Pain points, we’ve all got ‘em. From the little bugbears to the really big challenges you have to overcome. The trick is solving them, but that’s easier said than done.
Imagine the feeling of that inconvenient thing that’s been annoying you just a little bit every day. How much would you pay to get rid of it? How grateful would you be to the person who did? The solution to that problem, that makes your days run smoother and your life easier, that’s what you want to be for your customers.
When we’re talking about pain points, there are two main groups. Business pain points, which are the ones that affect you, and customer pain points, which we cover in this article.
So, let’s talk about:
- What customer pain points are.
- Why customer pain points are important.
- How to identify customer pain points.
- How to use customer pain points to improve your Go-to-Market.
What are customer pain points?
Put simply, customer pain points are the problems your customers have. Your job is to deliver products and services that resolve those problems.
For example, let’s say your company launched a new product that helps teams organize their work projects and timelines and collaborate better with one another. Your customers that use the product like it, but you’ve had a lot of feedback that if people within the same company are using different email addresses, they have trouble accessing one another’s projects. It’s a barrier to collaboration and it’s frustrating some of your users.
This issue that slows down collaboration is the customer pain point. And your job in this situation is to roll out an update that makes it easier for people in the company with different email addresses to access one another’s projects.
When you’re thinking about the buyer personas you’re targeting with your products and how to persuade them to buy, an understanding of customer pain points will be one of the most useful weapons in your armory.
Why are customer pain points important?
There are many reasons why customer pain points are important, but these are our top three.
Customer service
Good customer service can radically increase your sales and customer loyalty. Pain points are a great way to demonstrate that your company takes customer service seriously.
You want your customers to know that you’re listening to their concerns and care about improving their experience. Working to resolve their pain points will encourage their loyalty to your brand because your customers know that you’re actively working to make better products for them and help solve their specific problems.
Establishing good relationships with your customers allows you to grow your customer base, generate organic growth as your loyal customers vouch for your brand and benefit from the profits that come with lower customer acquisition costs.
Securing sales
It’s important to know why prospective customers are interested in your product and what problems they're hoping it’ll solve. By understanding what their pain points are, you can build a sales and customer success plan for that customer which will successfully resolve their problems.
You don’t want to just throw every possible benefit of your product or service at a prospective customer. They won’t retain all of it and it’ll be overwhelming. By paying attention to their pain points, you can sell them a narrative in which your product makes their lives better.
Show them what their future could look like with your product in their arsenal, and convey why they’ll be happier with your product over anyone else’s. Stick to the relevant details that target their pain points and take them on a journey to a better life, with your product.
Differentiating yourself from your competitors
The marketplace is increasingly saturated with similar products and it can be hard to set yourself apart. So, how do pain points get you ahead of the competition?
Well, if lots of companies have similar products to yours and there’s a pain point bothering customers consistently across both your and your competitors’ products, identifying the pain point and being the first one to solve it will establish you as an industry leader. Set yourself apart from the rest and establish yourself as the best, all in one fell swoop.
If you’re the first to solve a pain point that’s a problem across the market, you’ll win customers from your competitors and get your brand noticed as one to watch and beat. Plus, customers tend to buy with their hearts, not their heads.
You can put all the facts and spreadsheets in front of a prospective buyer you want, but customers will still defer to the brand that's considered the best. When you think of phones, you probably think of Apple, and when you think of soft drinks, you think of Coca-Cola. It doesn’t matter if Tango has more flavors, Coke will always be the go-to in our minds. Be your industry’s Coca-Cola.
How to identify customer pain points.
Again, there are a few ways to go about this, but we’ve shortlisted our favorites. With these methods of data collection, you can build a really strong image of who your customers are, what their pain points are and how you can solve them.
Sales calls
Record your sales calls and pay attention to:
- Questions your customers ask about your products and services.
- Their reasons for being interested in your product in the first place.
- The problems they want to solve.
You can use this information to build out a well-rounded image of who your customer is, what their pain points are and what a successful resolution would look like for them. Sales calls are a great point of contact to really get to know your customers and how you can be their product knight in shining armor.
If you’re a large company, listening to all of your sales calls is going to be pretty time-consuming. Luckily for you, your pain point can be resolved easily. You can buy software for your company that will record and analyze your sales calls for you and tells you which pain points customers are bringing up the most.
With this data, you can group the major pain points your customers have and create solution plans for each pain point. For example, you could have one sales path that you follow for customers who want better collaboration in their company and another sales path you follow for customers who want more user-friendly interfaces for their teams.
If you want to find out which tools you can use to automate this system, check out our guide to sales enablement tools:
Kate Onley-Gregson
Focus groups
Arguably the best way to find out what your customers are thinking, ask them! Put a focus group together and ask your customers what their pain points are and the kinds of solutions they’d like to see from your company.
Focus groups are also really useful because you can put them together early on in the Go-to-Market process. While sales calls happen later on, usually after a product’s been launched, you can hold focus groups while you’re still in the product development stage.
This lets you refine your ideas and products early on, so you can avoid putting out a product that isn’t actually relevant or useful for your customer base.
Online surveys and quizzes
You can put out surveys with products like Typeform or Survey Monkey to dive deep into how your customers feel about your product. Similar to the focus group, this allows you to directly ask your customers how they feel about your products and what their pain points are.
The strength of the focus group is that you’ve got a captive audience to answer your questions. While surveys can be harder to get engagement out of, the advantage is you can reach a wider range of people from different markets around the globe.
While surveys are a great tool for in-depth feedback, if you’re interested in less detailed feedback but with much higher responses, pop-up rating widgets on your website could be the way to go. You’ll probably only want one or two questions in your pop up, but if it’s a tool users can interact with quickly and easily on your website it’ll be much easier to get higher hit rates.
How to use customer pain points to improve your Go-to-Market
Customer pain points are crucial to your Go-to-Market strategy. When you’re launching a new product, you’re adding a new chapter to your brand's story. You want that new chapter to add value to your brand and make sense to your customers.
For example, if a clothing brand that’s marketed itself as offering sustainable fashion, it would make sense for them to bring out an organic range. Their customers would be excited about it and it would make sense for the company.
However, when iHop changed to iHob and announced they’d be becoming a burger joint, we were all pretty confused. It didn’t make sense and customers couldn’t understand the change.
When you’re planning the next steps for your brand, take stock of your customers’ pain points. You can use them to help develop products that’ll add value to your customers and show them you’re moving forward in a direction that centers their experience.
A customer-led Go-to-Market strategy that uses customer pain points as a starting point to work out what you want to achieve as a company will always offer customers more than products designed in a vacuum. Pay attention to pain points and you’re far more likely to carry out a GTM strategy that resonates with your audience and successfully lands in the market.
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