way it didn't at the beginning.

The irony isn’t lost on me: my business now mirrors the companies I work with.
I work mostly with SaaS companies, subscription-based tech, recurring revenue models. They're all moving upmarket. They're all trying to sell into the enterprise because they see it's the only way to break through and grow long-term.

And that often means working with fewer, bigger customers while doing really high-impact work for them. 

Turns out I'm doing the same thing. Here's to a healthy, successful, sustainable 2026!

Dan J. Levy

Founder of Storyline | Bridging the gap between brand & product marketing, positioning & messaging, strategy & storytelling.

My 3-year old daughter, somehow still awake past 10pm, wobbles into the living room as I’m finishing up a few things on my laptop.

She points to the emoji panel and puts her branding genius to work:

📍= “lollipop” 
🔥= ”marshmallows” 
 🎉= “ice cream cone with sprinkles"
 
3 for 3.

I knew Mark Carney’s speech at Davos made a global splash when two clients brought it up on calls this week — one in the US and one in Australia.

As a Canadian, I have plenty of thoughts on the substance. But this being LinkedIn, I’m here to talk about — you guessed it — the storyline.

From that perspective, it was a masterclass.

Unlike the trendier “storytelling,” a storyline is not meant to entertain and engage. It’s meant to clarify and convince. It's meant to worm its way into the hearts and minds of the people you're trying to influence.

For my clients, those are the CIOs and CFOs who determine the fate of a six-figure deal. For Carney, it’s the Davos elite. But the structure is exactly the same. 

It starts with Context, which anchors the story in the current moment. This is the "Why now?" piece that ensures the solution's relevance and urgency.

Carney opens with a metaphor about a greengrocer putting a sign in his window that he doesn't believe in. He frames the current geopolitical moment as "living within a lie." We all know the rules-based order is fading, but we keep the sign in the window to avoid trouble. 

Next, he frames the Problem. We used to think global integration was a failsafe against conflict. Now, great powers are using that integration as a weapon. Supply chains are vulnerabilities. Tariffs are used as coercion. 

"If you are not at the table," he says, agitating the problem, "you are on the menu."

Then, he proposes the Solution. This is the crux of the storyline. Carney coins the term "Values-Based Realism." It's the move from passive compliance to active cooperation. He argues that middle powers like Canada need to "take the sign down" and stop pretending. We need to build domestic strength in energy and AI, and form coalitions based on shared interests, not nostalgia. 

Finally, he paints the Vision, showing what the world looks like if we get this right. It’s not about isolationism but a "third path" where countries don't have to choose between submission to a superpower or going it alone. It's a vision of sovereignty anchored in resilience.

Context. Problem. Solution. Vision. 

It’s a simple formula, but it’s the backbone of every clear and resilient storyline, whether you're selling a SaaS platform to a risk-averse bank, or a foreign policy doctrine to the G7. 

For the sake of the free world, let’s hope Mr. Carney lands the deal.

You're at a steak dinner. Maybe you're coming off a trade show like NRF, or an SKO ('tis the season). Across from you is the VP of IT at a company you've been trying to close for six months. 

You've already done the small talk. Kids, travel, the game last night. Now there's a lull. You take a sip of wine. They cut into their ribeye.

You could talk about your product, but that feels salesy. You could ask about their challenges, but that feels like a discovery call. You're supposed to be "building a relationship," but you're not sure what that actually means in this moment.

So you talk about the weather again. The dinner ends, and you go home feeling deflated. You missed an opportunity to build a key relationship, but you don't know what you could have done differently.

Now imagine the same dinner. Same prospect. Same ribeye.

But this time, you lean in. "Hey, did you hear about the Cisco acquisition? What do you make of that?" Or: "What's going on with AI at your company? How are you dealing with that?"

Suddenly, you're not pitching. You're talking shop. You have a point of view on what's happening in the market, and you're genuinely curious about theirs. The conversation flows. By the time the check comes, you've built more trust in 90 minutes than in six months of emails.

That's what a storyline gives you. Most companies have positioning - what they do and who they do it for. But positioning doesn't give you anything to talk about at dinner. Your storyline does.

It's your point of view on the market, the context your buyer is operating in, and why any of this matters right now. It gives you a framework for those conversations. A shared language and vocabulary.

Some people call this category creation. But the category is about what you do. This is about how you see the world, what problem you're solving, and why it matters for your particular buyer(s), right now.

Enterprise deals aren't won in demos. They're won in conversations. Your storyline is what makes those conversations possible.

If your team doesn't know what to talk about beyond features and functionality, let's talk.

Your product is enterprise-ready, but your GTM isn't. Here’s what I advise my scale-up clients to do in this moment:

Most scale-ups underestimate what it actually takes to sell to the enterprise. They think it's about checking boxes. Compliance. Security. Stability. Infrastructure.

All of that is table stakes. It's the price of admission. It's not what makes enterprise buyers choose you.

What makes them choose you is a storyline that creates context for why you matter right now. That shows them you understand their world, and gives every stakeholder in a six-to-seven person buying committee a consistent way to talk about what you do and why it's worth the investment.

Your BDRs need to change how they run outreach. Your AEs need to change how they run discovery. Your marketing team needs to change what content they create and who they target.

That goes way beyond a messaging project. It’s organizational transformation.
And it starts with getting clear on the story you're telling at the enterprise level. You need to create a fundamentally different narrative for buyers with fundamentally different stakes.

You need to fix your storyline problem.

Positioning explains your solution. Storyline shapes the conversation.

This distinction keeps coming up in my client meetings and I think it's one of the most important things I've landed on.

Positioning tells people what you do, who you do it for, and how you're different. It's internal alignment. It's clarity. It's necessary. But it doesn't shape the conversation.

When you walk into a room with enterprise buyers, you don't get to control what they already believe. You don't get to decide what category they've already put you in. You don't get to choose what they're comparing you to before you've even opened your mouth.

Storyline is what lets you frame that conversation. It's the narrative that creates the context for your solution to make sense. It's what makes buyers see the problem differently before you ever talk about your product.

Positioning is reactive. It answers the question "What do you do?"

Storyline is proactive. It answers the question before it's asked.

Most companies nail their positioning and then wonder why enterprise deals still stall. It's because they're explaining their solution inside a conversation they didn't shape.

A positioning project and a website refresh aren’t the same thing. Despite what you may read on LinkedIn 

But your website – particularly your homepage – is a great forcing function to align on positioning and bring it to market in a way that communicates not just what you do but why it matters, to the right people, right now. 

That’s your storyline. 

So when I redid my own website just before the break, it felt high stakes. I knew my website was just one channel, and not the one that would bring me new business, necessarily. 

But I needed it to communicate my own storyline in a clear and compelling way. Not just “I’m a consultant who bridges the gap between brand and product marketing,” but here’s the problem I solve for clients, here’s the context that makes that problem relevant and urgent, and here’s who I solve it for, exactly.

And since I’m helping B2B tech companies move upmarket with a more resilient story, I wanted the site to seem “enterprise” itself, even if I’m just one guy. Because the storyline problem has nothing to do with how big you are, it’s about the size and complexity of the organizations you’re selling into. 

What I’m trying to say is, I relaunched my offer last month, but never  launched my new website. And since today is the one-year anniversary of publicly launching Storyline, it feels like a good time to do it. 

What do you think?

No alternative text description for this image

If you're moving upmarket to sell into the enterprise, you'll likely experience what I call the "confused for" problem.

And it's harder to solve than a competitive differentiation problem because you're not fighting features. You're fighting context.

One of my clients built something genuinely new: CX observability for cloud contact centers. They weren't competing with anyone. They'd carved out a space no one else occupied.

But that was the problem.

Every sales conversation went the same way: "We are not call center analytics or assurance. We do not replace your CCaaS platform, we integrate with it."

Prospects couldn't figure out what category to put them in. So they defaulted to the solutions my client looked most like, even though it wasn't.

So instead of manufacturing differentiation, we leaned into what truly made them special. They were – and still are – the only company offering true observability into the modern AI-enabled contact center. 

Not point-in-time testing. Not synthetic “evals.” A real-time window into all the disconnected systems – networks, carriers, headsets, AI agents, conversations – that make up a real enterprise customer experience.

We elevated the problem from a technical one to an operational one rooted in the context of enterprise contact center leaders who are navigating massive complexity in the era of digital transformation, voice AI, and agentic workflows.

Now CX Observability isn’t just positioning but a storyline that weaves its way through its entire go-to-market, from demand gen campaigns and press releases to sales conversations and steak dinners with customers at industry trade shows.

Enterprise sales is ultimately about relationships and conversations, and your storyline grounds those conversations in a shared vocabulary and POV on what’s happening in your customer’s world, right now.

Most positioning frameworks focus on competitive differentiation. How are you better than the alternatives? But when you're specialized enough to be a category of one, the real fight isn't "how are we different." It's "how do we help people understand what we actually are."

That's not a positioning problem. That's a storyline problem.

If your sales team spends more time explaining what you're not than what you are, we should talk.

taplio

The Battle

Ryan Baum 🌱

Dan Levy

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreDan Levy's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Ryan Baum 🌱

Dan Levy

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dan Levy's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDan Levy's LinkedIn Performance