u/seglab

I sell a \~$60–70k/year B2B SaaS product to ecommerce brands, and I’ve realized I have a problem:

**I don’t think I understand our buyers nearly well enough.**

I’m a marketing generalist, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about positioning, content, demand gen, etc. But I still feel like a lot of my understanding of the customer is second-hand.

The good news is that I have unusually easy access to them. Our customer success team has monthly calls with a few dozen customers, and I can basically join as many of those calls as I want.

So I want to use that opportunity properly.

If you were in my shoes, **what questions would you ask customers to really understand how they think?**

Not just:

* “What problems are you trying to solve?” * “Why did you buy our product?” * “What do you like/dislike?”

I’m more interested in getting inside their heads:

How do they think about their business day to day?
What keeps them up at night?
What numbers do they obsess over?
What do they complain about internally?
How do they decide something is worth paying $60k/year for?
What alternatives do they consider—even ones we wouldn’t think of as competitors?
What language do they naturally use to describe the problems we solve?

If you’ve done customer research / voice-of-customer work for B2B SaaS before, **what are the 3–5 questions you’ve found most revealing?**

I’m especially interested in questions where the answer surprised you or materially changed your marketing.

I sell a ~$60–70k/year B2B SaaS product to ecommerce brands, and I’ve realized I have a problem:

I don’t think I understand our buyers nearly well enough.

I’m a marketing generalist, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about positioning, content, demand gen, etc. But I still feel like a lot of my understanding of the customer is second-hand.

The good news is that I have unusually easy access to them. Our customer success team has monthly calls with a few dozen customers, and I can basically join as many of those calls as I want.

So I want to use that opportunity properly.

If you were in my shoes, what questions would you ask customers to really understand how they think?

Not just:

• “What problems are you trying to solve?”
• “Why did you buy our product?”
• “What do you like/dislike?”

I’m more interested in getting inside their heads:

How do they think about their business day to day?
What keeps them up at night?
What numbers do they obsess over?
What do they complain about internally?
How do they decide something is worth paying $60k/year for?
What alternatives do they consider—even ones we wouldn’t think of as competitors?
What language do they naturally use to describe the problems we solve?

If you’ve done customer research / voice-of-customer work for B2B SaaS before, what are the 3–5 questions you’ve found most revealing?

I’m especially interested in questions where the answer surprised you or materially changed your marketing.

I sell a ~$60–70k/year B2B SaaS product to ecommerce brands, and I’ve realized I have a problem:

I don’t think I understand our buyers nearly well enough.

I’m a marketing generalist, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about positioning, content, demand gen, etc. But I still feel like a lot of my understanding of the customer is second-hand.

The good news is that I have unusually easy access to them. Our customer success team has monthly calls with a few dozen customers, and I can basically join as many of those calls as I want.

So I want to use that opportunity properly.

If you were in my shoes, what questions would you ask customers to really understand how they think?

Not just:

• “What problems are you trying to solve?”
• “Why did you buy our product?”
• “What do you like/dislike?”

I’m more interested in getting inside their heads:

How do they think about their business day to day?
What keeps them up at night?
What numbers do they obsess over?
What do they complain about internally?
How do they decide something is worth paying $60k/year for?
What alternatives do they consider—even ones we wouldn’t think of as competitors?
What language do they naturally use to describe the problems we solve?

If you’ve done customer research / voice-of-customer work for B2B SaaS before, what are the 3–5 questions you’ve found most revealing?

I’m especially interested in questions where the answer surprised you or materially changed your marketing.

A common advice that we all hear is - "figure out where your potential customers hang and meet them there".

My company has a few dozen clients (B2B) and our team is having calls with all of them pretty frequently. I want to join some of those calls to ask the question directly - "where do you get information / spend time online / etc.".

My concern is twofold -

1. Isn't this an awkward question?
2. Won't they lie / give me a biased truth?

Do you have "scripts" for asking that questions on a call, which gets the other person to give you an accurate answer?

We have no sales collateral. Zero. Nada.

B2B, contracts in the $50K-$100K range, sales cycle is anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months.

Given that we don't have any collateral currently, which types should we create first, and once it exists - how can we validate that it's doing what its supposed to do?

Note: This post was written by a non-content marketer.

I’m not trying to be contrarian here. I’m honestly trying to develop my perspective on this.

Now that AI is everywhere - and the temptation to use it to produce content at scale is so strong, the obvious result is that everyone and their uncle is publishing tremendous amounts of sloppy content, favoring quantity over quality.

So what am I, as a marketer, supposed to do if I want content marketing to be a viable channel?

Even if I create the best content in my category, it can still get lost in a sea of LLM-generated slop. I’m struggling to imagine how high-quality content beats the sheer volume being produced.

What am I missing?

Does content marketing still work, but require a fundamentally different strategy? Or is it simply becoming less viable as a standalone channel?