David Iyamah
January 15, 2025
Introduction
Selling to enterprises is one of the most challenging aspects of B2B sales. Unlike SMB deals, enterprise sales involve multiple decision-makers, long sales cycles, complex procurement processes, and internal bureaucracy. Sales professionals often waste time reaching out to the wrong people, using ineffective messaging, or failing to understand the buyer’s internal approval process.
At the same time, sellers who have successfully closed deals with enterprise companies possess valuable knowledge about how these businesses buy. They know which stakeholders matter, what messaging works, and what hurdles to expect in procurement, but this information is rarely shared. Most sellers reinvent the wheel, leading to inefficiencies and lost opportunities.
Accountstory is a network where sales professionals (and later buyers themselves) share their insights on selling into specific enterprise accounts and earn rewards in return. Contributors are incentivized to document and verify real-world strategies, providing actionable intelligence to other sellers. This creates a crowdsourced playbook for breaking into enterprise accounts, enabling sales teams to close deals faster and with greater precision.
The Problem: Enterprise Sales is a Black Box
Selling to large companies is difficult because every enterprise has a different buying process. Some are procurement-driven, requiring complex RFPs, while others rely on informal decision-making among executives or end users. Sellers who lack visibility into these processes face three major challenges:
Finding the Right Stakeholders: Sales teams waste time reaching out to the wrong people. Or never find the right ones. Who runs Devops at Coinbase? How do I sell recruiting software to a16z? Enterprise teams today mainly spray and pray to figure this out or hope that someone they know has the knowledge.
Crafting the Right Message: Generic sales pitches don’t resonate; each enterprise has its own priorities and decision triggers.
Navigating the Internal Process: Procurement, legal, and budgeting can stall deals for months if sellers don’t anticipate or understand how it all works. This can impact forecasting and even delay deals closing on time or at all as time kills deals.
Why Hasn’t This Been Solved?
Sales knowledge is fragmented – Enterprise sales playbooks exist, but they are locked within individual companies and individuals who have the know how.
No incentives to share insights – Sellers who figure out how to close deals keep this knowledge to themselves. We know that they are willing to share these insights though with the right incentives.
Existing solutions are ineffective – this data does not exists. Sales training, CRM data, and third-party firmographics don’t provide account-specific knowledge about how companies work.
The Solution: A Sales Intelligence Network
Accountstory creates an incentivized knowledge-sharing network for sales professionals. It provides a structured way for sellers to contribute their insights, get rewarded for valuable contributions, and access an ever-growing playbook of real-world, account-specific sales intelligence.
Our Wedge - A LinkedIn Extension
Our initial phase and product would just be to grow the network and get the contribution flywheel going. We're going to build a simple chrome extension that sits on li LinkedIn, allowing users to contribute insights effortlessly without disrupting their workflow.
Contribute & Earn Rewards
Sales professionals can share account-specific knowledge - who the key stakeholders are, what messaging works, and how to navigate procurement.
Insights are validated by other users, ensuring accuracy and reliability.
Contributors earn token rewards based on the quality and usefulness of their insights.
In the initial phase the value to the user while the network is being built out is mainly the rewards they accrue and owning part of the network early on. They get to partake in the economic benefits the network developing. Over time it becomes trading information or unlocking information.
Feedback from a Strategic Account Executive
Redeem for High-Value Sales Insights
Users can redeem rewards to unlock premium sales intelligence.
Over time, AI-powered tools aggregate and refine the best insights into enterprise-specific playbooks. Think of an AI agent that has access to this knowledge. Since the knowledge doesn't exist this could be a powerful network effect.
Companies can buy access to the AI agent, or the dataset could perhaps integrate with other agents and tools in CRMs via an API.
The Sales Network Flywheel
The real power of Accountstory comes from its self-reinforcing network effect. As more people contribute, the network becomes smarter, attracting even more participants who also contribute and making the insights more valuable.
How the Flywheel Works
Sellers contribute insights on breaking into enterprise accounts.
These insights help others avoid common mistakes and target the right decision-makers faster.
AI aggregates, validates, and refines the data into actionable strategies.
The platform learns which insights are most effective and surfaces the best strategies.
More sales professionals join to access high-value intelligence.
The playbooks become an essential resource for sellers looking to improve their enterprise sales skills.
As the network grows, contributions increase, making the insights even stronger.
More contributions create more data, continuously improving the system.
This flywheel effect ensures that the network’s value compounds over time - the more people participate, the smarter and more useful the insights become.
Market Opportunity
The market for B2B sales intelligence is massive. There are over 50 million B2B sales professionals globally, many of whom struggle with enterprise sales.
Current solutions, such as CRM enrichment tools and third-party databases, fail to provide the real, contextual insights sellers need. As it grows, our network would be unique, and in the age of AI, having a unique dataset that pertains to enterprises and that motion is immensely valuable.
Roadmap & Future Growth
Phase 1: Network Launch
Develop and launch the LinkedIn extension.
Recruit early adopters and sales influencers.
Establish the the contribution and rewards loop.
Phase 2: AI & Data Refinement
Deploy AI-driven insights to filter and refine the best contributions.
Allow sellers to access intelligence directly within their CRM and outreach tools.
Phase 3: Scaling the Network
Partner with B2B sales organizations to onboard more professionals.
Expand into industry-specific sales intelligence (e.g., healthcare, finance, SaaS).
Phase 4: Full Platform Expansion
Build out premium tiers for advanced sales analytics and AI-driven coaching.
Integrate deeper with enterprise sales platforms and workflow tools.
Team & Contributors
Accountstory is built by sales leaders, AI engineers, and data experts, with contributions from experienced enterprise sellers who provide the backbone of the network. The founders are 3 Berkeley grads with backgrounds in ML/engineering & enterprise sales from SurveyMonkey, Mapbox, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Strategic investors and industry partners will also help drive adoption and network effects.
Conclusion
Enterprise sales remains a mystery for many sellers. Without account-specific knowledge, sales professionals waste time on ineffective outreach, struggle to engage decision-makers, and fail to navigate procurement. The best insights exist, but they’re not accessible to most sellers.
Accountstory solves this problem by rewarding sales professionals for sharing what works. Instead of keeping valuable knowledge locked within companies, the network turns individual successes into shared intelligence, helping every seller close deals faster and more efficiently.
As more professionals contribute, the network grows stronger, the data becomes smarter, and sales teams win more enterprise deals. Over time, Accountstory will become the most valuable sales intelligence resource, not because it’s built on abstract data, but because it’s powered by real-world experience from the sellers and even buyers who know best.
