Do you really want to optimize your value-driven selling strategies, and give your customers a reason to give your product or service the nod over your competitors? You’ll need to start focusing on customer pain points, and learning how to identify and resolve them to keep your clientele happy. What makes this such an important step in the process, and how can you start adjusting your own approaches to accommodate? Here’s what you’ll need to know…
First, let’s define what we mean by pain points. Simply put, these are specific problems that your customers (and potential customers) are trying to solve. Just as with physical pain, your customers’ pain points will be diverse—frustrations, inefficiencies, obstacles, etc.—and their specific nature will influence the types of solutions customers will be prone to seek.
That being said, pain points often fall into one of four general categories:
- Financial: A product or service costs too much, and customers are seeking to limit how much they’re spending on this item.
- Process: Customers have an everyday problem impacting their lives, and need a product or service to solve that problem.
- Productivity: Customers want to do something more quickly, and are looking to a product or service to help them save time or become more efficient.
- Support: For things that customers don’t want to deal with on their own, they might seek out a third-party product or service to handle entirely.
Once you’re able to zero in on the pain points your customer is experiencing, you’ll have opened yourself up to a whole new world of marketing possibilities. You can address these pain points directly, showing potential customers that you’re “on their wavelength,” so to speak, and distinguishing yourself from competitors who aren’t addressing these concerns.
The question, of course, is how you’re supposed to learn what those pain points are so that you can capitalize. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach, but there are some tactics that tend to have success, and one of the most useful you’ll have at your disposal is the survey.
Using an online survey, you can pose targeted questions directly to your customers and potential customers, and get to the core of what they’re seeking. Your questions should be designed to ferret out some of the following details:
- What is the biggest problem your customers face? What is it that they’re trying to solve for?
- What options are they looking into? Is your product/service on that list?
- Are there other options available to the customer that surpass yours in value?
- What’s stopping them from doing business with you?
An online survey offers some distinct benefits when compared to other data collection methods. In addition to being cost-effective (you can use any number of affordable online platforms to create one), they’re easy to construct and respectful of respondents’ time, so they’re more likely to complete them and give you some useful answers.
Finally, you can bolster your online surveys with other methods of finding out what’s on your customers’ minds—like social listening—to improve the relevancy of your insights and make the best plans in trying to woo consumers to your brand.