Do You Really Know Your Clients’ Pain Points?
Most consultancies can describe what they do in real detail. Fewer can describe, in their client’s own words, what problem that actually solves. That gap is often where good work goes quietly unnoticed — not because the work isn’t good, but because it hasn’t been translated.
Why Capability Isn’t the Same as Value
In my experience, most sales conversations lean too heavily on capability — what we do, what we’re qualified in, what our process looks like. That’s useful information, but it rarely answers the question a client is actually asking themselves, which is closer to: what does this mean for me?
Two Themes: Time and Money
Pain points, across most of the industries I’ve worked in, tend to come back to two things: time and money — productivity and profitability. A farmer often wants more output from less input. A builder usually wants a reliable supply chain so they can finish one job and move to the next. A professional services client typically wants correct advice delivered on time, so they can avoid penalties and protect their reputation. Different language, similar underlying themes.
Pain Points and Pleasure Points
It’s worth flipping the lens occasionally. Alongside pain points, I like to think about pleasure points — what a client stands to gain, rather than only what’s currently frustrating them.
Profitability, Productivity, Peace of Mind
In my experience, most clients have three: they want to increase profitability, improve productivity, or protect their peace of mind. That third one is easy to underrate. For a lot of technical and professional clients, knowing a job is being handled properly — without having to check in constantly — is worth about as much as any efficiency gain.
The Sandwich: Problem, Solution, Impact
Here’s a simple structure for talking about your work, whether that’s in a client conversation or in your marketing. Think of it as a sandwich, with three layers:
Problem — what was the client’s issue, and why did they come to you?
Solution — what did you actually do about it?
Impact — what can they do now that they couldn’t before?
It’s a plain structure, but it tends to pull the conversation back to the client’s world instead of your own process — which is usually where it should sit.
Build Your Question Bank
None of this works from behind a desk. A useful exercise: write down ten open questions you could ask in a discovery conversation, built around the pain points you already know tend to come up with your client base. Two worth keeping in your back pocket:
“Tell me more about that.”
“What happens if this doesn’t get solved?”
Small prompts, but in my experience they often do more work than a longer, more polished question.
Ready to Put This Into Practice?
Most of this is groundwork you could reasonably start this week, without changing much about how your team works day to day — just where their attention goes in a client conversation. If it would help to run this exercise properly across your client base, I’d be glad to work through it with you.
Once you’re clear on the pain points themselves, the natural next question is who you hear them from most — see our piece on how to identify target customers for a practical way to build an ideal client profile around what you’ve just found.