What are Pain Points?
Pain points are problems that a business’s ideal customers repeatedly have that can be fixed with goods, services, and customer experiences. People often describe them as places where things get tense, messed up, or annoying daily in their personal or work lives. Customer pain usually falls into one of four groups based on how it affects their lives:
- Physical — a material problem, such as a lack of an appropriate tool or resource.
- Emotional — unhappiness with the current state of something, such as frustration regarding the complexity or effort required to complete a task.
- Financial: financial loss or damage, such as money lost due to an inefficient process.
- Logistical: a lack of an efficient structure or procedure, such as an ineffective customer service system.
A person’s pain point could be anything from a product that doesn’t meet their needs to a lack of tools in a particular area. It could also be a whole new need that isn’t being met. Customers don’t always know what their pain points are, or they can’t put their finger on them. The company aims to devise a solution to those issues, market and sell it well, and give customers a good experience that makes the answer worth it.
Synonyms
- Buyer persona pain points
- Customer pain points
Pain points for the buyer’s character
Problems that customers are having
How important it is to know what your customer’s points are
The value offer of a business is all about answering the question, “W” at problem do we solve for our customers?”” In this way, customer pain points are at the heart of every business and product.
Creating New Products
Before making a product or service, you should discover what problems your customers are having. It’s like building a fancy car without an engine. It could look good, for sure. It won’t get anyone anywhere, though. It’s important to remember that the goal isn’t to make a product and then find a need for it. First, you must figure out the problem; then, you plan the product to fix it. The development process is based on a deep knowledge of what customers want and need. This affects every choice, from design and functionality to marketing and the user experience. The simple truth is that your customer’s needs and wants are what guide you to making a product or service famous. You need to deeply understand those pain points and turn them into a product or service that makes your customer happy.
Sales and marketing
Everything a company does—from the words they use to persuade customers to the ads they make to get their attention to the content they make to keep people interested—depends on how well they understand their customers problems and show how their product or service can solve them. When a salesperson meets with a possible customer, they need to ask open-ended questions to find out what the customer needs and wants and how their product or service can meet those needs. After that, they can give the customer a solution that is specifically made to meet their needs. In the same way, ad copy and buyer enablement material are how a business walks a customer through a product and helps them see how it fits into their daily lives. It shows them how to use it to solve their daily issues quickly and easily. Figuring out pain points, both current and possible, is the first step in the customer journey. The journey doesn’t end until those problems are fixed. In the middle, it’s up to sales and marketing to get the word out.
Creating a Process
It’s not just the service or goods. Both how easy it is for a customer to use and how smooth the process seems are essential. Let’s take a look at an e-commerce brand. Customers will be annoyed by a platform that is hard to use or a checkout process that is full of problems. If a business knows about these problems, they should make a platform that is simple and easy to use, a checkout process that is as easy as pie, and a returns system that doesn’t take a lot of extra steps.
Getting Team Members Ready
Team members need to learn about the methods that were used to solve customer problems during training. A well-written sales plan helps sellers figure out how to talk to potential customers in the best way. People who work in customer service need to learn how to fix issues quickly and give customers the necessary answers.
Marketers need to know what the company wants to say about its brand, how it wants to communicate with customers, and the methods it uses.
Product designers need to know what the product is all about and how it fits into the customer’s life.
The goal is for team members to relate to a customer who is having a hard time, understand what they are going through, and offer the best available answer.
How the Customer Feels
An item can ease some problems, but some problems remain with the customer experience. Everyone on the team and every part of the product helps improve it. Customer service that isn’t consistent, late, and long wait times can all lead to a bad experience that can turn customers away and hurt business in the long run.86% of people who trust a business would stop doing business with it after two bad situations. The customer experience is gone if a product makes things worse for them instead of better.
How to Find Out What Hurts Your Customers
Businesses need to know how many of their customers feel a certain way when trying to figure out which pain points to sell into. To run a whole marketing effort because only a few people use a product to do something wouldn’t make sense. They must not follow the rule instead of the exception if they want to keep making money. To do that, they need to find out which problems buyers have the most trouble with. There is a structured method called “pain point mapping” that aims to “find customers’ main” issues and determine what those issues are.
How to do it: Look at what customers have said.
Feedback from customers is easy for businesses to get. By reading web reviews, they can figure out what works and what doesn’t about their product and what doesn’t improve it. Team members can look at low scores (like complaints and one-star reviews) to see what unhappy customers have in common. As for the high scores, they can show the company which features and services they should focus on more or promote as the most critical parts of their product.
Listening with others
Social listening is a real-time way to people’s opinions about a company, product, or service. Companies can stay up-to-date on how their customers feel about their problem space with what they say on social media. Natural language processing and mood analysis are used by social listening tools to quickly find areas of success and failure so that companies can come up with ways to fix them.
Polls of Customers
You can learn a lot about your customers’ needs and wants and any problems customers by surveying them. The questions should be about how satisfied customers are with a product, how they use it, their experiences with customer service, and more. Also, they should let customers write free-form comments about what they like and don’t like about a product or service. Companies can donate polls to see how customers’ opinions match what their employees think. Customers, they can see how well their goods meet customer needs.
Talk to Customers
Interviews with current and former customers, like polls, can give you much information about how satisfied your current customers are. Businesses can find pain points they might not have found otherwise by asking the right questions about a product’s benefits, the buying experience, and the quality of custproduct’sice. Let us say a B2B SaaS company finds that its customers have trouble getting the complicated parts of its product. If you talk to 15 to 30 customers, you might find that they find it hard to understand their paperwork and onboarding information. A possible answer? A set of film guides that are easy to follow.
Studying the Market
Businesses can see into the lives of their users through market research. It helps them determine what they want and need and how they act. It’s a bit of an umbrella term because market research comes in different forms, some listed above and some below. It also means looking at rivals to see their strengths and weaknesses and how big of a market they’re serving. Questionnaires are a great way to get important information from customers. They get helpful information straight from the customer’s mind. A skincare company might want to make a light, high-SPF product that doesn’t feel greasy if most customers say they are worried about sun damage but don’t like how sunscreen makes their skin feel.
Another thing that observation doesn’t search can do is find pain points that not even customers know. For example, a store owner might notice that it’s hard for customers to find things in their stores. Leaders could use this information to plan to change how stores are set up to make shopping more enjoyable.
Feedback from the sales and customer service teams
Members of the sales and customer service teams are the ones who talk to customers every day. Make sure that these teams are part of meetings about the product and the customer experience so that they can share what they’ve seen. It’s also a good idea to give sales and customer service their Sthey’veannel. They can share success stories with customers, talk about common issues with the product, and come up with answers.
There are different kinds of customer problems.
A customer’s pain spots differ depending on whether they are a home or business customer. Knowing the difference and spotting them is essential because it helps you, your company, or your sales team find the correct answers. People who buy from businesses usually try to solve problems in their own lives. In B2B, they’re generally trying to solve problems related to the day-to-day running of their business. Problems that B2B customers are having
Pain from Positioning
Product-market fit and brand positioning are two of the hardest things for companies to do. Many people depend on them—42% of businesses fail because they can’t find their sweet spot. A prospect having trouble with setting mightn’t take notice of our business.”
- “Nobody is noticing our company.”
- “Our website isn’t getting any engagement.”
- “Most of our customers are spending more than us.”
- “We’re behind the category.”
If you “want to sell a product to someone is Having trouble figuring out where” it fits in the market, show them how to use it to make their product stand out or fill a niche.
Pain in the wallet
When it comes to pain, everyone is going through financial pain, even when they’re not. Who wants to do it or shouldn’t financially or make more money? They respect those who wouldn’t have trouble with money and might say things like
- “Our revenue is growing but we have low profitability.”
- “We aren’t getting an ROI on marketing campaigns”
- “Too much time is spent managing finances.”
- “We aren’t selling enough to keep the lights on.”
- “Poor financial visibility is clouding decision-making.”
When working with” “customers who are tight on cash, stress how ywe’dproduc” can help them make more money and save money. Having flexible prices and cheaper options will also help your conversion rates.
People Are in Pain
Workers keep a business going and are often the first ones to notice when something goes wrong. A customer whothey’reing problems with people may say things like
- “We don’t have enough talent in-house.”
- “The team is overworked and underperforming.”
- “We’re struggling to hire qualified personnel.”
- “Employee turnover is through the roof.”
- “Our company culture isn’t aligned with what we say it is.”
- “Middle management isn’t developing and motivating our workforce.”
Companies” with problems whether employees should buy products and services “that make things more accessible inside the company, help team members talk to each other more clearly, and improve things for employees.
Deal with Pain
Employees are the lifeblood of any company, and they’re often the first to feel the pain when things go wrong.
A customer dealing with people pains may express things such as:
- “We don’t have enough talent in-house.”
- “The team is overworked and underperforming.”
- “We’re struggling to hire qualified personnel.”
- “Employee turnover is through the roof.”
- “Our company culture isn’t aligned with what we say it is.”
- “Middle management isn’t developing and motivating our workforce.”
Products and services that streamline internal processes, unify communication among the team, and help businesses improve the employee experience are no-brainers for companies dealing with people’s pains.
Pain in Productivity
No workforce is as effective as it could be. And some sections don’t get anything done at all. On average, saledon’tkers only spend 28% of their tidon’tlling. Pain in productivity can be thought of as things that get in the way of the team doing their best work. Someone having trouble with interoffice productivity might say, We keep missing deadlines for clients.”
- “It takes forever to get stuff done because of all this paperwork.”
- “We don’t have a good system for tracking progress.”
- “Communication between departments is broken.”
- “We don’t have a way of qualifying leads or scoring deals.”
- “Our processes are too manual and error-prone.”
Pain for small businesses
These are different from other pain points because they discuss the specifics of having a small business and its problems. Often, small businesses don’t have enough staff or the right tools, like high-quality technology or money. Business owners may also feel stressed when they handle too many areas alone. A small business owner might tell their sales team the following:
- “We’re continuously missing client deadlines.”
- “We haven’t found a way to track progress across teams.”
- “There are clear communication gaps between departments.”
- “Team members have complained about unclear expectations and objectives.”
- “There is a lack of access to data and reporting.”
Pain in Productivity
Problems with productivity also affect individual buyers. The most significant difference is that B2C customers are not managing a whole team but themselves. A person who is having trouble getting work done might say:
- “It’s hard for us to compete with larger companies and economies of scale.”
- “We need more capital but don’t qualify for traditional loans.”
- “We’re having trouble managing our resources effectively.”
- “I’m wearing too many hats to focus on revenue growth.”
- “It’s hard to stay competitive when we don’t know what we’re up against.”
Help with pain
When customers or clients don’t get the help they need quickly, they may feel upset and alone. A customer who is having trouble with help might say:
- “I’m always running late for appointments.”
- “It takes me forever to get anything done.”
- “I feel overwhelmed by my workload.”
- “I can never seem to find the time to focus on myself.”
- “I’m drowning in tasks and don’t have any free time.”
Pain in the wallet
Regarding B2C businesses, financial problems happen more often because people control their funds. Most people are “financially stressed” in some way, and many are having difficulty making ends meet.” When a person is having money problems,” they might say:
- “I can never get a hold of anyone when I need help.”
- “I’ve been waiting weeks for a response about my issue.”
- “The customer service team doesn’t have helpful answers.”
- “I voiced a problem with Product X and the company ghosted me.”
- “I’ve been getting passed around between departments and still haven’t seen any results.”
Deal with Pain
Process flaws make things more complicated than they need to be. If you’re average, compare Uber to calling a taxi and waiting. Which is easier? A customer is having trouble with the process might say:
- “I don’t know how to budget or manage my finances.”
- “I’m always spending more than I planned to on things I don’t need.”
- “Solution X I’m using right now costs me way too much money.”
- “I need Solution X, but I can’t afford it.”
Customer Journey Pain Points
Whether a product solves a customer’s problem, B2B and B2C businesses must consider the entire customer journey; customers interact with a brand at many different points, and those customers must be pleasant for them to have an excellent overall impression.
Customer journey pain points could include:
- Sales inefficiencies (long lead times, confusion during the sales process, inadequate follow-up)
- Marketing and communications issues (lack of valuable content, no customer engagement to drive adoption)
- Difficulty navigating the website (confusing menus, lack of information, slow page loading times)
- Poor customer service (unresponsive staff, incorrect information provided)
- Long delivery times or unreliable shipping policies.
Operational efficiency is critical to improving the customer experience and solving these pain points. Streamlining internal processes, improving communication between departments, and investing in better technology can significantly impact how customers interact with your brand.
As the page clarifies, it’s more than just making an excellent product to deal with pain points. It goes on. It’s the whole customer trip, which starts with the purchase.CPQ sofIt’se improvestrancee inexperienced in many ways, such as. For example, Iitsconfigurator can be connected to a website’s coree, letting customers make their own choices and making the process smooth.
It speeds up the quote process so customers can get a clear picture of prices quickly, which lowers the chance of losing deals.
Since you don’t have to enter data manually, it’s more accurate and less likely to make mistakdon’tContracts and digital signaturit’sake long-form papers easier to handle and speed up the signdon’trocess.
It syncs data about pit cases and products with CRM, so customer success teams always know what products each customer buys.
Simply put, CPQ helps businesses run more smoothly, giving them better service to their clients. It also lets customers buy things when they want, without having to wait for long replies or do a lot of steps by hand.
