Marketing Made Easy: A ‘Pain Sheet’ Primer for Startups

In the last newsletter edition, ‘Buyer Personas: The Secret Sauce to Effective Marketing Strategies’, we introduced the concept of the buyer persona. In this article, you will learn how to use personas to match product features to market opportunities using a pain sheet, so you can do it right the first time.

The pain sheet is a tool that maps out the concerns for your key personas and then helps you gauge market opportunities.?Once you complete the pain sheet, you can run ‘what if’ scenarios to determine the best product feature set for each marketing opportunity. The best set is the one that solves the most painful problems, for the customers most likely to buy, and is the easiest to build. That nexus of pain, feature, market size, and likelihood to buy, is the sweet spot for your startup’s go to market strategy. That’s why it is so important to spend the time and effort to get it right.

Because there are almost always multiple market opportunities, you need to complete the pain sheet for each buyer persona (influencers, champions, other stakeholders). Periodically during the product development cycle, as you garner market input and feedback, you should revisit the pain sheet to make sure that your assumptions are still valid.?The earlier you detect a mismatch, the faster you can respond, and of course, the quicker you can get to market with a winning product.

Completing the Pain Sheet

Create a table with a column for each persona and a row for the series of questions to follow. Then, fill out the table for each persona.

The pain sheet contains the following questions.

The Pain

1. What is the persona’s pain? Describe in as much detail as possible - The answers here are usually related to loss of revenue, missed opportunities, damaged reputation, wasted time, or inefficient workflows. Alternatively, there might be no discernable ‘pain’ and you are offering new capabilities.?In this case, the pain is what the persona is missing out on because they don’t have your innovation.
2. How severe is each pain? How much does this pain affect the persona’s daily experience? For example, what is the price of a mistake? How many customers might they lose? Accurately gauging pain severity is critical because getting it right can be the difference between a ‘must have’ product and being merely a ‘nice to have’ one.
3. What are they doing today to solve the pain? ?Often, the answer to this is ‘nothing,’ but sometimes it can be not taking on business to avoid the pain (because of inefficiencies, for example) or maybe it is costly outsourcing to third parties to overcome a lack of resources. ?Understanding how the persona views the pain and its current state provides you with valuable insight about how to build powerful and convincing marketing messages for that persona.
4. How much would they being able or willing to to/pay to alleviate this pain? In other words, how would the persona cost-justify a solution to their pain. How much money or time would they save??Or how much new business would they gain? How many errors would they prevent? Providing accurate answers helps you uncover the value of your product in this persona’s view; this input is critical for building a return on investment (ROI) or total cost of ownership (TCO) model you can use to build your revenue projections and to show future customers your product’s value. ?It is also useful for helping your champion convince other stakeholders to buy your product.

Market Opportunity / Alternatives

1. What other alternatives also solve this pain? ?Usually this is a list of competing products, or products in other categories the customer is using today. It might also not be related to products at all; for example, it customer might change business processes or workflows to reduce/eliminate the pain.
2. Why would they select your product? Does your product solve their problem best? Does it fit better into their current work environment? Is it easier to use, or maybe it is the least expensive solution? What are the key reasons we would win this persona?
3. On the flip side, why would they select an alternative solution over ours? This section contains a mini-competitive analysis with all the alternatives listed in a previous question. Doing this right is critical for preparing marketing materials, because understanding ‘why we would win/why we would lose’ helps create the marketing messages that will best address the customers pains/concerns.
4. What barriers exist to using your product? For example, does your product meet the accessibility, security, or governance requirements already in place? Does your product use a development technology in use? Does your product interface with the customer’s existing technology stack? All of these could be roadblocks to selling to this customer, and these barriers may only become apparent as you develop a relationship with the customer, so it is important to revisit this point throughout the product development cycle.

Product Analysis

1. What product functionality (i.e. feature set) solves this pain?
2. How difficult is it to develop this feature set? Based on your analysis, how much time and how many resources do we need to satisfy the persona??The answers here are quantitative metrics that summarize the amount of time, money, and manpower you would need to invest to complete the product.

Conclusions

Complete the pain sheet for each persona. Remember that a persona may have more than one pain, in which case, you should run the questions again; one time for each pain.

Once complete, your team can analyze the sheet to identify the best match for customer pain, propensity to buy, and ability to deliver a timely solution. There are multiple ways to score the pain sheet, I will try to cover some of these in a future article. Whatever method you use, it will always come down to a judgement call about what score to give each item.?This can be particularly difficult because the influence of cognitive biases, like the confirmation bias, which often makes it difficult to neutralize preconceptions. Being aware of these biases is the first step to dealing with them. Also, many organizations work with outside experts to guide you through the process, and uncover mistakes and biases.

To?obtain a pain sheet template or to schedule a free 30-minute consultation about how to do it right the first time, click?here.