Get Deeper Insight into Your Prospects’ Pain Points: Two Approaches

I bought a new music speaker because of pain points. I had been using an old analog speaker for years and it got the job done just fine. But that doesn’t mean it was perfect. Over time, as more advanced speakers entered the market, I started noticing all the things my speaker couldn’t do. Eventually, I caved and made the jump. I didn’t buy a new speaker because it had fancy features. I bought a new speaker because it solved the pain points of having an older, non-wireless speaker.

This sort of story should be very familiar to just about everyone—even more so to anyone who sells anything for a living. It’s an example of how pain points can be used to sell. Although this example was a case of B2C, B2B companies need to pay attention to the power of pain points all the same. Pain points are one of the most versatile and effective tools in the B2B salesperson’s toolbox but before any salesperson can make use of this fact, they must first have a deep understanding of what their prospective customer’s pain points are.

Let’s zero in on that topic. Instead of going into detail about why pain points are useful to sales and marketing teams in B2B space, or how to use pain points effectively (possible topics for future posts), let’s get into the question of how to find pain points. We’ll examine two practical approaches for gaining deeper insight into the pain points of your prospects.

Approach One: Draw from the Well You Have

You might not know this, but you probably already have all the data you could ever need to discover and categorize the pain points of your ideal future customers. That data is in the brains of your current customers. One of the most reliable, straightforward, and powerful ways to uncover pain points is to simply ask your current customers. Before digging a new well, draw from the well you have.

There is more than one way to do this and the best way for you will depend on factors such as your industry and what sort of relationships you have with your customers.

Surveys

One of the most common methods used to gather information from current customers is surveys. The great thing about a survey is that if you craft it right, you can save a lot of time by sending one survey to a bunch of your clients at once. You may not hear back from a lot of clients, but you don’t need everyone to respond to get some intelligent, actionable feedback.

Spend some time on your survey if you go this route. Really try to narrow down your questions to get exactly the information that will help you pinpoint pain points. Keep the survey short and clear to lower the barriers to response as much as possible. Multiple choice questions are great for increasing response rate, but open-ended questions will give you more specific information. Keep these things in mind when designed your survey as there’s no one size fits all.

Conversations

If your market is one that lends itself to more personal, long-term relationships with your customers, you might want to skip the survey method and try just asking your customers, one-on-one, about their pain points. That doesn’t mean literally asking “what are your pain points,” but more along the lines of a peer to peer discussion. You want to get some insight from these loyal customers about what problems your service solved for them and why they choose it over other options. Ask them about what business challenges come up for them time and time again and how they handle those challenges. In the process, you might even find ways you can potentially add to your services to better serve your customers, if you’re lucky.

I know this seems like such a simple thing; asking your customers what problems they’ve faced in their industry and how your services have helped, but too often we forget to have these little reflect-and review-conversations with our long-term clients.

Online Reviews

Speaking of reflecting and reviewing, online reviews can be a great resource for insight into pain points that are common in the markets you serve. The great thing about online reviews is that you don’t even need to have a wealth of online reviews to pull from on your own product or service. You can just as easily look up reviews of your competitors.

That’s because right now you’re simply trying to better understand what pain points your prospects have, not necessarily how your specific solutions solve those pains. You can use both social media postings and B2B review sites to search for content. It’s not hard to dig out the pain points in these posts; just look for details about what problems they were having before they found said solution, and how the solution in question solved those problems, or made their life easier.

Approach Two: Listen More, Talk Less

Most salespeople would agree that riding the line between aggressive and passive when selling in the B2B space is not easy. Trying to talk someone who’s representing another company into putting money into something they don’t know much about can often feel more like a battle than a conversation.

Telling someone what they should want often won’t go anywhere fast, and trying to get someone to tell you exactly what they want can be just as fruitless. Your goal is to figure out what your prospects pain points are and then get them to make the connection between those pain points and your solutions. The way to do this is to guide them with the right questions.

When you or your salespeople are having calls with prospects, focus on asking open-ended questions that lead them in the direction you want to go. There’s an art to this as well. Opening a call with “so what are you looking for?” is going to lead to generic answers more often than not. Ask them to talk about the specifics of the market they operate in, what factors drive business in their market, what obstacles to getting more business or better business they’re facing, etc. Use rich questions to guide the conversation into productive territory that gives you a solid understanding of how your services could match up with their pain points.

You may often find your prospects talking about the same types of pain points. You may run into pain points you hadn’t considered before. All of the above can be useful down the line. Another key strategy in these conversations is to use examples of your previous customer’s pain points and how you’ve solved them as a springboard into the prospect’s situation.

Find the Problems, Be the Solution

Approaching marketing and sales from a pain point perspective is a two part operation. Part one, find the problems your prospects are having. Part two, provide them with solutions to those problems. Too often, the B2B sale process is all solution-focused without any nuanced examination of the problems these solutions are for. That’s why practicing a more deliberate focus on pain points can so beneficial.

Don’t just assume you know exactly what sort of problems your prospects are looking to solve. Dig a little deeper by looking to your current customers, asking better questions of your prospects, or both. You never know what kind of insight you might pull up.