B2B buyers look for new products to make their lives easier. They have pain points they need fixing.
Maybe something isn't working as efficiently as it should. Or you're spending too much money on a simple solution. Maybe there's a product out there that can automate most of the work you spend half your day working on.
The list can seem endless.
Customer pain points are abundant, and it is up to marketers and salespeople to both identify and address them when reaching out to prospects. Your sales and marketing strategies depend on it.
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Customer pain points are specific problems that potential and existing customers experience in the marketplace and want to be solved. B2B sales and marketing teams identify these pain points through customer conversations, behavioral signals, and sales data to position their solutions as the fix buyers need.
Your GTM strategy should be built around customer pain points. Your product exists to solve problems.
Watch how ZoomInfo helps teams identify and solve customer pain points
Understanding customer pain points drives three core outcomes:
Better targeting: Focus outreach on accounts facing problems you can solve
Higher conversion: Message to the specific challenges buyers care about
Faster sales cycles: Lead with pain points instead of generic product pitches
Why Pain Points Matter in B2B Sales
Identifying customer pain points is crucial to the success of both your sales and marketing strategies. Salespeople need to determine pain points in order to customize their pitch and present their product or service as the best possible solution to their challenges.
And marketers need to understand pain points so that they can effectively advertise and create content around their solution in a way that will appeal to and entice potential customers.
Ignoring pain points creates specific consequences in B2B sales:
Stalled deals: Prospects go dark when their core problem isn't addressed in your pitch or demo.
Lost competitive evaluations: Buyers choose vendors who demonstrate understanding of their specific challenges.
Lower win rates: Generic messaging fails to resonate with decision-makers facing budget scrutiny.
Longer sales cycles: Deals drag when you haven't identified the pain point driving urgency.
The Four Types of Customer Pain Points
B2B customer pain points can generally be split into four different categories:
Pain Point Type | What It Means |
|---|---|
Financial | Budget constraints, cost concerns, unclear ROI |
Productivity | Time wasted on manual tasks and inefficient workflows |
Process | Internal friction and broken team handoffs |
Support | Gaps in vendor responsiveness and onboarding quality |
Financial Pain Points
Financial pain points stem from budget constraints, cost concerns, or poor ROI perception. Buyers want to reduce spending while maintaining or improving efficiency.
Common B2B financial pain points include:
Procurement friction: Lengthy approval processes and budget cycles that delay purchasing decisions.
Unclear pricing models: Hidden fees or complex tiered pricing that makes cost comparison difficult.
ROI justification challenges: Difficulty proving value to finance stakeholders or demonstrating payback period.
Productivity Pain Points
Productivity pain points reflect time wasted on manual tasks or inefficient workflows. Customers wish to be more efficient with their time and are most likely to be unhappy with the amount of time they waste with their current solution.
Common B2B productivity pain points include:
Manual list building: Sales reps spending hours researching contacts instead of selling.
Tool-switching overhead: Toggling between multiple platforms to complete a single workflow.
Admin work burden: Account executives doing data entry and research instead of closing deals.
Process Pain Points
Process pain points arise from internal workflow friction or broken handoffs between teams. Customers are looking to improve internal processes and are most likely experiencing issues with their current systems.
Common B2B process pain points include:
Inconsistent lead routing: Leads getting assigned to the wrong rep or falling through the cracks entirely.
Unclear SDR-to-AE handoffs: Qualified opportunities losing momentum during the transition between teams.
No standardized qualification criteria: Different reps using different frameworks to assess opportunity quality.
Support Pain Points
Support pain points reflect gaps in vendor responsiveness or onboarding quality. Customers wish to receive more appropriate support, specifically at critical stages of the customer journey.
Common B2B support pain points include:
Slow implementation support: Delayed onboarding that pushes back time-to-value.
Lack of strategic guidance: Vendors who provide tools but no best practices or ongoing optimization support.
Common B2B Customer Pain Point Examples
Every customer is different, and every company will need solutions to a unique set of problems. Yet in the world of B2B, there are certainly some common pain points that we all can relate to.
Inability to find accurate contact information: Sales teams waste hours tracking down verified emails and direct dials.
Low connect rates on cold calls: Reps struggle to get through to prospects due to wrong numbers or outdated contact data.
Time-based factors: Reaching out to the wrong people at the wrong time, missing buying windows.
Undifferentiated outreach: Sales and marketing teams need to create content and offers that stand out from the crowd.
Data decay: Contact information going stale within months, leading to bounced emails and wasted outreach effort.
ICP mismatch: Reps spending time on accounts that don't fit the ideal customer profile, dragging down conversion rates.
Take for example ZoomInfo customer Vectra, a technology company applying artificial intelligence in the fight against cyber attackers. Their main customer pain point was prospecting efficiency.
Vectra's sales team spent hours daily tracking down contact information and verifying it manually. Wrong numbers and email bouncebacks killed productivity and blocked growth opportunities.
By identifying this pain point, ZoomInfo was able to provide them with accurate prospecting data as well as a powerful suite of search and target tools.
How to Identify Customer Pain Points
Most prospects begin their buying journey (or at least preliminary research) because of a business-related issue they would like to be solved. And the key to understanding what this specific problem entails is to simply talk to them about it.
Direct conversation remains the most reliable way to understand customer pain points. Intent signals reveal what buyers research, but conversations uncover why it matters and what outcome they need.
Customer Surveys and Interviews
Surveys and interviews reveal what customer pain points matter most to your buyers. Open-ended questions surface deeper insights than yes/no formats because buyers describe challenges in their own words.
Below are a few open-ended questions to get them talking about their most pressing issues:
What is the main thing holding your business back from growth?
What takes up the most time in your and your team's day?
What is preventing you from hitting your goals?
Why isn't your current solution working for you? What do you wish it was doing better?
What is the biggest challenge you're currently facing?
After gleaning useful information from these conversations, you can start to build messaging around your product, and frame it in a way that specifically addresses the concerns of prospective customers.
Sales and Support Conversation Analysis
Sales reps surface customer pain points in every discovery call and demo. Mining these conversations for recurring themes gives you real-time insight into buyer challenges without waiting for formal feedback cycles.
Mine these conversation sources for recurring pain point themes:
Discovery call recordings: Listen for the problems prospects describe in their own words during qualification calls.
Lost deal debriefs: Analyze "why we lost" themes to identify pain points your solution didn't address.
Renewal conversations: Track friction points customers mention when evaluating whether to continue using your product.
Support escalations: Review tickets that required manager intervention to spot systemic issues causing customer frustration.
Buyer Intent and Behavioral Signals
Buyers research solutions before they talk to vendors. Website visits, content downloads, and competitor page views create digital signals that reveal which customer pain points are driving their search.
Intent signals reveal pain points before prospects self-identify them. When buyers research topics like "CRM data quality" or "sales automation," they're signaling a pain point. Using intent signals allows you to reach buyers earlier in the sales process, putting you ahead of the competition.
Signal types that indicate pain points include:
Topic research patterns: Accounts consuming content about specific challenges (data accuracy, workflow automation, integration complexity).
Competitor evaluation activity: Visits to competitor websites or comparison pages indicating dissatisfaction with current solution.
Technology changes: Technographic shifts showing adoption of complementary tools or removal of incumbent vendors.
The Vectra example demonstrates this approach. By identifying the prospecting pain point through conversation and signals, ZoomInfo positioned its solution around the specific challenge Vectra's team faced rather than leading with generic product features.
How to Solve Customer Pain Points in B2B
Identifying pain points is only half the equation. Revenue teams need to translate those insights into action.
Improve Data Quality and Enrichment
Many B2B customer pain points stem from bad data. Wrong contacts, outdated information, and missing firmographic context create friction across your entire GTM motion.
Data quality issues that cause pain points include:
Bounced emails: Invalid or outdated email addresses that waste outreach effort and hurt sender reputation.
Wrong phone numbers: Disconnected lines or incorrect direct dials that kill connect rates.
Outdated job titles: Contacts who have changed roles or left companies entirely, leading to misdirected outreach.
Data enrichment solutions exist to solve this. Platforms like ZoomInfo continuously verify contact information and append firmographic details to CRM records, reducing manual research time and improving targeting accuracy.
Segment Accounts by Firmographic and Technographic Fit
Poor segmentation creates pain points for both sellers and buyers. Sellers waste time on bad-fit accounts. Buyers receive irrelevant outreach that doesn't address their specific context.
Firmographic criteria (company size, industry, revenue) and technographic data (current tech stack) enable better targeting. When you segment accounts by fit, reps focus on opportunities most likely to convert.
Criteria Type | Examples |
|---|---|
Firmographic | Employee count, annual revenue, industry vertical, geographic location |
Technographic | CRM platform, marketing automation tool, sales engagement stack, data providers |
Prioritize Accounts with Buying Signals
Once you've identified pain points, signal-based prioritization ensures reps focus on accounts most likely to convert. Intent data, engagement tracking, and buying signals indicate readiness.
Signal types that indicate account prioritization include:
Active research behavior: Accounts consuming high volumes of content about solutions in your category.
Competitive evaluation activity: Visits to competitor pricing pages or G2 comparison listings.
Technology adoption changes: Installation of complementary tools that indicate budget availability and buying intent.
How to Use Pain Points in Outreach Campaigns
Knowing pain points means nothing if you can't operationalize them in messaging and campaigns.
Ways to incorporate pain points into outreach include:
Subject lines: Reference the specific pain point in email subject lines to improve open rates (e.g., "Spending 10+ hours/week on list building?").
Opening hooks: Lead cold calls and emails with the pain point, not your product (e.g., "Most sales teams we talk to waste 40% of their day on manual research...").
Discovery questions: Use pain point insights to ask better qualification questions that uncover urgency and budget.
Follow-up sequences: Tailor nurture content to address the specific pain points each segment faces.
ABM campaign personalization: Customize landing pages, ads, and content offers around account-specific challenges.
Turn Pain Points into Pipeline
B2B buyers purchase when they have a problem that needs fixing. Identifying customer pain points and positioning your solution as the fix is how you turn research into revenue.
Once you've identified your customers' most pressing pain points, you can start to tailor your messaging and make it clear that what you have to offer could really help them in their day-to-day. Because while you are selling physical products, you're really selling solutions.
Ready to identify and solve customer pain points with better data and intelligence? Talk to ZoomInfo about how GTM Workspace and ZoomInfo's B2B data can help your team target the right accounts with the right message.