Simply put, a pain point is something your ideal customer is struggling with.

It’s keeping them up at night, it’s making them worry about the future, and it’s hurting their mental health in their day-to-day life.

The bigger the pain point, the more your customer will pay to fix it.

This is key as you figure out your product-market fit and structure your ideal client profile and offer. Without this information, you can end up saying the wrong thing to the right person or the wrong thing to the wrong person.

You’ll look around and wonder why your marketing and revenue operations are falling short.

Some look at metrics, data, their niche, and other proxies.

When what they’re really missing is: the big, horrible pain point they’re solving with their product or service.

Examples of Pain Points

• Need to boost sales or the company will not be able to pay employees
• Need to get financing for new equipment or the company will get stuck and not be able to scale and grow
• Need a new website to attract new customers or I’ll feel like we’re behind our competitors and losing money, headed for a crash
• Need to hire sales reps to get my time back because I just had a baby and I am more busy with my family than ever

As you can see, pain points are generally rooted in either fear of a problem on the horizon, or trying to meet time-based goals that allow for growth and expansion.

There are emotions on the back of every pain point.

You want to study these very carefully.

“Getting more leads” is never the full story, for example. They need to get more leads because they’re WORRIED that they are not going to be able to meet revenue goals, they’ll have to fire employees, or they won’t be able to support their family.

You want to play into these emotions with your marketing and sales operations to get rid of the pain with your product or service. Connect that emotion to the solution you provide.

This process takes sales calls from “convincing my lead to buy” to “solving my lead’s problems, getting them feeling relieved and them signing up with excitement and hope”!

This is how sales should work. Gone are the days of convincing anyone of anything.

This is a common question we get.

“How do I find the pain points? Where do I look?”

This is different for every niche, industry, and ideal customer profile, but there are a few resources that we always use to find our niche’s pain points.

1. Reddit

Reddit is a universe of what they call “subreddits” that are focused on specific topics or niches.

Exploring subreddits that speak to your ideal customer allows you to find their pain points fairly easily.

It’s all about finding enough people that are experiencing that same pain point, then going out and actually validating it with ideal customers.

2. Quora

People go to Quora to ask questions and get answers.

It’s a very trusted website and gets a lot of traffic every day.

This is a goldmine for you, researching pain points. You can easily search with keywords to find people asking questions about your niche/industry.

Here, you can uncover the pain points that they’ve taken the time to ask about. You can even answer questions on Quora to generate organic traffic to your landing page or website (another great source of lead generation and feedback).

3. Talk to Your Ideal Customers

This is by far the best way to understand your ideal customers’ pain points – go straight to the source!

There’s many ways to do this, but cold outreach is the most economical.

You’re not looking to sell, in the traditional sense. You’re looking to have conversations and learn more about this experts’ experiences in their industries and uncover the emotion behind their pain points.

In many cases, if your product or service actually gets results, these conversations can end in a closed sale, but that’s not the focus.

Example of this type of outreach:

Hi {first_name},

I was looking for {niche} experts on LinkedIn and your name popped up. I am researching {niche} and wondering if you could spend 5 minutes on a zoom call to answer a few questions.

Thoughts?

Obviously there are many angles you can take to reach out like this, but the point is: you saw they’re an expert and you’d like to ask them a few questions about their industry.

Now, once you have your pain points mapped out, it’s time to put them to work.

There are several ways to use your newly discovered and validated pain points in your ads, content, and outreach messages.

We’ll focus specifically on outreach messaging in this article.

Examples

• Ask the prospect if they’re experiencing anything {pain_points}
• Tell the prospect you’ve seen a lot of people in their industry (name dropping works great here) that are experiencing pain point 1, pain point 2, and pain point 3 – are those things they’re going through currently?
• Link to an authority article about how to solve their specific pain point, place a call to action button at the end of the article to book a call – link to it in your outreach email or message
• Create a video sales letter (VSL) that explains how to solve their main pain point step-by-step, place a button or calendar scheduler embed below the video if they’d like help solving this problem – link to this in your outreach message (also works amazing for ads)

It’s very simple, but extremely effective to focus your messaging around your ideal customer’s pain points.

In-depth knowledge of your ideal customer is the most powerful tool in your marketing & sales toolbox.

The more you know, the better you can speak to solving their main problems, alleviating their fears, and getting them closer to their goals.

Pro tip: our Lead Gen Masterclass teaches this process more in-depth, as well as other foundations, strategies, and tactics to help you fill your pipeline more reliably, shorten deal cycles, and increase revenue.