Do you know how to find your client’s pain points?
If you’ve ever pitched what you thought was the perfect product or service to solve a problem and they didn’t buy it, it can be so frustrating! But your why you are losing deals may be less about the carefully designed service your pitching, and more about how you are (or are not) addressing your client’s specific pain point.
You Need to Be Clear on What a Pain Point Is
It’s important that you know what I mean when I talk about a “pain point” so you can position your business as THE solution for prospects and clients. When you find your client’s pain point, you’ll discover it isn’t a problem where the solution would be nice to have or simply make things a little easier. Pain points deeply affect your client’s bottom line and must be solved for them to grow and function.
Client pain points can be very diverse, even in the same industry, but that’s why we are going to dive into exactly how to find your client’s pain points and then how to leverage them. When you’ve found your client’s pain points, you’ll know exactly how to make yourself indispensable and position your product and services at the right place, at the right time, at the right price.
Find Your Client’s Pain Points to Improve Your Business
Trying to market and sell to people who won’t buy is a huge drain on your time, budget and productivity. High achievers only spend time with prospects and clients who know they need help and are willing to work with someone to solve those problems.
You may not realize it, but sometimes your expertise can come back to bite you. What you’ve learned and successfully used to help other clients can make you overconfident in your ability to relieve preconceived pain points. But to solve your customers’ problems, you need to know what they think their pain points are or help them discover what their pain points are.
Build Personas with What You Already Know
If you have some experience under your belt, then your client’s pain points are a complete mystery. Work with what you already know and build buyer personas of the ideal buyer for each of your jump-off products and services.
If you love templates, you can check out: How to Create a Concrete Buyer Persona with Templates and Examples. But you can keep it simple and keep it moving by simply listing three key pieces of information:
- Who – buyer industry, job title, location, interests, income, etc.
- What – list the problems you know the ideal buyer has
- How – a buyer uses your product (not to be confused with how the product is designed to be a solution)
Obviously, creating your buyer personas won’t uncover any new client pain points. What you are doing is creating a base-line where you can validate your assumptions, watch for shifts in patterns in the who and what, and adjust your personas as you discover new pain points.
5 Questions to Find Your Client’s Pain Points
Asking the right questions of both prospects and clients allows you to start thinking about how to position your company or product as a solution. For example, if you find that, for most of your clients a major pain point pain spending money without knowing their exact return on investment, you could highlight features in your services such as detailed reporting or the increased return on investment you current clients have experienced.
To specifically address pain points, you need to ask the questions that uncover specifically what those pain points are.
1. What’s the biggest challenge to growing your business?
This conversation starter is a jump-off point that scratches the surface of what the client feels their pain point is. Dive deeper with these follow up questions:
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- What’s your plan of attack to solve this problem?
- What is your deadline to solve this problem?
- Do you think finding a solution will be difficult?
- Who is working on fixing this problem right now?
When you help prospects and clients talk through their business situation, you have a precious opportunity to increase your understanding of their business while demonstrating your expertise.
2. What happens if you don’t solve this problem soon?
When you’ve uncovered a pain point, it’s helpful to know what actual problems and headaches it is causing your client. Are they losing money, losing customers, wasting time, or collecting bad reviews online? Being clear on the risk of doing nothing, especially when weighed against the benefits of your services, is a strong motivator to make some changes.
3. What has prevented you from fixing this problem?
This question helps you directly identify objections to the sale. It also lets you know what past and present solutions they have tried. If they’ve tried other solutions ask these follow-up questions:
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- How was your experience with that solution?
- What would you have changed about that experience?
When you know their history with this pain point, you can pinpoint a better alternative and detail how your solution is different and better.
4. Our clients say that X is a common challenge. Do you think this is affecting your growth?
Some prospects and client will need help discovering their pain points. Small businesses and boot-strapping startups get real good at dealing with pain points and finding workarounds or temporary fixes. This type of question provides a frame of reference by opening a topic without pushing a hard sell on what YOU think they need.
5. Why do you think you’re losing customers? Or customers are not returning?
Dive into why customers are dissatisfied or unimpressed. You may not be in a position to help them with their customer service or marketing messages, but you can show how to bring in more customers with your product or services means more income even if they don’t fix their conversion or retention problems.
REMEMBER: Let the client do the talking. You only benefit when actively listening to what the client is telling you. Show you are engaged by asking insightful follow up questions. The more they feel you genuinely care about their problems, the more they are willing to share. When you find your client’s pain points, you are better able to align solutions with your products and services.
Leveraging Pain Points to Make the Sale (or Upsell)
Not all clients are aware of their pain points, which can make marketing to them difficult. With those types of prospects, you’ll need to help them realize their problem and also convince them that your product is the right solution. But when you do KNOW the pain points of your ideal clients, you’re holding the keys to successful marketing and sales materials and campaigns.
For example, interested buyers are typing their pain point terms into search engines. So, search engine optimizing your webpages, content, and ads to address those pain points puts your business in front of your targeted audience.
Another example is using your client’s language when addressing pain points in your sales pitches and materials. This psychological technique goes a long way in building trust. That’s why you don’t build pitches on assumptions, but instead take the time to find your client’s pain points.
When you connect with clients and actively listen as they answer your questions, you’ll learn what you need to know to improve your product and optimize your marketing. You’ll also be in a position to better help your clients accomplish what they really want to do with their business.
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