Before promoting a service or product, it is essential that sales professionals gather in-depth information about the target audience’s key pain points. This would enable them to tap into those problem areas. Marketing campaigns become more impactful if the pain points are discovered upon prior and in-depth research.
If you have proper knowledge of the key pain points, then you will have a positive edge while speaking one-on-one to a prospective client. However, sometimes it is not easy to determine the main pain points of the target audience because of the generic statistics related to their demographic.
So, how can a sales professional figure out the pain points of their prospective clients? In order to answer this question, let’s uncover other essential questions that can help sales professionals to explore the key traits of their target audiences.
What Are Pain Points?
Pain points are certain aspects that cause worry, regret, fear, and confusion among customers. If you understand a customer’s pain points, and their deep, underlying fears, you may get a basic idea about how to structure your content. It can help you to transform a vague, mediocre plan into an excellent, solutions-driven, and personalized strategy.
Discovering a customer’s pain points is the key to discovering their problems. This may, in turn, help you to provide them with efficient solutions in the form of products or services.
These pain points may further revolve around the following themes:
- Financial- They might be spending excess money on the current solution and may want to reduce their expenses.
- Support- They might be receiving poor or no support at all during crucial stages of their buyer journey.
- Process- They may want to improve internal processes are create new sales procedures
- Productivity- They might be wasting too much time, energy, and creative juices on the current solution and may intend to implement new and more productive strategies.
- Prestige- They might seek a solution that would shed the spotlight on their efforts and put them in a position wherein they are acknowledged and respected.
Once you have discovered the themes of customer pain points, you can narrow down on some of the important pain points related to your prospects. These have been mentioned below:
- Delayed support response
- Inconsistent customer experience
- Non-availability of the support team
- Poor quality of products and services
- Lack of adequate knowledge and experience
- Alignment of solutions to customer’s needs
- Complicated buying process
- Rude behavior of support representatives
Customer Pain Points- What Do The Numbers Say?
In accordance with statistics, many customers have experienced the issue of delayed customer support. As per 82% of the customers, a factor that leads to great customer service is having their issues resolved quickly. However, 65% of the customers stated that it was frustrating to receive inconsistent services. It has also been seen that approximately 87% of the customers leave their carts if the buying process is too long or complicated. However, according to 75% of the companies, improving customer experience is their top priority.
The Questions That Would Help You To Understand The Customer’s Pain Points
Understanding a customer’s pain point is not an easy task. It requires in-depth research and proper interactions with the target audience. This will eventually allow the clients to share their problems, to which your product or service can provide a solution.
However, it is important to note that customer pain points change over time. Their worries will change in the early days of them becoming your customers and will change again after they have become your customers. Your aim is obviously to eradicate the pain points of your customers. But, in order for that to happen, you will have to constantly ask questions.
Hence, let’s proceed towards exploring the main questions that you need to ask the customers. These questions have been explored further:
- What are your business challenges?: Every business wants to grow while overcoming the challenges that come it is the way. It is essential for sales professionals to understand the client’s business challenges first. Finding out their business challenges can help you to map out an efficient solution for them.
- Are you looking for a solution that will help you to enhance your productivity?: Productivity-based questions may help to gain the attention of your prospects. Who does not want to enhance the productivity of their business? However, you have to be ready with an answer and properly explain how your product/ service can help in increasing productivity.
- What is your current plan to tackle your problem, and how is it working?: You should make sure that your prospect and you are on the same page. This will ensure that you can help your customers successfully achieve their goals. Asking a question directly will enable the customer to reveal whether they have a plan or that it is not working. With this insight, you can make a real start on providing a solution to them.
- What is your deadline?: Asking this question will help you to manage customer expectations and establish realistic goals. This will give you a clear idea about the time frames of the customer right from the beginning. If it isn’t possible to follow the timeline, it is better to let the customers know about it right from the get-go than further down the line.
- What are your overall priorities?: It is important to understand the overall priorities and projects of the prospects. If you ask a question centered around the priorities of the prospect, you will be able to explore larger opportunities and learn about their priorities. This way, you can decide how your offering fits into the bigger picture.
- Can you describe your customer journey?: Asking the question about customer journey will help in understanding the evolution of pain points depending on end-user conduct. It has become essential to guide clients to reevaluate customer journeys.
- What do you need to help your organization grow?: This question helps you to understand the key areas in which the client might need support and how your product or service can help them to simplify processes.
- What do you want and not want in the solution?: Asking such a direct question can reap effective results. You can straightaway ask a prospect what they want and do not want in the solution. Their responses will give you a clear picture of what they seek to gain and avoid from your services. This way, you can tailor your service in such a way that it meets every requirement of the client.
- How much time do you spend on certain tasks?: It is important to ask this question as it educates the prospects about the separation in value creation and what their time is worth. Their answers will provide you with insights into how your product or service can help them in the productive use of time and enhance efficiency.
- What do you need to stop doing?: This is a thought-provoking question that sheds light on the current economic waste. It will help the customers to understand what they must stop doing so that they can find time to start doing something more productive. After learning their answers, you can decide how your service can provide them with greater value.
Final Suggestion
The questions mentioned above can help your sales team to gather in-depth information about the prospects. They can also find out what are the common queries that your sales team can work upon. Once you learn more about the customer’s pain points, you can take impactful steps which would help you in designing a foolproof marketing plan that can gain more customers and help you to deliver lasting services.
If you are a company that wants to delve deeper and deliver excellent customer services, we at Kylas can help you to keep track of the sales funnel, streamline workflows, and discover new customers. If you want to know more about the diverse features of Kylas, click here.
