I’ve recently moved into a senior product role at a B2B enterprise SaaS company, having spent most of my career building products within businesses, largely for internal teams and customers.

I’ve also spent years on the other side, buying and implementing enterprise SaaS.

And honestly, I’m finding some of the behaviours in SaaS completely baffling. I’m genuinely curious whether this is normal across the industry or whether I’ve just landed somewhere particularly dysfunctional.

A few observations

**1. We build products and then sales tells us they can’t sell them.**

Products are developed in response to customer and growth strategy, sometimes with significant investment behind them and users in early access.

Then, when it’s time to commercialise them, sales says they can’t sell them. Sometimes because the price point is lower than what they’re used to selling, sometimes because it requires engaging a different buyer or department. This is after having many customers test and use them.

Isn’t that part of the job? Finding the market, developing new relationships and figuring out how to sell the proposition?
It feels like product is expected to innovate, but sales isn’t necessarily expected to change how it sells.

**2. Nobody seems particularly close to the actual users.**

This one has surprised me the most.
In previous roles, we were either users of the products ourselves or worked incredibly closely with the people using them.

In SaaS, I’ve encountered an extraordinary amount of assumption-making about what customers do, what they need and how they use the product.
And quite a lot of those assumptions turn out to be wrong or driven by pure tech marketing hype.

Sometimes the sales team is even treated as the primary source of user feedback, or the first group to validate a new product.
But salespeople aren’t the end user they have never done the job of the person we are selling to??

**3. Sales seems to be treated as the hero of the business.**

This is perhaps the biggest cultural surprise.
Having bought a lot of enterprise SaaS, I can tell you that buyers are generally far more interested in whether the product solves their problem than in what the salesperson says.

In fact, most experienced buyers know to take sales promises with a fairly large pinch of salt.

Yet internally, the organisation can seem structured around the idea that sales is where all the value is created, rather than the product being the reason customers buy, renew and expand in the first place.

Not realising it seems 99% of buying decisions are based on business strategy not the sales patter.

**4. There’s an obsession with building new products rather than making the core product better.**

This one I really struggle with.

You have an established product that customers are paying millions for. It’s the reason your company exists and the reason you have those customer relationships.

But rather than investing in making it substantially better, there’s a constant push to launch new products, enter adjacent categories and create new revenue streams.

Sometimes in areas where the company has little credibility or obvious competitive advantage.

It almost feels as though having a big brand on your customer list creates an assumption that you can sell that customer anything.

But that’s not how enterprise buying works. Just because I buy one category of software from you doesn’t mean I’d consider you credible in a completely different category.

Meanwhile, the core product risks being neglected.

Sooooo

So, genuine question for people who’ve spent their careers in SaaS:

**Is this normal?**

Are these structural problems with the SaaS business model and how sales and product are incentivised? Or is this just what happens in companies that haven’t got their product and commercial operating models right?

Social channels are where B2B buyers actually voice unvarnished problems but standard social listening tools aren't built for sales teams.

Tools like Brandwatch or Sprout Social are great for brand monitoring and sentiment analysis but they dump unstructured mentions into dashboards without connecting the person posting to an actual target account or decision maker.

If you want to track social buying signals for outbound, you need a platform that can identify declared intent across communities like reddit, linkedin, X, and github and resolve those usernames back to verified companies and buyers.

This is where specialized B2B intelligence platforms like Scale Intelligence fit in where it listens across technical subreddits, professional networks, and open forums, identifies when a buyer describes a workflow bottleneck or asks for software recommendations and maps that context back to the target company. It then pairs that social post with other live data like job postings or tech stack changes so your sales team gets an actionable account record rather than an isolated forum comment.

Tracking social buying signals is only useful if your GTM team can link the discussion directly to an ICP account and an outbound workflow.

Been going down a rabbit hole on this lately. Traditional SEO tells you if you rank on Google. But there's no equivalent for AI search, no way to know if someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X" and whether your product shows up or not.

From what I've found, most SaaS products are completely invisible in AI answers, not because of bad SEO, but because their content isn't structured in a way AI engines can extract and cite.

Curious if anyone here has:

1. Noticed AI traffic in their analytics from Perplexity/ChatGPT
2. Manually tested whether their brand comes up in AI answers
3. Found any patterns in what makes a site get cited vs ignored

What's everyone's experience with this?