Even though you may have a high-quality product, your customer satisfaction and churn rates will suffer if your sales and marketing communications fail to address customer pain areas.
How well do you know your customers, then? According to an IBM survey, 4 out of 5 consumers believe brands don’t understand people as individuals, thus the answer might be less than you think.
This may be the reason that just 12% of people will genuinely trust you when you state that you prioritize your clients.
How can salespeople demonstrate that they truly get the frequent consumer pain points? How can you make it possible for your revenue staff to identify these pain spots when speaking with prospects and provide solutions?
We’ll discuss pain points in this manual and how to use them to generate revenue and value.
Customer Pain Points: What Are They?
The precise issues that customers have that cannot be resolved by their existing solution or the market at large are known as customer pain points.
This could be due to problems with cash flow, productivity, an antiquated procedure, or a lack of customer support. They might not know how to find extra time in the day or dislike the present subscription model that most solutions offer. Give them a clear solution to their problem, no matter what their pain may be, as a salesperson.
However, in order to explain why (and how) you can address their problems, you must first clearly comprehend the issues that they are facing.
To enhance the customer experience customers identify with your business, salespeople must demonstrate empathy and understanding.
The top 10 businesses that scored highest on the Global Empathy Index survey boosted their worth more than twice as much as the bottom 10 did, and produced 50% more in earnings over the course of the year.
In other words, you’ll be better able to give your prospects a remarkable user experience when you comprehend and empathize with their problems.
Better deals, more sales, and increased revenue follow from this.
What are the primary categories of customer pain points, and how do you recognize them?
Pain Points of Different B2B Customers
There are four key areas where your prospects frequently experience pain in various ways:
- Finances
- Productivity
- Processes
- Support
You have two ways to address the pain point, depending on why it is there: either through your sales process or through your product.
Let’s examine many instances of each kind of consumer pain point and how to address them.
Financial Problems
Customers of yours are overpaying for their present solution. Perhaps they have been paying for unexpected add-ons that weren’t part of the initial price. Perhaps they received a significant discount for the first few months or year, and now the cost of their subscription is likely to increase. Or perhaps they’ve recently experienced a crisis that has forced them to make cuts.
Financial difficulties are delicate subjects.
Your clients could feel trapped with no obvious way out, particularly when a crisis strikes. Your treatment of prospects now will have an impact on how they perceive your company moving future.
Productivity Challenges
Your prospects’ productivity is being hindered by the present tool set. They are irritated by the monotonous duties they must perform by hand every day and the time they lose doing so. Make sure to demonstrate how your product makes their tasks easier in your sales messaging.
Or perhaps your customers are going through a fruitless purchasing process. They are unable to reach a clear judgment since they are stuck in their research. In this situation, customers require an efficient path to purchase that makes it simpler for them to move from research to interest to purchase.
Process Problems
Your prospective clients could desire to modernize their internal procedures and businesses. However, they are unable to readily modify their tech stack, thus they are stuck using antiquated procedures.
Businesses will have different reasons for this type of pain point, but here are a few examples:
- Because a sales team’s CRM is challenging to adjust and update, they are trapped using an antiquated and inefficient sales procedure.
- Because the project management software a company uses doesn’t provide a clear picture of where each activity fits into the larger timeline, projects there frequently take longer than anticipated.
- Because of their sluggish and ineffective implementation procedures, a company that partners with a marketing agency is experiencing a decline in new inbound leads.
Your offering is the remedy for the problem in each of these scenarios.
Supporting sore spots
Poor support for customers both during and after the transaction will cause them to leave shortly.
For instance, the degree of support your business provides can differentiate you from your competitors if your prospects are having problems with their present provider.
On the other hand, your clients might be having trouble getting support while making a choice. At each level of the buying process, are you assisting new leads and prospects? In what way do they investigate your product? Is there a simple way for them to get the answers to their queries?
You’ll be better able to provide help to your customers if you can determine where and when they need it (and solve this pain point).
9 Ways to Discover the Pain Points of B2B Prospects
Salespeople are similar to doctors in that you must identify the source of the problem before prescribing a suitable treatment.
How then can you pinpoint the exact issues that are troubling your customers? Here are 9 measures you may take to better understand the problems your consumers are experiencing.
1. Conduct market research on customers without relying on sales metrics
Don’t get me wrong; qualitative market research and sales metrics both have a lot to say about your prospects and consumers. But these data-driven methods can’t provide you with all the information.
Sincere conversations with customers are necessary for conducting true customer research. More in-depth than what stats like consumption, conversion rates, or revenue can reveal is this qualitative research.
So, converse with your clients. To get them chatting, ask the proper questions. Not only the difficulties they are having in their business, but also the underlying reasons for those difficulties, should be noted.
You can use the following open-ended inquiries to engage your clients in conversation:
- Tell me about some of the problems you’re trying to resolve at the moment.
- Could you describe your procedure for…
- Can you give me an illustration of…
- What would this procedure look like in a perfect world? What would you require to make that happen?
- Why do you consider these problems to be important?
- How does this problem impact the group? The business? You specifically?
- How has the economy or other changes in your industry affected your business?
- What would be the first change you would make if money were no object?
- What impact do seasonal variations have on [key pain point]?
Try to keep asking follow-up questions after each inquiry until you discover the true source of any difficulties or problems the client is experiencing.
You may obtain accurate, up-to-date information from the people who matter by chatting with both your present clients and others in the sector.
2. Gain Knowledge From Customer Support
Every day, members of your support staff interact with customers. Additionally, it is their responsibility to resolve the problems your consumers are having. This implies that they probably have some special knowledge of the problems that most influence your clients.
So, for information, rely on your support group. If you’re a sales leader, schedule regular meetings with the head of the support staff to discuss the most frequent tickets that are being submitted, the problems that clients in the market are experiencing, and potential solutions.
3. Invest time gathering (and putting into practice) genuine customer feedback.
Investigate the specific grievances or suggestions that customers have regarding your product or service rather than just seeking out general thoughts on pain spots. This will not only help you see the problems that the business can answer more clearly, but it will also help you win the trust and loyalty of your clientele.
In a Microsoft study, 77% of participants indicated they have a higher positive opinion of firms that solicit and welcome customer input.
Real customer feedback can help you come up with ideas for product upgrades as well as changes to your sales procedure or marketing plan.
4. Check out online reviews of rival products.
Real customer reviews are the best place to find people complaining about the difficulties they are now facing in business.
Choose your primary rivals in the market and clientele you serve first. In order to find out what others are saying about them, visit websites like G2 or Capterra.
What aspects are they having problems with? Where on the product are they running into trouble? Which procedures are sluggish or ineffective? What can you offer clients that the competition isn’t providing?
With the help of these reviews, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of market trends, pain spots, and the particular terminology your target market employs to explain its problems.
5. Monitor Social Media Conversations in Your Sector
Social media is another excellent source of unfiltered ideas. You can conduct focused searches for content that matches what you’re looking for on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
You may track trending tweets on important business subjects on Twitter by using the Topics area. Browse through these trending tweets to learn about the problems your sector is reporting as well as any suggestions or solutions that other users have provided in the comments that follow.
Social media can be used to establish genuine interactions with members of your target demographic. Use LinkedIn’s advanced search tools, for instance, to connect with people who match the characteristics of your perfect client.
Ask if you can schedule an interview with them rather than attempting to “sell” them. Ask the same questions you did while you were doing customer research to learn more about the problems facing the sector.
6. Verify top prospect pain points with chatbots.
If you’ve been following the preceding stages, you presumably already have a few rather distinct pain sites in mind.
The time has come to test your hypothesis.
Since it is automated on your website and will provide you with immediate information with little work, a chatbot is an intriguing tool for validating theories about your market.
Pick a few pages on your website where potential customers are most likely to be in the consideration stage to start (this might be a product, feature, or pricing plans page).
Next, choose your top three problems and create a multiple-choice question that your leads must respond to. the following
What is the primary issue you are trying to resolve? A, B, or C?”
A helpful hint is to also provide a “other” alternative in case you were extremely off.
7. Use Live Chat to Interact in Real Time
Still lacking a well-founded hypothesis? Although you’ll need to execute this manually in this situation, chat can still be helpful.
Live chat on your website enables your staff to converse with fresh leads and prospects as they are viewing it. You can learn a lot about them if you interact with them in real time on specific pages and ask them the same open-ended questions we did above.
Live chat is being used by businesses like Elluminati Inc. to interact with website visitors in real time and produce more qualified sales leads.
8. Consult with your marketing staff
Yes, I am aware of your thoughts. “Marketing? However, they barely even converse with consumers as frequently as the sales team does.
True. But what do marketers actually do a lot of? Research. Every week, your marketing team devotes hours to researching buying signals, comprehending hot industry themes, and learning about and writing about what’s going on in your clients’ lives.
Because of this, even though they may be one step further away from customers than your sales team, they can nevertheless provide you some unique insights into the market.
9. Develop Ideas With Your Sales Team
All sales managers can benefit from taking this final step. Your sales team is working diligently every day to ascertain the demands of prospects and leads in order to present a solution.
The insights gained through discovery and qualifying are particularly valuable. Your salespeople are investigating the fundamental causes of the prospect’s problems in order to offer them a solution since they are still in the discovery phase of the sales process.
You’ll always be aware of the most pressing pain concerns if you regularly gather your team to discuss the common issues that prospects are mentioning.
You’ve seen how to use these methods to explore client pain points using accurate, qualitative data and to keep your team abreast of the industry’s most pressing issues.
What will you do with this knowledge now?
How to Drive Sales by Using Pain Points
It’s time to improve the customer experience overall by addressing those customer pain areas. How can B2B sales and marketing teams apply this knowledge to what they do on a regular basis?
Adapt your sales strategy to be more customer-centered
You’ll be in a better position to alleviate their problems from the outset of their interactions with you if your sales process is coordinated with the manner in which they prefer to make purchases.
How, for instance, do potential customers prefer to learn about your product? Do they wish to look through your website’s case studies and research tools? Do they wish to test your offering for themselves? Do they desire a walkthrough video? Would they rather communicate with your team online? Or do they long for the one-on-one conversation a phone call with your sales team would provide?
How about the purchasing procedure? Do they feel knowledgeable about the pricing options available to them? Are your responses to them satisfactory to them? Do they desire additional discussions with your sales team to iron out the details, or would they rather have their inquiries addressed in a brief Loom video?
To meet your customers where they are during the buying process, be aware of their pain areas (not where you want them to be).
Talk on actual pain points in sales conversations.
Your sales staff can bring up these pain areas in every sales contact if they have deep, first-hand understanding of the market or industry they are selling to.
Your sales pitch should point out a typical issue in a way that lets your prospect know that you are a member of their exclusive club and understand their situation.
If you are selling sales software, for instance, avoid discussing how your product might increase the productivity of their sales team. Talk to your potential customers about how much they detest pestering their salespeople to update the CRM and how switching to your software will save them from ever having to do so again.
Create a sales pitch that functions more like a conversation between peers than a monologue from an outsider by using the ordinary language of your target market and audience.
Use content marketing to address the needs of potential customers.
By providing your clients with useful information that helps alleviate their problems, you can demonstrate that you understand their needs. Before clients speak with a sales representative, problems can be resolved with the use of in-depth manuals, FAQs, blog entries, and video content.
In the best case scenario, this content will also encourage people to buy your goods, but don’t consider it to be your content’s main objective. Use content marketing to discuss current events in the sector and give the reader genuine value without seeking payment.
You can demonstrate that you understand the demands of your audience by producing content that tackles a particular issue and provides a solution. According to a research by the Material Marketing Institute, consumers’ personal requirements and pain areas were among the most crucial pieces of content they looked at before making a purchase.
Constructing targeted customer testimonials is another effective method to use information in your favor. Recall the discussions you had with the clients earlier? Take notes during your customer interactions and ask them to describe the problem your product helped them with.
Update Your Marketing Plan to Demonstrate Audience Understanding
Just saying to your audience, “We get you,” is insufficient. Time to back it up.
Start by editing the ambiguous terminology in your marketing material. We’ve all heard about items that are cutting-edge, user-friendly, cutting-edge, unbeatable, necessary, or customized. Those words are basically meaningless.
Instead, use the study you conducted above to learn the terminology your market uses to explain their problems. Use that in your marketing text after that.
Use Close.com as an illustration. The primary problems we’re attempting to fix are highlighted in plain language:
fresh close HP
Next, center the launch of your new feature around the primary problems it addresses. You should always avoid the urge to begin an announcement post on the corporate blog by saying, “We’re thrilled to announce that…”
Instead, consider how this new feature relates to your list of primary pain concerns by returning to it. Give specific instances of how this new function resolves typical problems.
Your sales and marketing plan will produce consistent messaging that is authentic and pertinent to your clients if you concentrate on their pain issues.
No Pain – No Gain
We wouldn’t have much information if our prospects didn’t experience any suffering. Most potential buyers make purchases to alleviate some kind of pain, whether it be a pain related to money, productivity, support, or processes.
It’s time for you to examine yourself:
- Do you regularly conduct in-person customer research as part of your business?
- How effectively do you comprehend the terminology used by your customers to explain their main problems?
- Do you actually demonstrate to your clients that you understand their struggles and are willing to assist them?
A certain strategy to enhance how they interact with your brand is to fully comprehend the pain points of your customers.
