Pain point

A message built on a real, quantified pain point stops a reader in a way "we save you time" never does, because the reader recognises their own situation. Pain also differs by role. A technical buyer worries about complexity, a finance buyer about return and a manager about the team's workload. One message aimed at everyone usually lands with nobody. The most common mistake in positioning is describing a feature instead of the pain it removes.

• Ask open questions in customer interviews, such as "What is the biggest headache in this area?", not loaded ones such as "Do you struggle with X?".
• Put a number on every pain, in hours, money or risk. An abstract complaint becomes a business case once it has a figure.
• Keep a short list of pain points for each buyer persona, and rank them by how often they come up and how much they cost.
• Check behaviour as well as speech. Session recordings and support tickets often show friction that interviewees forget to mention.

A pain point is a concrete frustration with a measurable cost, not a vague wish. "We want better reporting" is a wish. "Our finance team spends two weeks every month reconciling spreadsheets" is a pain point. It has a cost, a place in someone's week and a person who feels it.

Marketers often sort pain points into four types. Financial pain is paying too much. Productivity pain is wasting time. Process pain is a workflow that is slow or error-prone. Support pain is not getting help when it is needed.

• Treating a feature request as a pain point. "We need an export button" describes a wanted solution. Ask what problem the export would solve.
• Assuming the pain without asking customers. Interview at least five before you write the message.
• Naming a pain that exists but costs the buyer too little to act on. Rank pain points by cost and by how often they come up.
• Writing for one pain when different roles feel different ones. A finance lead and an operations lead need different headlines.
• Using your own jargon instead of the words customers used. Keep their phrases in the copy.
• Never revisiting the list. Pain points shift as a market changes, so check it at least once a year.