Any business owner knows their product or service inside out, and they know how it solves a problem like the back of their hand. But we all know business isn’t always as black and white as that. Fixing pain points is what helps you learn about your business processes and customer communication - tweaking aspects of your marketing and sales processes to reflect what you’ve learned from experience. And obviously, fixing pain points are going to help you to overcome issues that may arise in the process of the customer journey.
This equals happy customers, better brand reputation, and contributes to your overall growth. Fixing your prospect’s problems isn’t always as smooth sailing as we’d like it to be, but once we understand the notion and regularity of pain points, we can find ways to overcome them.
Your different leads will have different issues - some of which are made prevalent from the beginning, and some of which sporadically arise along the customer journey. Understanding pain points leans on both sales and marketing.
HubSpot defines pain points as:
‘Persistent problems with a product or service that can inconvenience customers and their businesses…they are unmet needs waiting to be satisfied’
Really, pain points are issues that arise in relation to your product or service that your business seeks to fix. Examples of pain points could be
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Complaints about the quality of service or product
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A service or product doesn’t match their needs as well as they hope
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Dissatisfaction due to miscommunications
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Your services are priced above their budget
Pain points are an important part of your marketing strategy, and persistently unmet pain points will cause your prospects not to buy.
Every salesperson has been there, your sales team may have had some positive results with the ‘attract’ stage of your marketing, and you’ve successfully gained some prospects who have developed an interest in your product or service via the funnel of advertising. However, after beginning a sales conversation with them - (and sometimes it can be quite a long-drawn-out conversation), they decide not to buy.
Unfortunately, it happens all the time in sales departments for almost every business, and it’s completely unavoidable. You’re not going to sell to 100% of responding prospects. But if this happens repeatedly, it might be worth revisiting the root of these pain points, and how you can alter your business to prevent them from happening too regularly.
However, to stop this from happening quite so frequently, consider all the potential pain points your customers may have along the way, as you curate your marketing plan. There are ways to prevent customer pain points from being a consistent thing - and you should try and be prepared for a range of different scenarios that may arise during the customer journey, whether it’s a financial, operational, or service-based issue.
Understanding your customer’s pain points is important because it allows you to fix and overcome these issues and build a stronger reputation and a stronger product or service altogether.
How do pain points influence your buyer persona?
Along the customer journey, the prospect may encounter pain points you hadn’t previously considered before. This will influence one, or some of your buyer personas. You may tweak a pre-existing buyer persona or create an entirely new one based on the pain point you have experienced. Or perhaps the pain points you’ve encountered may inform your final product itself. The persistence of the pain points could demand fresh tweaks to your whole product or service, to suit these demands.
To avoid this, predict the pain points as a part of your marketing plan. Be prepared for customer pain points that can crop up. Do extensive research and gather all the relevant necessary data and information. Customer feedback is your best friend here; utilise customer-company conversations as a research basis and consider the likelihood that these pain points will occur again in the future, for another customer.
It's a team effort
The best way to access your customer pain points is to work collaboratively. Multi-departmental communication needs to really be on point here, particularly between marketing and sales. Your inbound marketing strategy should deeply intertwine these two departments. Remember, your marketing team aren’t speaking directly to your customer. It’s your sales team who are having those crucial front-line conversations, and your marketing team are the ones who formulate a response. So, it’s integral to your marketing plan to have a thorough, smooth-functioning communicative relationship between your sales and marketing department to form a solid foundation for accessing and solving your customer pain points.
Both teams always need to be on the same page. If your marketing team send out spammy or useless marketing materials to a customer whose pain point is entirely irrelevant to your sent content - your customers want to be impressed, and it really doesn’t take long for your leads to begin searching for a similar product or service elsewhere from a competitor.
Understanding customer pain points is integral to growth
Customers are what makes your business run - your business simply wouldn’t exist without them. It always comes down to the classic saying ‘the customer is always right’, and your business needs to mould to your customer as much as it can whilst sticking to its values and principles. Negotiating solutions to fix your customer pain points will overall help build a better-functioning business, increase your understanding of your buyer persona, and will build a solid reputable foundation for a strong, long-lasting business.
