Marketing Generics Application Note:

Points of Pain. Their importance for more effective Marketing and Sales

Marketers and sales people are, or should be, always trying to find out what their customers need, and how they can sell to them - the typical paradigm is ”the more or better you understand their need, the better chance you have of being able to satisfy them and therefore sell to them”.  This is true in principle, but in practice it’s more complicated than being able to simply identify and therefore address needs.  What you really need to be able to find out is the nature of your customer’s need, and in particular their pain points or ‘points of pain’.  This Application Note explains how.

The difference between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’

As an obvious starting point we can say that customers have to have a need otherwise they don’t buy.  Most Marketing and Sales people naturally get this, but it’s only half the story.  A person may have a need to travel from London to Berlin on a certain day, and that tells you what they want, but knowing that much doesn’t even begin to help you understand what that person’s real need is or how you can address it.  How do they want to travel?  How much do they want to pay?  Have they got something difficult and fragile to transport at the same time?  Is time of the essence?  And so on.  So the point here is that understanding the ‘what’ is just the first stage, and ‘how’ the customer wants to be served is more important than the ‘what’.

Keywords: Points of pain, POP, nature of the need, value-based marketing,B2B, B2C, Deep Dive,