Whatever you sell, every lost deal and churned account can be traced back to the same root cause: a customer pain point your team either missed or didn’t fully address.
Frustrations and unmet needs directly shape how buyers evaluate, compare and commit to new products. Understanding them is vital to developing products and messaging that resonate with your audience.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to identify customer pain points across the buyer journey, the main pain point types and how to act on those insights to improve conversions and retention.
Key takeaways from customer pain points
Customer pain points are the real reasons buyers start searching for new solutions, making them the key to more relevant sales and marketing messaging.
The four main types of customer pain points – financial, productivity, process and support – often overlap and compound.
Identifying customer pain points involves collecting insights from multiple sources, including sales conversations, customer feedback and CRM data.
Pipedrive helps you capture, track and act on customer pain points to increase sales and loyalty. Start a free 14-day trial to see how.
What are customer pain points and why do they matter?
Customer pain points are specific problems, frustrations or unmet needs that people experience in their lives or at work, particularly when interacting with products and brands.
Identifying pain points helps marketing and sales teams move beyond surface-level messaging to grow engagement and ultimately deliver better customer experiences.
When you know what’s holding a prospect back from achieving a goal or committing to a purchase, you can position your solution around the issue that needs solving.
For example, many operations and project teams want to build custom apps that increase productivity but lack the technical skill or time to code. Airtable targets that pain point directly by promoting Cobuilder, a no-code tool that helps recipients achieve their goal:
The leading message – “The future is no code” – resonates because it speaks to a specific need rather than a generic feature.
Note: When sellers misunderstand customer pain points, buyers can end up with the wrong solution and eventually churn. According to Gartner’s Software Buying Trends report, 59% of buyers regret at least one software purchase made in the past 18 months.
Types of customer pain points (with examples)
Recognizing the types of pain points customers have makes it easier to tailor your outreach, discovery questions and follow-ups.
Most fall into one of four categories:
Financial pain points include costs, pricing transparency and budget constraints. For example, a prospect feels they’re overpaying for their current solution or finds it difficult to justify investing in a new one.
Productivity pain points revolve around how long or how much manual effort it takes to complete important tasks. For example, a sales team relies on spreadsheets or disconnected tools to manage deal pipelines, slowing their workflow.
Process pain points come from friction in existing workflows or the customer journey itself. For example, manual data entry increases the risk of human error in internal processes, which SaaS brands often address with automation features.
Support pain points relate to customer service quality, pre- and post-purchase. For example, support is slow or self-service options are unintuitive, quickly eroding trust.
Many customers face multiple types of pain points.
For example, a process pain point (confusing onboarding) might create a productivity pain point (wasted time). Eventually, that turns into a financial pain point (resources spent fixing the problem).
Such issues also prompt buyers to start searching for new solutions or at least be open to switching when another company pitches to them. Around half of consumers told a Genesys study they’d seek new brands after just a few poor interactions.
Types of customer pain points (with examples)
Recognizing the types of pain points customers have makes it easier to tailor your outreach, discovery questions and follow-ups.
Most fall into one of four categories:
Financial pain points include costs, pricing transparency and budget constraints. For example, a prospect feels they’re overpaying for their current solution or finds it difficult to justify investing in a new one.
Productivity pain points revolve around how long or how much manual effort it takes to complete important tasks. For example, a sales team relies on spreadsheets or disconnected tools to manage deal pipelines, slowing their workflow.
Process pain points come from friction in existing workflows or the customer journey itself. For example, manual data entry increases the risk of human error in internal processes, which SaaS brands often address with automation features.
Support pain points relate to customer service quality, pre- and post-purchase. For example, support is slow or self-service options are unintuitive, quickly eroding trust.
Many customers face multiple types of pain points.
For example, a process pain point (confusing onboarding) might create a productivity pain point (wasted time). Eventually, that turns into a financial pain point (resources spent fixing the problem).
Such issues also prompt buyers to start searching for new solutions or at least be open to switching when another company pitches to them. Around half of consumers told a Genesys study they’d seek new brands after just a few poor interactions.
Where customer pain points show up in the buyer journey
Customer pain points can show up at multiple stages of the buyer journey, shaping how prospects move from initial awareness to final purchase and beyond.
The levels of friction at each of the following stages directly influence whether prospects stay engaged, convert or drop out of the pipeline. These risks makes them crucial to pre-empt.
Buyer journey stage | Common pain points | Possible impacts |
Awareness |
| Prospective customers lose interest or move on to competitors with clearer messaging. |
Consideration |
| Deals stall or move to alternatives that appear more complete or better value. |
Purchase |
| Abandoned deals, lower closer rates and wasted sales efforts reduce profitability. |
Post-purchase |
| Lower customer satisfaction and retention rates, reduced lifetime value (LTV) and negative reviews that could hinder new deals. |
Mapping pain points to journey stages creates a clearer picture of what stops deals from closing. You can then make targeted improvements to your sales and marketing strategies.
Let’s say new users complain about having to repeat themselves on calls. A targeted improvement would be to record all customer interactions in a CRM. With full context, customer support teams can skip asking basic questions and go straight to solving problems.
Download our customer journey map template
How to identify customer pain points: 4 reliable insight sources
Uncover your own customers’ challenges across the buyer journey by pulling valuable insights from these sources.
1. Sales conversations
Discovery calls and sales meetings are where pain points surface most naturally.
Listen for repeated objections, frustrations described in the buyer’s own words and gaps between what their current solution delivers and what they need.
The Sandler Pain funnel is a useful framework for structuring these conversations. It involves asking a series of open-ended questions to quickly uncover challenges.
Start broad (e.g., “Tell me about your current process”) to get customers talking. Then work toward specifics (“What happens when that breaks down?” or “What kind of impact does this have on your business?”) to home in on the biggest problems.
2. Customer feedback
Support tickets, online reviews, surveys, forums and social media all reveal patterns in customer dissatisfaction.
Look for common complaints and recurring feature requests to better understand the issues customers face.
Pay close attention to the language people use to describe customer issues, too. You may be able to use this in sales content or to refine buyer personas.
For example, this small business owner describes using spreadsheets for accounting as “messy”, suggesting they need software that’ll streamline their finance work.
An accounting software salesperson could use the same language (i.e., “messy spreadsheets”) in sales conversations to show they understand potential customers’ challenges. Doing so would help them build rapport and make it easier to move deals forward.
3. Sales and marketing metrics
Numbers reveal patterns that conversations alone can miss. Using your CRM’s reports and dashboards, dig into metrics like:
Conversion rates at each pipeline stage
Churn and retention rates by segment
Average deal cycle length
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores
If a high percentage of deals stall at the proposal stage, for example, there may be a pricing or trust-related pain point your team isn’t addressing in discovery.
The answer could be to make pricing clearer on your website, or to weave more social proof into your sales enablement content.
If CSAT scores are low, the issue could be overpromising value in sales conversations or underdelivering on customer support.
4. Customer behavior
Pay attention to what your customers do and not just what they tell you.
Actions like abandoning an onboarding step or repeating the same workaround often point to pain points that don’t come up in conversation.
Session recordings and product analytics can help you spot problematic patterns.
For example, are your app’s users resetting their login credentials more than necessary? It could highlight a user experience (UX) or security obstacle that needs investigating.
When you combine behavioral insights with what you’re hearing in calls and seeing in reviews, you get a much clearer view of where the friction happens.
4 simple ways to address customer pain points
Identifying pain points is only valuable if your team acts on them. Here are four ways to turn insights into measurable improvements.
1. Optimize processes and workflows
Map out the stages where prospects or customers consistently struggle and simplify them.
If prospects consistently struggle at a specific stage, such as onboarding or contract review, map the current process, identify the bottleneck and simplify it.
Even small changes make a difference. Automating a manual step or clarifying a confusing email sequence can remove enough friction to keep deals moving.
2. Improve product functionality
Use feedback and usage data to prioritize the product changes with the greatest impact.
If customers repeatedly request a feature or abandon a workflow at the same step, that’s a clear signal of a gap to address. While you may not have direct control over product development, you can feed back to the relevant teams.
In cases where full product changes will take time, consider interim solutions such as better documentation, in-app guidance or workaround recommendations.
3. Strengthen customer support
Reduce response times and give support reps full context on every customer interaction.
Knowledge bases and chatbots help with the first change, empowering customers to solve their own issues while learning more about your product without impacting company resources.
A CRM that logs every touchpoint against each contact handles the second change, so nobody has to explain their problem twice.
In Genesys’ CX survey, 51% of consumers said they want brands to anticipate their intentions and proactively offer solutions. That means creating a system that provides predictive support based on real past interactions.
4. Improve the sales process and follow-up
Personalize follow-up communication based on the specific pain points a prospect shared during their initial conversations.
Consistent follow-up, at the right time and with the right context, either turns interest into commitment or rules out unsuitable leads. Both outcomes help your company sell more to the right people, increasing LTV.
Automate reminders and sequences to ensure follow-ups can’t fall through the cracks, even when your team is managing a high volume of deals.
Using a CRM to identify and act on customer pain points
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a purpose-built system for tracking customer pain points and turning insights into repeatable workflows. Instead of relying on scattered notes or memory, every interaction and data point team members need lives in one place, making it easy to act on.
Here’s how a great sales CRM supports the process:
Centralizing customer interactions and feedback. Every call note, email and support ticket is logged against the contact or deal, so your team always has full context.
Tracking pain points across deals and stages. Use custom fields or tags to categorize pain points as they surface during discovery. Over time, patterns emerge that inform your messaging and positioning.
Improving visibility into the sales process. Dashboards and reports highlight where deals stall, which objections come up most and where follow-ups are being missed.
Automating follow-ups to reduce gaps. Workflow automations ensure no prospect is forgotten, even when your team is managing a full pipeline.
Turning insights into repeatable workflows. When you identify a common pain point, build it into your sales process. Create templates, sequences and activity reminders that address it consistently.
Pipedrive in particular gives sales teams full visibility into the pipeline and the tools to act on what they learn.
For example, custom data fields and notes let you tag and track specific customer pain points across every deal.
Workflow automations handle routine follow-ups so your reps can focus on building relationships. You can set the system up to send an email whenever a new deal is added, for instance, or re-engage inactive deals after a specific period.
Insights dashboards surface trends, such as which pain points correlate with won or lost deals, so you can refine your approach over time.
Pipedrive’s dashboards are clear and customizable, showing the most important metrics whenever you need them.
Pipedrive case study: 360 Payments
Payment processing company 360 Payments puts these features and more to work. The company built its sales approach around understanding customer needs, from detailed note-taking on every prospect to asking sincere, open-ended questions during discovery.
Pipedrive’s activity views and real-time dashboards helped 360 Payments’ team prioritize follow-ups and stay aligned without chasing internal updates. The result was 298% net income growth and a 40% increase in gross revenue over two years.
Final thoughts
Customer pain points are at the heart of every effective sales and marketing strategy.
The best-performing teams diagnose problems first and pitch solutions second. Sales reps use real conversations, feedback and structured data to understand what buyers really need before they try to sell a product.
The framework is simple and repeatable: define the pain point, validate it with multiple sources and build systems that help your team act on those insights consistently.
Let Pipedrive be the system that turns customer understanding into action for your business. Try it free today.
