Understanding Your Client’s Pain Points Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Pain Is Good Right? 

Understanding Your Client’s Pain Points Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy 

Nobody wishes pain (i.e. business challenges) on their clients, but every organization suffers pain throughout their business lifecycle. Many suffer pain from lack of growth, pain from too much growth too fast, pain from not having the right people in the right seats, or pain from not having the infrastructure in place to deliver with excellence and retain customers.  

Every organization has pain points. The key to winning the hearts and minds (and share of wallet) with your clients is to:

1. Understand the pain they are feeling.
2. Identify the root cause of that pain.
3. Understand the impact is that pain having on the organization.
4. Know the value they place on making that pain go away or lessening the pain.
5. How your product or service solves their problem and makes the pain go away.
6. Be able to clearly articulate how your product or solution improves their current situation and how it will lessen the pain or make it go away all together.

Let’s Unpack These Steps

Understanding the Pain They Are Feeling:

The best way to understand a client’s pain is to simply ask them. What is keeping them up at night? What are some of the challenges the business is facing? To get to the heart of the pain, you may have to probe a little or ask more than one person within the organization. Remember pain can be expressed in different ways by different people. 

Other ways to understand the pain a client is feeling is to do external research.

• What terms are businesses searching for when looking for your solution?
• What is going on in their industry? Are there environmental, political or regulatory changes that may have affected your client?

Identify the Root Cause of the Pain:

Similar to the pain we feel in our bodies, the cause of the pain the business may be feeling may not be what we think it is. If a company’s proclaimed pain is growth, there may be several things that are preventing growth. It could be lack of top of funnel leads, or it could be the wrong type of leads or the inability for their sales team to win business when a lead is generated. Understanding those things are critical to addressing the root cause. 

Understand the Impact of the Pain to the Organization:

All businesses are going to have challenges and pain. Understanding the impact to the organization is critical to understanding how motivated they will be to eliminate the pain. A $500 per month impact is very different from a $10,000 a month impact. Having the client articulate the impact will help you determine how motivated they will be to solve it.

What is the Value The Place On Making The Pain Go Away?

Along with understanding the impact, understanding the value they place on making the pain go away is also important. If they indicate the pain is severe but they are not willing to invest to make the pain go away, the pain may not be as severe as they indicate. Understanding this is also important to align the investment they might be willing to make in your solution.

How Your Product or Service Solves their Problem and Makes the Pain Go Away:

Traditionally companies focus heavily on selling features and don’t understand how their problem solves the customers problem. By changing the lens in which you look at your product or service from “here is a great feature” to “here is how our product or service solves a specific problem” the more a client is going to see value in what you are offering. If we are not able to identify how our product or service solves that specific problem, we may need to dig deeper to gain better alignment.

Be able to clearly articulate how your product or solution improves their current situation, lessens the pain or makes it go away all together:

The ability to tie all of the pieces together in a well articulated story narrative is critical to standing apart from the competition. A great marketing strategy will be able to “speak” in the client’s language, positioning your company as the one that understands their pain, the root cause of their pain and the impact it is having on their business.  

Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Being able to get closer to your customer’s true needs will help you develop a more impactful sales and marketing strategy. Using language that resonates with the client, showing understanding and empathy for the challenges they are facing and being able to articulate how your product or service solves their problem will lead to better awareness, engagement, opportunities, and also win you more business. 

Remember To:

• Address the pain point your customer/client has.
• Use emotional language that grabs their attention, such as empathy.
• Speak to how your products/services can uniquely solve their problem. 
• Don’t forget to tell your customer/client the value they will get from using your product/service.

This focus on solving problems for clients in your sales and marketing won’t create overnight conversions. Remember that you still have to build a rapport with your target audience. Building a foundational relationship on trust and community is important. But by speaking to and solving the problems of your customers, you can shorten the time it takes to build that trust, leading to faster conversions and happier customers!

Need help digging into the data on your clients’ pain points? From data to implementation, I can help you craft a better sales and marketing plan that will help you get more sales and increase customer loyalty. Connect with me today to learn more!