Case Study - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
A case study in uncovering the hidden commercial blind spots that cost a B2B SaaS its deals.
The most common reason people contact me is, “Helen, we’ve got a sales problem.” Experience has taught me that it is never a standalone problem with sales.
This is the story of a four-week commercial audit at a B2B SaaS platform — real customers, real revenue and a classic internal standoff — and the three pieces of evidence that changed the roadmap, cancelled a development sprint and doubled the defensible price of the existing product.
23
organisations interviewed across customers, lapsed prospects and live opportunities
100%
price increase the existing basic product could sustain with the right buyer
52%
of respondents identified an unsolved need no competitor was addressing
Part 01
Every founder I work with is incredibly close to their product. That is their superpower, until it becomes a commercial blind spot.
This summer, a client of mine — a B2B SaaS platform, kept anonymous here — had real customers, real revenue and a classic internal standoff on the road to growth.
The product team was in build mode, often responding to sales-led opportunities. That left little time for the internal systems that create process and scale, or for product features suitable for many rather than one. The sales team took a different view: they felt they could not win deals without the bespoke development, and that deal values might be higher with it.
Both positions were reasonable. Both were held sincerely. Neither could be proved, because there was no single source of truth to settle the argument — so the team was stuck in a loop of disagreement.
This is the point at which most companies pick a side based on seniority, volume or exhaustion. Instead, the discovery stage began.
Part 02
As a Fractional CCO, my job is not to guess; it is to find the evidence. I was brought in to strip away the assumptions and conduct an objective commercial audit.
Between 24 July and 21 August 2026, I worked with the team and we interviewed 23 organisations. Deliberately, they were not all happy customers:
The goal was simple: establish the whitespace in the market, and prove problem-solution fit. Was the whitespace open for the taking, or was it simply undesirable, with no provable demand?
The distinction matters more than founders expect. An empty market is not automatically an opportunity. Sometimes nobody is solving a problem because nobody will pay to have it solved. Validating demand before building is the difference between a blue ocean and an expensive one.
Part 03
The data dismantled three internal assumptions.
Grant administration was the core strength and the core product, confirmed by around a third of respondents. That single finding allowed the team to stop iterating their value proposition and move forward with confidence.
The instruction that followed was not a pivot. It was more of the core — the least glamorous and most profitable roadmap decision available to them.
When interviewed, around 30% of deals were stated to have been lost purely due to price. That is not a real objection. Those buyers still bought elsewhere, so the budget existed.
The problem sat somewhere less comfortable: a need to better establish who the buying committee actually was, and to map pain and gain across that wider group.
That reframing led to product innovation around working with bid teams instead of delivery teams, which opened up urgency, need and budget from an entirely different team on the buy side.
Interestingly, we also discovered the basic product could handle a 100% price increase and still be considered good value by the bid team.
Identifying this immediately removed the need for an expensive, unnecessary development sprint. The team simply needed to sell to the right buyer — and sell the basic product at double the price — creating revenue expansion later in the journey from the delivery product.
52% of respondents identified a massive need for a specific product that was already in the development roadmap, and was not being solved by any competitor.
Establishing that problem-solution match created an instant blue-ocean opportunity, and another new way to go to market: a genuine reason for the sales team to open doors and have meaningful conversations, rather than another feature to discount.
Part 04
When your revenue plateaus or your deals start stalling, do not rush to change your product. First, conduct the commercial, data-driven audit.
A stalled sales architecture is rarely a sales problem. It is usually a company selling the right product, at the wrong price, to the wrong member of the buying committee — and paying for bespoke development to cover the gap.
Questions
A sales architecture is the whole commercial system that produces revenue: the ideal customer profile, the buying committee you sell into, the value proposition, the pricing model, the pipeline stages and the handover between product, marketing and sales. When deals stall, the fault is almost always in the architecture rather than in the sales team’s effort, which is why replacing salespeople rarely fixes it.
A commercial audit is a structured evidence-gathering exercise that tests a company’s internal assumptions against what the market actually says. In this case study, 23 organisations were interviewed across current customers, lapsed prospects and mid-evaluation leads between 24 July and 21 August 2026, so roughly four weeks from first interview to findings.
Around 30% of lost deals in this audit were attributed to price, but those buyers went on to purchase a comparable solution elsewhere, which proves the budget existed. When a buyer has budget and still says no on price, the real gap is usually value: the wrong person in the buying committee has been sold to, or the pain and gain of the wider group has not been mapped.
Not before you have tested whether the deal is really lost on features. In this case study the sales team believed bespoke development was required to win, and the evidence showed the basic product could sustain a 100% price increase and still be considered good value by the right buyer. The planned development sprint was cancelled and the commercial fix was to change the buyer, not the product.
You need enough interviews for patterns to repeat across distinct buyer segments rather than a statistically significant sample. Twenty-three interviews were sufficient here because they spanned current customers, lapsed prospects and live opportunities, so the same signals could be checked against three different relationships with the product.
Problem-solution fit means the market agrees the problem is real and painful enough to pay to solve. Product-market fit means your specific product is the thing they choose to solve it with, at volume. Auditing them separately matters because a product can have genuine product-market fit in one segment while the larger opportunity sits in an unsolved problem next door.
If your revenue has plateaued or your deals are stalling for reasons nobody internally can agree on, let’s find the evidence.
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