Nothing frustrates your sellers more than the situations where they invest good amount of time and energy in nurturing a prospect and then they end up not buying from you. We have all been in this situation and we know that it is not very pleasant. This mainly happens when the prospective customers are do not have the confidence that your sales reps or your company understands their problems and can provide a good solution for them.

So, in order to successfully close deals or retain customers, your sales reps must know,

• The common problem that customers face while trying to make a purchase decision
• How can they identify a customer pain points
• And what can they do to fix them

In this blog, we are going to explore these aspects further

What Are Customer Pain Points?

Customer pain points can be defined as a certain set of persistent problems that a prospect faces in their business and marketplace. Any type of prospect can have a business pain, whether they are an individual or a large company.

First, let’s understand how to identify the pain points of the customers:

How can you identify your Target Customers’ Pain Points?

Here are some ways to identify your target audience’s pain points

1. Carry out surveys and ask the right questions:

Carrying out a simple survey to understand your customer’s pain points is not difficult at all. But the challenge here is to get your customers to answer those surveys.

In order to get your customers interested in your surveys, you’ve got to keep the survey questions simple and targeted. Here are some question examples which reps can use to carry out survey that will help them understand their customer base:

• What complications or issues were you facing or trying to solve when you came across our product?
• Can you please let us know the top 4 advantages that you have felt using our product or service?
• What more would you like us to do or how can we improve our product?
• Besides yours what other roles/titles do you feel can benefit from our product/service?
• If our product is not available then what other alternative products do you think of to solve your problem?
• What’s keeping you away from the alternate product/service?

2. Understand your customer base through your sales teams

When it comes to identifying the customer’s pain points one should not only focus on the existing customers but also take the lost prospects into consideration.

Analyzing diverse customers is essential to get a true understanding of their problems. And every lost deal is a crucial pain point that your product/service has failed to solve. It could be a cost-related problem or your product is lacking some features. You can take help of your sales team to identify these shortcomings and working on them to improve your service. You can ask your sales reps/teams to create a document in which they lodge their observation after every failed sales pitch. The document should include feedback for questions like

• What were the problems faced by the prospect?
• What were the things prospect liked or disliked about the product/service?
• What was the reason, prospect had to turn down our product?
• What feature could have stopped the prospect from turning down our service?
• Was the prospect comparing our product to any competitor’s product? If so specify the feature or advantage they have over us.

This analysis will be highly beneficial for you in long run.

3. Check out the online customer reviews on your product

Reading the reviews that your customers post online (on social media or any other platform) about your products and services, helps you to clearly understand their pain points.

These reviews give you insights into

• What your customer’s like the most about your services
• Where do you lack
• And how can you improve

Also you can read your competitors reviews and understand how they are doing better with their products/ services in comparison to yours.

4. Study and understand your competitors

Knowing your competitors and being aware of their presence is very crucial. So, study your competitors’

• Websites,
• Their features
• Their pricing
• Their marketing strategy and ads
• Their customers etc

to understand how to improve your products and your sales strategy.

Studying all these aspects will help you to improve your products and sales strategy and lure your customers into buying your product or service.

What are the common customer pain points that businesses have to deal with & how to fix them?

Let us now explore the types of pain points that customers usually have while doing business with vendors and what can you do to fix those pain points

Financial pain points

Financial pain points are the most critical of all pain points. Financial pain points occur when customers feel that they are paying too much for a product/ service.

Your customers love choices and they are always on the lookout for cost-effective solutions that offer them more services for the money invested. Businesses need to strategize for budget-friendly options and customer-friendly subscription plans, in a way that caters to customer expectations and is aligned to business priorities.

Tip to fix this issue: The main goal for you should be to prove to the potential customers the right value they will perceive in choosing your products.

Customer support teams and account managers should understand customer expectations, competitor benchmarks, and budget to offer an optimally priced solution that caters to the needs of the customer.

Support Pain Points

Customer support is one of the important business functions. With improper support, most of the crucial areas are impacted. Customers may have product-related queries and most of them would expect prompt customer support. Some common support issues are:

• Delayed response
• Lack of product knowledge
• Not available on customers preferred channel

When businesses fail to deliver the right solution to the above customer pain, it impacts customer retention & loyalty.

Tip to fix this issue: One of the best ways to exceed your customer expectations is by helping them in real-time, with

• Digital engagement tools like live chat or video chat
• Co-browsing
• AI chatbots etc

Process Pain Point

The process pain points refer to how businesses interact with customers at different stages of their buying cycle by choosing different methodologies and processes. The process-related pain points can be:

• Connecting to the right department
• Application submission
• Lengthy and difficult buying process
• Complicated payment method etc

Tip to fix this issue: Businesses need to identify these bottlenecks to make the customer experience seamless across touchpoints. They need to ensure that they are able to meet customer queries faster by the right team and persuade their prospects that your products/services are easier to use.

Productivity Pain Points

The productivity pain points are when the customer want to make the most of their time and are most likely frustrated due to,

• Inconvenience of using their current solution
• And the time they are wasting on it

And now they want a streamlined experience of using a product.

Tip to fix this issue: Businesses need to convince their customers that their product is

• User-friendly
• Hassle-free
• And time saving

You can use images and product descriptions that explain how your product helps practically.

Final Thoughts

Understanding and identifying customer pain points is not an easy task. A lot of work has to be put in for understanding your customers precisely. Most businesses only worry about sales but do not work towards understanding and solving problems of your customer base. When you design your offerings and sales strategy keeping in mind the problems your target audience is facing you’ll surely succeed.

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