How To Find Your Prospect's Pain Points

We've all heard of pain points, it's integral to an effective B2B sales process; but drilling down into pain points can be an incredibly useful exercise for a variety of reasons, some of which I'm going to get into in this blog. If you're not tracking your pain points at the moment, you're missing a trick.

Assumptions

Many of us have a basic understanding about why our customers buy from us. We make valid assumptions based on a 'feeling' and we can adjust our sales pitches based on what our prospects are likely to respond to.

This is great when you're starting out, but as you scale you soon start to realise that this technique just won't cut it anymore. We find that making assumptions often leads to lost sales, or completely getting the tone of the conversation wrong to begin with - these are mistakes you can't afford to make as you get bigger.

So how do we solve this?

Track the data

It might seem obvious, but so few business owners actually keep track of their prospect's pain points. They let their salesmen run wild without stopping for a second to think about how important tracking this data can be. However, the benefits really are immense.

It can be a somewhat tedious process, and one may hasten to believe that it's taking precious time away from salesmen when really they should be selling - however, hopefully by the end of this article you should have enough justification to spend at least a little time tracking the conversations that your salesmen are having with prospects.

Doing The Ask

When your salesmen are on the phone, make sure they're asking open-ended questions to try and determine pain points. Knowing these can mean all the difference when making a sale.

Here are some examples of how to find pain points as an IT company, Cybersecurity company or as an MSP:

"What made you reach out and schedule a call with us today?"

"What's your experience with your current provider?"

"What would better IT look like for you?"

Notice how these questions leave the prospect with the opportunity to tell us about what they're having issues with? These kind of questions leave guesswork out of the equation, and if you're making decisions based on the data, you're going to want to make sure it's accurate.

How To Track The Data

Something as simple as creating a spreadsheet with each one of your prospect's most common pain points can get the job done to a degree good enough to serve the vast majority of purposes.

If you would like a template for a Sales Prospect Pain Point Spreadsheet click this link or the image above.

Alternatively, you can also setup a property on your CRM for your salesmen to use. Either way, it's worth doing.

So, Now What?

Okay, so you've got your data now - but what do you do with it? Good question. There are a couple of things you can do with the data that are SUPER useful:

1. Influence your Collateral

Are you creating sales collateral that answers your prospects pain points? If not, then this is a great place to start. Not only does creating pain point collateral answer your customer's questions more accurately. It also gives you some content to put on your social media and significantly speeds up your sales cycle.

2. Influence Your Content Strategy

Now you know your prospect's pain points, you can revolutionise your marketing team's content strategy. Rather than trying to guess what content is going to resonate with your audience, you now have first hand data on exactly what's going to work. Really, if you take nothing else away from this article - take this away: Pain-Point content skyrockets engagement.

So at this point you should have a decent understanding of why it's so important to be tracking your prospect's pain points. We hope you've found this piece useful and just reach out to us if you ever get stuck with this sort of thing. We're here to help!