How to identify customer pain points
What makes a great salesperson? Instead of spending time trying to prove how cool their product is to sell it, they expertly pinpoint customer pain points and provide solutions that can relieve them. After all, selling is not about you but about your prospect. If your prospect has no business pain or no money, then there is no need for your solution, no matter how great it is.
If you know customer pain points and how you can solve them, use it to convert prospects into your loyal community. Show them that you care, and are ready to learn and understand, then you will not only attract customers but also increase their trust in your company and build long-term relationships with them.
What are customer pain points?
Pain points in sales are specific problems that your prospects encounter along their customer journey. The importance of pain points cannot be overstated: the very first thing a business needs to do is to figure out the pains and desires of its customers. It may not be painless, sometimes prospects don’t even know the extent or nature of their problems themselves.
It may happen that your prospect doesn’t have enough resources (money, time, and/or skills) to solve their problem. It might also happen that they simply don’t know how to solve the problem or have no access to reliable information. Alternatively, they have already tried one or several solutions but it didn’t work or they left with a negative customer experience.
Determining the pains of your prospects will ultimately significantly affect the marketing and sales strategy. Ideally, the customer pain points should be the foundation on which business strategy is based. This will increase the productivity of the team and help prevent budget leakage. Don’t waste your time on those who definitely won’t or can’t buy, research, and learn.
Customer pain points may become a significant barrier to building strong relationships with a company. That’s why it is critical to understand the needs of customers and eliminate possible obstacles in interacting with the company, thereby ensuring only positive emotions from the purchase.
Types of pain points
There are different types of pain points but they can be sorted into four main categories: support, productivity, finance, and process. Classify your prospect’s problem into one of these types and it will be so much easier for you to understand what they need and offer them a solution.
Support
Prospects often have questions about the product, and they want quick feedback from the support team. Managers taking their time to answer, lack of communication channels, or wrong tone — these things can cost you customer’s interest and loyalty. Customers don’t like waiting, and if they don’t get prompt answers to pressing questions, they might just go elsewhere. Listen and hear what your potential client has to say, use it as a free opportunity to learn about their barriers and drivers, and create an enjoyable customer experience.
Productivity
We all know this one: you find that amazing item you were looking for your whole life, you add it to your cart, and proceed to pay for it — only for it to be out of stock. Ouch. Your prospects don’t want to waste their time, so show them that you value it and don’t let them leave disappointed. Persuade your prospect that their needs are the most important thing for you. Availability, delivery, payment methods, or deadlines, you’ve got it all covered.
Finance
People don’t like parting with their money, especially when the product they buy is intangible, so you have to convince prospects that it is worth their coin. The goal is to prove the feasibility of such expenses and show all the benefits that the customer receives from the purchase.
Once again, your product might, of course, be the best, but perhaps instead of outlining all of its features and capacities, focus on telling your prospects how exactly it will change their lives. Persuade them that this is a ticket to a stress-free life, saving time and effort, and in the long run, saved money.
Process
The process becomes a major customer pain point when the interaction between the prospect and the business staggers. When contacting a company, the person wants to be connected to the correct department immediately, not switched from operator to operator, thrown around like a hot potato. If your prospect had less than pleasant previous experiences, play on that to assure them that you understand their pain and that your product or service is user-friendly.
How to identify pain points: 7 approaches
So how to identify customer pain points and incorporate them into your marketing and sales strategy? Unfortunately, there are no cookie-cutter solutions or premade templates, so you have to figure it out by yourself. However, here are some tips on how to conduct your research and determine your prospects’ pain points to create engaging content on social media, know how to address your prospects to grab their attention and gently guide them to purchase.
Search for blogs or forums
Reddit is your friend here. Don’t discount mommy forums either. Dig into comment sections. Reading through all of these discussions, you will get an idea of the common fears, pains, and problems and get real insights, sometimes to the level of the most sophisticated market analytics.
Browse Q&A platforms
Quora is popular for a reason. Look for questions about your topic, and get insight into the pains and concerns of clients.
Study your customers on social media
You can use parsers, which can conduct marketing research in under 30 minutes. With them, you will be able to find out everything about your competitors, analyze their audience, and find out their composition by gender, age, geography, and interests. Knowing all this, you can make a whole up-to-date list of customer pains.
Create surveys on your social media, they actually provide fairly accurate information.
Review your product
Obviously, your product is the best there is, however, it is important to understand the problems customers can encounter when dealing with it and the questions that might come up. Get someone unfamiliar with your product to conduct a user test and carefully draw their customer journey. Carefully read up reviews, especially negative ones, of your or a similar product on independent platforms.
Conduct email surveys
Send out short questionnaires to people who have recently made a purchase with you. This way you can find out if the product or service meets the buyers’ expectations, whether it managed to resolve customers’ pain, and whether the customers are satisfied with the overall experience. Throw in some little perks to encourage buyers to spend time filling out the survey.
Send out the questionnaires to those who decided to not buy if you can. That way you can find exactly where the whole thing turned south.
If you are planning on conducting some surveys, we’ll let you in on a little secret and show how to find emails of your target audience in two minutes (or less).
Conduct interviews with your target audience
This approach is the most complex and expensive of all listed, but it is very effective. Gather a focus group (offline or online) and ask them about their expectations from your products or services, how they imagine the results, and by what criteria they will be able to understand that their problem has been solved and the pain is resolved. Let them talk mostly unguided and soon they will relax enough to give some real insights. The general principle of selecting interview participants is to communicate with real clients rather than with potential ones.
It is also important to build conversation in such a way that interviewees can’t answer with one syllable word but have to elaborate.
Ask your customers about their expectations
Let them lead this dance, and they will show you all the moves. By creating a perfect-case scenario, they will inadvertently reveal their fears and not-so-great past experiences, from which you can learn their pain points and offer them a customer experience tailored specifically to them.
Above all, a great salesperson always remains attentive. When you find out the customer’s pain points, bring their attention to features that solve their problems specifically. A personalized solution is how you show your prospect that you genuinely get them and turn them from a prospect to a single-time buyer to a fan of your brand.
For most of these approaches, you’ll benefit immensely from having a lead database ready to use. Get access to B2B contact databases with more than 50 million business email addresses and over 7 million companies.
The post How to identify customer pain points appeared first on .
What makes a great salesperson? Instead of spending time trying to prove how cool their product is to sell it, they expertly pinpoint customer pain points and provide solutions that can relieve them. After all, selling is not about you but about your prospect. If your prospect has no business pain or no money, then there is no need for your solution, no matter how great it is.
If you know customer pain points and how you can solve them, use it to convert prospects into your loyal community. Show them that you care, and are ready to learn and understand, then you will not only attract customers but also increase their trust in your company and build long-term relationships with them.
What are customer pain points?
Pain points in sales are specific problems that your prospects encounter along their customer journey. The importance of pain points cannot be overstated: the very first thing a business needs to do is to figure out the pains and desires of its customers. It may not be painless, sometimes prospects don’t even know the extent or nature of their problems themselves.
It may happen that your prospect doesn’t have enough resources (money, time, and/or skills) to solve their problem. It might also happen that they simply don’t know how to solve the problem or have no access to reliable information. Alternatively, they have already tried one or several solutions but it didn’t work or they left with a negative customer experience.
Determining the pains of your prospects will ultimately significantly affect the marketing and sales strategy. Ideally, the customer pain points should be the foundation on which business strategy is based. This will increase the productivity of the team and help prevent budget leakage. Don’t waste your time on those who definitely won’t or can’t buy, research, and learn.
Customer pain points may become a significant barrier to building strong relationships with a company. That’s why it is critical to understand the needs of customers and eliminate possible obstacles in interacting with the company, thereby ensuring only positive emotions from the purchase.
Types of pain points
There are different types of pain points but they can be sorted into four main categories: support, productivity, finance, and process. Classify your prospect’s problem into one of these types and it will be so much easier for you to understand what they need and offer them a solution.
Support
Prospects often have questions about the product, and they want quick feedback from the support team. Managers taking their time to answer, lack of communication channels, or wrong tone — these things can cost you customer’s interest and loyalty. Customers don’t like waiting, and if they don’t get prompt answers to pressing questions, they might just go elsewhere. Listen and hear what your potential client has to say, use it as a free opportunity to learn about their barriers and drivers, and create an enjoyable customer experience.
Productivity
We all know this one: you find that amazing item you were looking for your whole life, you add it to your cart, and proceed to pay for it — only for it to be out of stock. Ouch. Your prospects don’t want to waste their time, so show them that you value it and don’t let them leave disappointed. Persuade your prospect that their needs are the most important thing for you. Availability, delivery, payment methods, or deadlines, you’ve got it all covered.
Finance
People don’t like parting with their money, especially when the product they buy is intangible, so you have to convince prospects that it is worth their coin. The goal is to prove the feasibility of such expenses and show all the benefits that the customer receives from the purchase.
Once again, your product might, of course, be the best, but perhaps instead of outlining all of its features and capacities, focus on telling your prospects how exactly it will change their lives. Persuade them that this is a ticket to a stress-free life, saving time and effort, and in the long run, saved money.
Process
The process becomes a major customer pain point when the interaction between the prospect and the business staggers. When contacting a company, the person wants to be connected to the correct department immediately, not switched from operator to operator, thrown around like a hot potato. If your prospect had less than pleasant previous experiences, play on that to assure them that you understand their pain and that your product or service is user-friendly.
How to identify pain points: 7 approaches
So how to identify customer pain points and incorporate them into your marketing and sales strategy? Unfortunately, there are no cookie-cutter solutions or premade templates, so you have to figure it out by yourself. However, here are some tips on how to conduct your research and determine your prospects’ pain points to create engaging content on social media, know how to address your prospects to grab their attention and gently guide them to purchase.
Search for blogs or forums
Reddit is your friend here. Don’t discount mommy forums either. Dig into comment sections. Reading through all of these discussions, you will get an idea of the common fears, pains, and problems and get real insights, sometimes to the level of the most sophisticated market analytics.
Browse Q&A platforms
Quora is popular for a reason. Look for questions about your topic, and get insight into the pains and concerns of clients.
Study your customers on social media
You can use parsers, which can conduct marketing research in under 30 minutes. With them, you will be able to find out everything about your competitors, analyze their audience, and find out their composition by gender, age, geography, and interests. Knowing all this, you can make a whole up-to-date list of customer pains.
Create surveys on your social media, they actually provide fairly accurate information.
Review your product
Obviously, your product is the best there is, however, it is important to understand the problems customers can encounter when dealing with it and the questions that might come up. Get someone unfamiliar with your product to conduct a user test and carefully draw their customer journey. Carefully read up reviews, especially negative ones, of your or a similar product on independent platforms.
Conduct email surveys
Send out short questionnaires to people who have recently made a purchase with you. This way you can find out if the product or service meets the buyers’ expectations, whether it managed to resolve customers’ pain, and whether the customers are satisfied with the overall experience. Throw in some little perks to encourage buyers to spend time filling out the survey.
Send out the questionnaires to those who decided to not buy if you can. That way you can find exactly where the whole thing turned south.
If you are planning on conducting some surveys, we’ll let you in on a little secret and show how to find emails of your target audience in two minutes (or less).
Conduct interviews with your target audience
This approach is the most complex and expensive of all listed, but it is very effective. Gather a focus group (offline or online) and ask them about their expectations from your products or services, how they imagine the results, and by what criteria they will be able to understand that their problem has been solved and the pain is resolved. Let them talk mostly unguided and soon they will relax enough to give some real insights. The general principle of selecting interview participants is to communicate with real clients rather than with potential ones.
It is also important to build conversation in such a way that interviewees can’t answer with one syllable word but have to elaborate.
Ask your customers about their expectations
Let them lead this dance, and they will show you all the moves. By creating a perfect-case scenario, they will inadvertently reveal their fears and not-so-great past experiences, from which you can learn their pain points and offer them a customer experience tailored specifically to them.
Above all, a great salesperson always remains attentive. When you find out the customer’s pain points, bring their attention to features that solve their problems specifically. A personalized solution is how you show your prospect that you genuinely get them and turn them from a prospect to a single-time buyer to a fan of your brand.
For most of these approaches, you’ll benefit immensely from having a lead database ready to use. Get access to B2B contact databases with more than 50 million business email addresses and over 7 million companies.
The post How to identify customer pain points appeared first on .
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