Physical pain is never good. However, for people in business, trying to make a living there is another pain that needs to be addressed. Did you know that in the world of marketing, your customers experience their own pain points? Although these pain points may not cause physical pain, they can still be challenging to “diagnose.” As a business owner or leader, you can distinguish your business by discovering pain points your customers have and providing a solution.
What is a pain point?
Pain points are specific problems that your prospective customer faces or simply put, challenges. Challenges come in a variety of forms and can be as different as your potential customer list. Some challenges can be prevented or eliminated due to proper management. Other challenges, like the environment cannot always be predicted, but can still be helped. Although a multitude of pain points exist, WordStream.com groups pain points into four broad categories and describes them as follows:
• Financial Pain Points: Your prospects are spending too much money on their current provider/solution/products and want to reduce their spending, or see a better ROI.
• Productivity Pain Points: Your prospects are wasting too much time using their current provider/solution/products or want to use their time more efficiently. With our audience this could be that they want to shorten their calving window or simply find a way to increase efficiencies.
• Process Pain Points: Your prospects want to improve internal processes. For our customer base, this could mean they want to treat fewer calves or they are looking for a more stress-free way to wean their calves and get them started on feed and water.
• Support Pain Points: Your prospects aren’t receiving the support they need at critical stages of the customer journey or sales process.
Once you start thinking about pain points in these four categories, you should be able to start to plan your positioning in a way that will address each of these pain points to show that your company is the best solution to their challenges.
How to Identify the Pain Points and Find a Solution
Now that you understand the four broad categories of pain points, how do you tell which pain point your potential customer is facing? Chances are, there are at least a couple of pains points that have your potential client reeling. So be ready to address their needs to set your business apart from the competition.
The best way to identify pain points is to have a one-on-one conversation with your prospects. Ask them directly what their challenges are and how you can help solve those challenges. Really listen to what they have to say before offering a solution. Although many prospects and customers will have similar pain points, everyone will have some variation on how they plan to manage to fix or solve those challenges.
Perhaps your customer is troubled with spending a large sum of money on a consumable product like mineral. This is a great time to have a conversation about the investment that customer or prospect will be making in the nutrition and overall health of an animal. Talk about the ROI for that customer, if he or she spends money on a product like VitaFerm® Concept•Aid®, and how that investment can produce more live calves, and therefore generate more income.
If the pain point involves support, you can offer numerous solutions based on the goods and services you offer while providing outstanding customer service. The personal services that back a product are sometimes just as important to the customer as the product itself.
We don’t want to see anyone in pain – physical or otherwise. By discovering your potential customers’ pain points early in your conversation, you can set your company apart by offering solutions to their challenges and helping to ease their “pain.” This should ultimately differentiate your business, and you can watch your business grow.