Any good salesperson can tell you that the key to improving your sales is knowing your customers’ pain points. In this post, we’ll discuss what customer’s pain points are, their types, and the ways to determine them.
Outline
What are pain points?
Pain points are the problems which your prospects and customers face and which can be resolved by your company or product.
Pain points can be viewed as an SOS, a cry for help. Understanding, analyzing and categorizing pain points will help you sell your product and win your prospects’ trust. Focus on what makes your potential consumers feel uncomfortable and frustrated and use these problems to your advantage.
“If you don’t understand your customer’s pain points, how are you going to solve their problems?”
Pain point types and what to do with them
We can define 4 main types of customer pain points depending on your product. They are financial, productivity, process, and support pain points.
Financial pain points
Everyone wants to sell as much of their product and get as much profit as possible. So your goal is to prove to your potential customers that they are spending their money in vain with their current suppliers. Make them believe that your particular product is cheaper. Or, if it is not, it is still better than anything else on the market and will eventually help them save money.
Productivity pain points
Convince your prospects that the product they are using right now takes too much time, it is inefficient, and should have been changed a long time ago. Prove that your product is the key to saving their time and efforts. Demonstrate, preferably in numbers, all the time and money your prospects will save when they choose your company.
Process pain points
Persuade your prospects that your product or service is easier to use than anything else they have used already. Address this problem as the major one (if it is really so) and make them go your way. This is especially relevant if your customer is a small business.
Support pain points
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the major pain points among customers is support. This is caused by their problems staying unaddressed by the previous product providers. When considering a purchase of or a switch to your product, the customer will wonder if they will get the support they deserve in case they face a problem or have a question in the future. Try to give them more than they expect. Make them feel cared for and heard.
Pain point stages
These five levels of pain points will help you notice, assess, and react just in time:
- The customers feel a bit disappointed about their current situation but still feel OK about it.
- They feel pretty sad but continue using the tools they are accustomed to.
- Your prospects are quite unhappy and are ready to switch.
- Your customers-to-be are ready for changes and start searching for an alternative.
- Your eventual buyers are hopeless to find a solution.
As you can probably guess, the potential customer is more likely to listen to you and convert the more frustrated they are with their current situation. Your goal is to recognize the state of your prospect and to swoop in at the right time.
5 ways to determine your customer’s pain points
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Determining your customer’s pain points takes time and research. So here are 5 ways you can do this, both for potential and existing customers.
Use Google to find relevant blogs
This should be your first step in searching for pain points. Identify blogs relevant to your business niche, study them and take notes: note the most discussed issues, the most shared posts, the pages and articles that get the best traffic, the most upvoted comments etc. Blog culture has really grown in the last decade, and if there is ever an issue your potential customer faces (especially in the later stages), you’re sure to read about it in the blogspace.
Make a connection via social networks
You can always find your leads online. Find them on social networks (here’s how to do it on LinkedIn), search relevant forums, and topics on Reddit and Quora. Social networks are the most popular place for people to share experiences and ask for help. Once you start spending time there, you will learn exactly what your prospects are interested in and frustrated by firsthand, as well as ways you can attract them and convince them to join you. But be careful – don’t ever overtly promote your business. For now, you are only here to watch with the sole purpose of detecting, checking, and ascertaining their pain points.
Find the flaws in your product
Yeah, I know, seems strange considering your product is always the best. It may be so, but only to you. Stand in your customer’s shoes and try to look at your service through their eyes, as an impartial user. Ask yourself: “What bothers me in this? Why isn’t it the best? What can make it the best, or even just improved?”
We know your product is your baby, so if this task seems too difficult, simply ask your friend who doesn’t spend as much time with it as you do. They are sure to contribute something from a point of view unique to someone who first encounters the product. This will help you in finding the weak spots and correcting them, attracting more customers/users, and creating updates that will make sure your existing customers never leave you.
Send a welcome email with questions about expectations
The first and probably the easiest way to start communicating with your new customers and improve their experience is to send them a welcome email. This way, you’ll show them that you are interested in and value their presence. In the email, ask a question about their hopes and expectations for your product. This will help you find out which aspects are the most important to your customer and whether there’s room for improvement.
Don’t just ask “Do you like our product?”, don’t ask any yes or no questions. Such answer won’t provide any helpful info. Ask an open question like “What do you like/expect from our company?”. If your customer is ready to provide you with an answer, it will be an in-depth look into their major pain points.
Conduct surveys and analyze feedback
Another easy way of getting an insight into your customers’ pain points. Design a survey, send it to your customers, users, and subscribers. This will help you stay in tune with their needs, analyze what currently annoys them about your product, what they would like to see changed, which aspects attract them to your product the most, etc. This step is easy to organize and analyze, but the value of this feedback is invaluable.
What next?
Don’t just listen, hear.
In the same way it’s important that your partner listens to you and hears you in everyday conversations, the relationship with your customers should involve high levels of attention. Pay attention to every piece of feedback they give on your product – customers that go to these lengths to let your know how their experience can be improved are the ones that will eventually save you money and take your product to the next level. That’s of course if you choose to hear them.
The more you show that you are engaged in the conversation and interested in them, the more they will share with you. When you’ve established and structured all the pain points, work on using this knowledge. Use tools like Snov.io Email Finder to collect your competitors’ disgruntled customers and convert them with an Email Drip Campaign. Not sure how to do it? We’ve written a guide for you!
Let us know in the comments how you determine your customers’ pain points and how you deal with them.
