What I Would Fix First in B2B SaaS Problem Interviews

If a B2B SaaS team fixes one habit in their problem interview process, fix this: split your interviews evenly between users and buyers. Most other B2B-specific failures follow from getting that ratio wrong.

Why This Is the Bottleneck

B2B SaaS sells through a system, not a person. The user has the pain. The buyer has the budget. The IT or security gatekeeper has veto power. The champion has internal political capital to spend. Founders who only interview users get pain data with no path to purchase.

The product you build for users alone passes the "they would use it" bar but fails the "procurement approves and the champion pushes for it" bar. Both bars have to clear.

The Specific Discipline

Decide before the round that your fifteen interviews will be roughly seven users, five buyers or buyer-influencers, and three IT or security gatekeepers. The proportions can shift, but never let the round be all users.

This will feel awkward because users are easier to reach. Buyers are harder. Gatekeepers are hardest. Lean into the friction. The roles you cannot easily reach are the roles your product must serve to get bought.

What You Lose by Skipping the Buyer

Approval criteria. Vendor consolidation pressure. Security baseline expectations. Budget cycles and decision timing. Existing vendor displacement politics. ROI thresholds. None of these surface in user interviews. All of them affect whether the product gets bought.

What You Lose by Skipping the Gatekeeper

Data residency requirements. SOC 2 / ISO 27001 expectations. SSO/SAML requirements. Audit log expectations. Data retention policies. The full list of things that, if missing, kill the deal late. Founders who surface these only at customer #1 spend three months retrofitting them while sales stalls.

How to Reach Buyers and Gatekeepers

LinkedIn search by title and company size. Honest cold message that explains you are researching, not selling. Many directors and VPs say yes if the message is short and the topic is relevant. The response rate is lower than for users, but it is not zero. Plan to send more messages to land the calls.

What This Unlocks

Once you commit to the split, the round produces a sales playbook alongside a product spec. You know the user pain, the buyer's decision criteria, the gatekeeper's approval bar, the champion profile. The product you ship is shaped to satisfy all four. The launch motion you design is shaped to surface the pain to the user, route it through the champion, satisfy the gatekeeper, and convince the buyer.

Founders who skip the split build the product and then discover the sales motion. Founders who do the split build both at once.

The One-Sentence Version

If you remember one thing about B2B SaaS problem interviews, remember this. Interview the system, not the user. The product is bought by a system; it has to be designed for a system.