If you’re a SaaS company and you’re selling your product - you’re doing it wrong.

At one enterprise SaaS company, I lead the transformation of the sale and we went from 2-year, $160K product deals…to 4-year, million-dollar strategic partnerships. And in the two years I was there - I never once looked at the product. Because the product wasn’t the problem. Perception was.

We sold to the boardroom, not the back office. We solved their critical business challenge. We didn’t sell them a product. And we didn’t just point to the challenge. We showed them what they weren’t seeing.

That’s where the value is. That’s how you change the game.

Business is simple. You’re complicating it to your own detriment.

At its core, business is just this: Deliver measurable value and a great experience receiving it, and you with thrive. That’s it.

Everything else is noise.

But somewhere along the way, you got distracted:

→ Org charts.

→ Martech stacks.

→ Sales playbooks.

→ Acronym soup and dashboards full of vanity metrics.

You built a machine to manage the complexity instead of fixing the simplicity you lost.

Here’s the truth:

• If your customer doesn’t understand the value

• If they don’t feel it

• If they don’t trust you to deliver it

• Then none of the layers matter.

Simplicity isn’t easy. It takes clarity, courage, and discipline. But it’s the only thing that scales.

Simple is what earns trust.

Simple is what gets repeated.

Simple is what wins.

If you don’t have a compelling insight or point of view, you’re a commodity.

It doesn’t matter how great your product is.

If the customer already knows everything you’re going to say—

they don’t need you to say it.

And when everyone sounds the same, guess what happens?

The customer compares you based on features.

Or price.

Or whatever’s easiest to understand.

You’re not just losing deals.

You’re making yourself forgettable.

Great companies—and great sales teams—don’t show up with a list of features.

They show up with a point of view.

A clear take on:

→ What problem the customer really has

→ What they’re not seeing about it

→ And how your company helps them win

That’s what gets attention.

That’s what builds trust.

That what wins deals at a premium and sets up your customer success team to grow the account.

If you’re not designing your customer’s experience then you’re delivering a choppy one.

Because here’s the truth, your customers are already having an experience. The only question is whether you’ve designed it

or just let it happen by accident.

Did you plan what they should think, feel, and do at every key moment? Or are you hoping it all just goes well?

Most companies don’t design the journey. They build departments. They build processes. They ship features. And the experience?

• It’s fragmented.

• It’s inconsistent.

• It’s confusing.

• It doesn’t build trust—it breaks it.

Customer experience isn’t a layer you add at the end. It’s the strategy that holds everything together. If you don’t control it, you don’t control the outcome.

Design the experience. Or lose the customer.

Your CAC isn’t high.Your customer experience is weak.

If you can’t convert attention into interest, interest into belief, and belief into action, it’s not a cost problem - it’s an experience problem.

You’re paying to get people in the room. But when they get there…

• They’re confused.

• They’re skeptical.

• Or they just don’t care enough to act.

What you call a “conversion issue” is actually a clarity issue. A trust issue. A relevance issue.

It’s what happens when:

→ Marketing runs too generic

→ Sales sounds like everyone else

→ Your story doesn’t make them feel anything

→ And onboarding is clunky, unclear, or unconvincing

So yes—your CAC might look high on paper. But you’re not wasting budget. You’re wasting attention.

Fix the experience. And CAC takes care of itself.

The problem isn’t what you’re spending. It’s what your prospects are experiencing.

If your company is organized around departments…you’re in trouble.

Departments make sense on paper. But your customer never experiences your org chart. They experience the gaps between your teams. Here’s what they feel:

• Marketing says one thing.

• Sales says another.

• CS can’t deliver what was promised.

• And Product is on a different planet entirely.

Nobody owns the full journey. Nobody’s accountable for the experience. And everyone’s solving their part of the problem—while the customer falls through the cracks.

You’re not one company. You’re five teams sharing a logo.

Alignment doesn’t happen inside departments. It happens around the customer.

That means shared goals. Shared language. Shared ownership of the experience, not just the output. Because silos don’t just slow you down. They break trust. And they break deals.

Organize around the customer—not departments. That’s how you scale without breaking.

If marketing isn’t seeding the conversation sales wants to have, and sales isn’t setting up CS as the experts and your CS team can’t have a strategic conversation—you’re in trouble.

Most companies treat marketing, sales, and CS like separate functions. But to your customer? It’s one experience.

And when it’s disconnected, they feel it.

• Marketing runs campaigns that don’t speak to real business problems—just drive any old traffic.

• Sales tries to steer the conversation toward value, but has to start from scratch - then closes whatever deals it can.

• And CS inherits accounts from a position of weakness, and a churn clock.

Alignment isn’t a luxury. It’s your edge.

Disconnected teams lose deals. And disconnected teams don’t grow the accounts they win.

Your real competition isn’t other SaaS products.It’s customer apathy.

In so many opportunities, the customer doesn’t choose a competitor. They choose to do nothing.

• Because they don’t see the urgency.

• Because they’re not convinced the problem matters.

• Because your pitch didn’t shift their thinking.

They don’t say “no.” They just go silent. And that’s worse.

Because now your team is chasing ghosts. Forecasting deals that aren’t real. And wondering why nothing’s closing.

That’s not a pipeline problem. That’s a perception problem. You didn’t make them care enough to change.

The way to beat apathy isn’t with more features.

It’s with clarity.

→ Clarity about the real business problem

→ Clarity about what they’re not seeing

→ Clarity about why this matters now

Because if the problem doesn’t feel urgent or real, your product never will.

If your sales manager isn’t helping reps articulate business value and a unique POV in their own voice, then they’re a glorified Salesforce admin.

If your sales meetings go like this…

Each rep talks about what they did last week and what they’ll do next.

Everyone scrambles before the meeting to have just enough to say.

The head of sales runs through Salesforce updates.

And somehow… everyone is okay with this? Raise the red flag. Because your sales leader’s job isn’t to check the pipeline. It’s to shape the conversations that create it.

They should be asking:

→ What messaging is landing?

→ What’s falling flat?

→ Can each rep clearly explain our POV?

→ Can they tell the story—with confidence and clarity?

If not? Raise the red flag again. Because you don’t win deals by tracking them. You win them by training for them.

You Don’t Have an Operating Model. You Have Departments.

Most SaaS companies don’t choose their operating model. They inherit the default company “operating model”. It looks like this:

• Teams organized by function

• KPIs tracked in isolation

• Roadmaps built in silos

• Accountability blurred across handoffs

It’s the default way of organizing. And it works until it doesn’t.

Because no one’s responsible for the whole. No one’s optimizing for the customer. And no one’s making sure the value you promise is the value they experience. The result?

• Misalignment everywhere

• Confusion in the market

• Slower sales, weaker retention, lower NPS

You don’t rise above that by hiring more. You rise by operating differently.

The best companies choose clarity:

• Clear point of view

• Clear value delivered

• Clear experience designed around it

• And a model built to deliver that value consistently

You don’t need more departments.cYou need an operating model that actually works.

If your decks start with your company, your product, your brand quilt then you’ve already lost the room.

Your customer doesn’t care how many offices you have. They don’t care about your leadership team. They don’t care about your funding, your values, or your slide with logos from 2018.

They’re in that room because they:

• Have a problem

• Are under pressure

• And need help

And you just spent your first five minutes talking about yourself.

You don’t win the room by talking about you or your product. You win the room by showing them something they didn’t see coming. By making them feel:

• Seen

• Understood

• A little shaken

• And finally, hopeful

Your deck shouldn’t be about you. It’s a diagnostic. A shift in perspective. A moment where they realize, “These people get it.” That’s what earns the right to talk about your product. Not the other way around.

Stop starting with your story. Start by making them feel theirs.