How to Discover Your Customers’ Biggest Pain Points

What do you know about your customers?

Knowing your customers well will go a long way in helping you develop a relevant website for your business, as well as more effective sales and marketing strategies. Put in the effort and find out who they are, what they like/buy and why they like/ buy it.

If you are a B2B company, you need to find out which individuals in your target companies are responsible for buying decisions. These are the people you will target in your marketing.

For example, if you’re in the business of developing banking software, your ideal customer would be senior level executives in banks, such as bank managers and CEOs. You would not achieve much trying to market your service to frontline staff like bank tellers.

You will only be able to drive sales once you emphasize the benefits of your product or service to your prospects. If you understand the problems that face them, then it will be easier to provide them with solutions.

It’s also important to continue paying attention to future developments in your industry and customers’ lives. Being up to date with industry trends that will affect your customers will help you establish their future needs and offer those solutions the moment the need arises.

So, What Exactly Are Customer Pain Points?

Pain points are specific challenges that your prospective customers are experiencing. Think of them as problems that need to be solved.

Pain points are just as diverse as your prospects themselves, and not all prospects will know their pain points.

This makes it quite difficult to market to such individuals because you need to help them realize that they have a problem and convince them that your product or service is the answer to that problem.

There are four major categories of pain points:

Use these categories to think about how to position your business as the answer to your prospects’ challenges.

For example, if your prospects’ pain points are mainly financial you could focus on features of your product that address low cost options such as choosing a lower subscription plan, or point out feedback from existing customers who have reported a high ROI after using your product or service.

How to Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

Now that you know what pain points are and why you need to know them, you need to figure out how to identify them.

It’s highly likely that your prospects experience similar pain points. The diversity comes in the root cause of these pain points. That’s why carrying out research is a vital part of discovering customer pain points.

Qualitative research is the preferred method of identifying your customer pain points. It focuses on more detailed, personalized answers to open-ended questions.

Quantitative research focuses on standardized questions and representative sample sizes and would not provide as much detail as possible.

Even if five customers have the same challenge, the root cause of that challenge could vary significantly from one customer to another.

Two primary sources of information you need to discover your customers’ pain points are:

• Your customers: Ask them about their struggles, concerns, and worries.
• Your sales, marketing and support teams: review sales interactions and use SEO research tools to help you identify opportunities for content development.

5 Tips to Help You Understand Your Customers’ Pain Points

Advanced technology has made it easier to interact with customers. There are several tools that work effectively as customer service channels. Other tools allow you to communicate with your customers while they browse your website or encourage them to share their opinions, for example, through customer satisfaction surveys .

All these channels are tools for collecting customer insights. All the data you get from interacting with your customers will help you gain a deeper understanding of them. Review interactions with your customer service teams, look for patterns, and react to the insights you discover.

Creating generic demographics for your buyer personas will not provide enough data to develop messaging that resonates with your target market on an emotional level.

One way you can delve deeper into your customers’ needs is through Google Analytics. With the help of the Acquisitions tab you can see which blogs, forums and social media platforms your website traffic comes from. Use this data for your personas to know when and where to reach them.

The moment a customer visits your website, you can get plenty of valuable insights about how they spend time on the site. All their actions including clicking on links, reading through web pages, the time they spend on your site go a long way in helping you understand their behaviour.



Tools like Google Analytics are fantastic for tracking your customers’ interaction with your website. The data you collect should help you understand what your prospects like or don’t like or what they don’t understand, and what you need to improve to create a more robust website experience.

If you discovered a particular page that your visitors spend the most time, analyze it to see what’s attracting them. On the flip side, if you notice a high bounce rate on a specific page, try to figure out what’s making people turn away.

Besides your current plan for customer engagement, also create one for the future. This will prepare your customer service teams in responding to customers, especially during difficult situations.

You can take advantage of predictive analytics software to identify trends and patterns that can provide insight into decision making.

Empathise with your customer to understand the customer buying journey.



Companies use customer journey mapping, a technique whereby a detailed, graphical representation of the customer journey is created. It is based on the major touchpoints and interactions between your brand and your customer before, during, and after buying.

Top 5 Questions To Ask Your Customers

Whether you’re trying to figure out how to attract customers, how to retain them or how to create immense value for them, start by going to them and asking them for insights directly. Doing so will definitely have a positive impact on the direction of your business.

Here are the top 5 questions you can ask your customers:

A study carried out by SurveyMonkey found that 57% of people permanently stopped using a product after one unpleasant experience. When you ask your customers how you can serve them better, act on those answers they provide. This will show them you value their time and opinions.

This question can give you insight into what really matters to your customers. It could be anything from a particular feature to a great relationship with their account manager.

Find out whether your customers are satisfied with the value you offer, discover the things they like most and whether they will continue using your solutions. Answers to these questions can help you improve your value proposition, get your pricing strategy right, and make your business stand out from the crowd.

This will help you find out the most pressing issues that prevent your customers from being successful.

As a business owner, you are curious about your competition and specifically why your customer chose you over them. Knowing why your customers chose you over other businesses can give you an idea of the experience they are looking for in a product /service.

It’s also worth knowing to prevent them from jumping off to another vendor and make them stick with you.

Bottom Line

No matter how good your product or service is, no one will buy it if they are not interested in it or convinced that they don’t need it. In addition, you cannot persuade someone to buy what you’re offering unless you have a deep understanding of what they really want.

Take some time to know your customers because they are the only ones who can help grow your business. Once you understand their pain points, you will offer them the best products/services and in return build strong customer relationships.