Pain points are a huge part of every sales process - when utilized correctly, they can create massive opportunities for your business and generate huge revenue opportunities.
The kind of pain points you encounter as a salesperson can be varied, confusing, and very complex in nature and frequency. You should first aim to understand what the pain points are and how they relate to the sales process. Afterward, you should be looking to correctly identify different types of pain points and the way you manage them.
A pain point is something that a potential customer is experiencing and needs an ailment for. The easiest way to look at pain points is as problems, obstacles, and roadblocks. It can be something that causes a loss of revenue for a business, an unnecessary overhead, or something that is generally undermining the potential of an organization, department, or process.
You will often run into potential customers who have no idea of their pain points, this is something that can be both a complication in your sales process and also an opportunity too. If you correctly approach this prospect with Metrics and data behind their pain point, with Implication of Pain behind your approach, you can often create a direction towards your business that previously did not exist.
You can use creativity and experience to create various categories and types of pain for customers, but they can often be compartmentalized into these different sections:
Supporting Pain - The potential customer is unable to get that key support role filled in their business world, and this can be where your product or service plugs a gap.
Processing Pain - Your potential customer could be spending excess time and resources when it comes to internal processes, whether it is admin or more, and your solution can save them time and money.
Production Pain - Your potential customer is losing out on productivity and work rate due to pain, and your solution allows them to free the shackles and maximize efficiency when it comes to productivity.
Spending Pain - Your potential customer has a financial leak or spending problem when it comes to this pain point, and can save buckets full of money by taking on your solution.
As you began to apply these categories to your customer’s pain, you can think about the various ways you can place your company’s solution as a painful ailment for them. Every single product, solution, or service out there will have so many creative ways that they can be applied to a pain point, but it should be tailored to the type of pain a customer is encountering - for each different area of pain, Metrics should be applied once the Pain is Implicated to maximize the success rate of your customer fully understanding the situation.
Now you have an easy way to attribute the different types of Pain and how you can both categorize and strategize around them, you need to learn how to correctly identify them.
As the previous section makes particular mention of Metrics and the quantitative mention of how you can use your solution as an ailment in this way, identifying your customer’s Pain will require a more quantitative approach to fully understand the root causes of the Pain.
Conducting qualitative research can allow you to address pain points which can often be viewed as subjective or entangled with the emotions of the potential customer. No Pain is ever the same, and it will differ from any other customer you have Implicated the Pain for before. Before you go into Metrics and solutions, you need to look at how you can identify the correct pain, even if your customer is not aware of it.
Here are the best ways to spot customer Pain and build up qualitative data and facts before you advance further down the sales process:
Look at the competition - by working out what their competitors are doing to address pain points, you give yourself more of a direction to work towards - you should also remember that these pain points will never be identical as there are unique factors affecting the behind-the-scenes in each business.
Ask questions - By setting the goal of spotting the biggest pain points, you should look at forms, surveys, and feedback options for companies to fill out to learn what pain they are facing and why.
Engage in conversation - use your sales teams to strike up conversations with potential customers and keep their ears pinned back for anything that can sound like or lead to pain.
Use online customer feedback - whether it is online reviews or product feedback, you should be able to use customer data and reports to find out what is wrong with the customer’s offering or service and how your solution can be a fit in the process.
Identifying your customer’s pain points is pivotal - whilst it is not an easy task by any stretch, you can spark up a huge amount of business by being attentive to the Metrics and Pain Implications around the customer business and how your product or service and ailing the suffering.
Whenever you position yourself as a solution to pain, you allow your business to win business every single time.