Want to create customer personas that actually drive results? Focus on their pain points. Pain points are the frustrations, challenges, and unmet needs your customers face. Addressing these directly helps you craft personas that resonate deeply and guide better business decisions. Here’s why this approach works:
- 78% of customers feel misunderstood by brands.
- Companies using personas see a 73% boost in conversion rates.
- 93% of top-performing businesses credit their success to personas.
Quick Steps to Build Pain Point-Driven Personas:
- Collect Data: Use surveys, interviews, social media, and customer support tickets to uncover frustrations.
- Group Pain Points: Categorize into financial, process, support, or productivity issues.
- Tie Pain Points to Personas: Build profiles that reflect real challenges and motivations.
- Test and Update: Regularly refine personas with feedback and behavior analysis.
Start by addressing what truly matters to your customers, and you’ll create solutions they actively seek out.
Pain Points in Persona Development
What Are Pain Points?
Pain points are the challenges, frustrations, or unmet needs that customers encounter when dealing with a company, its products, or its services. Think of them as those moments when customers feel stuck, annoyed, or let down.
But pain points go deeper than mere complaints. They highlight underlying issues that shape customer decisions, loyalty, and even how they talk about your brand. Take the BlackBerry Storm launch in 2008, for example. Research in Motion’s new device suffered from glitchy software and an unresponsive touchscreen, leading to widespread returns and tarnishing the brand’s reputation.
To truly grasp pain points, you need to look at the entire customer experience. Dive into feedback from sales conversations, customer service interactions, online reviews, and even direct interviews. This approach helps you uncover not just what bothers your customers, but why it matters to them. That insight is key to categorizing and addressing pain points effectively.
"Quality is to give the customers what they want." – Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart
4 Types of Pain Points
Customer pain points typically fall into four main categories, each with its own impact and requiring tailored solutions:
| Pain Point Type | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | Customers feel they’re overpaying for the value they receive | A customer feels a software subscription is overpriced compared to competitors |
| Process | Inefficient or complicated procedures that waste time | A rental company forces in-person signatures due to lack of e-signature support |
| Support | Poor customer service or slow, unhelpful responses | A company buys software but struggles with inadequate customer support |
| Productivity | Barriers that prevent customers from completing tasks efficiently | A trucking firm faces delivery delays due to frequent thefts |
Financial pain points arise when customers feel the cost of a product or service doesn’t match its value. This often drives them to explore alternatives.
Process pain points create unnecessary friction for customers. A great example comes from Hootsuite, which discovered that its homepage overwhelmed users with complex features while neglecting simpler ones. After redesigning the page based on customer feedback, it became far more user-friendly.
Support pain points occur when customers face delays or inadequate assistance. With 90% of customers expecting immediate responses, slow or ineffective support can quickly drive them away.
Productivity pain points disrupt customers’ ability to meet their goals efficiently. These could stem from system failures, time-wasting processes, or tools that don’t perform as expected.
By identifying these pain points, you can move beyond generic customer profiles and develop personas that are truly actionable.
Why Pain Points Matter for Personas
Focusing on pain points allows you to turn general customer profiles into actionable personas that can guide meaningful business decisions. Addressing what frustrates your customers enables you to create solutions that genuinely meet their needs.
The data supports this approach. Companies that develop well-rounded personas can boost conversion rates by 73%, and 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their unique needs and expectations. By addressing pain points, personas serve as a bridge between what customers want and your business strategy.
These insights influence everything from product development to marketing and customer experience. For instance, a persona that highlights a marketing manager’s struggle with slow workflows – reflecting the 12% of customers who cite "lack of speed" as a major frustration – provides clear guidance for improvement.
When your personas are built around solving real pain points, your business becomes the solution customers are actively seeking, not just another option in a crowded marketplace.
4 types of pain points to identify in your ideal customer | Part 1
Step-by-Step Guide to Building Pain Point Personas
Learn how to create personas that address customer pain points with this straightforward guide.
Collect Customer Data
Start by gathering a variety of customer insights to build well-rounded personas. Use tools like NPS and CSAT surveys to collect numerical data, then follow up with customer interviews to dig deeper into the reasons behind their feedback.
Customer support tickets are another goldmine for uncovering pain points. These interactions highlight real-time frustrations and recurring problems. Similarly, product usage data can reveal where customers struggle or abandon tasks.
Don’t overlook social media and online reviews – they often provide unfiltered insights into what’s bothering your audience.
Your sales and support teams are also valuable resources. They interact with customers daily and can share firsthand knowledge of common challenges.
When conducting surveys or focus groups, ask open-ended questions to uncover issues you might not have considered. For instance, instead of asking, "Are you satisfied with our checkout process?" try, "What challenges do you face when making a purchase?"
Tools like Productboard help centralize feedback from various sources, such as support tickets, surveys, and CRM systems. For analyzing qualitative feedback, platforms like MonkeyLearn can be incredibly helpful.
Once you’ve collected your data, organize it to uncover actionable patterns.
Sort and Group Pain Points
After gathering feedback, the next step is to categorize the pain points. Generally, these can be grouped into four types: financial, process, support, and productivity issues.
Look for recurring themes, such as slow customer service, confusing navigation, or unclear pricing, to identify the most pressing problems.
Prioritize these pain points based on their impact on the customer experience and how well they align with your business objectives. Consider factors like how many customers are affected, the severity of the issue, and how feasible it is to address.
Empathy mapping can help highlight problems that cause significant distress for your customers.
To stay ahead of emerging issues, tools like Productboard Pulse can track real-time customer sentiment, while Voxco offers sentiment analysis to measure the emotional intensity behind feedback.
Once you’ve sorted and prioritized the pain points, link them to specific customer personas.
Connect Pain Points to Persona Details
Now that you’ve grouped the pain points, it’s time to tie them to customer profiles. Start by focusing on the most critical pain points and build personas around the customers who experience them.
Incorporate demographic, behavioral, and motivational data to create semi-fictional profiles that illustrate how these challenges influence decisions. Include details like daily struggles, preferred solutions, and even the language customers use to describe their frustrations. These details make personas more actionable for your marketing and product teams.
Context matters too. For example, a marketing manager frustrated with slow workflows may prioritize efficiency and automation, while a CEO with similar issues might focus on team productivity and ROI.
Tools like Zeda.io can provide instant feedback to help align pain points with persona characteristics. Platforms like Sisense can combine data from multiple sources to create detailed persona profiles.
Test and Update Personas
Personas aren’t static – they need regular testing and updates to stay relevant. They’re rarely perfect from the start and require ongoing refinement.
As Jason Patterson, Founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency, explains:
"Customer personas are never accurate. But some are useful. You can never be sure beforehand whether a persona is useful. You can only really know by testing it and refining it by studying the responses to your messaging. There are no shortcuts."
- Jason Patterson
Use usability and A/B testing to confirm that your personas reflect real customer behavior.
Regularly interview customers who fit your personas to validate your profiles. This can help identify any gaps or incorrect assumptions.
Monitor data from sources like website analytics, CRM systems, and social media to track changes in customer behavior. If you notice shifts, update your personas to reflect these changes.
Review and refine your personas every quarter to ensure they align with current customer realities.
"That is probably the most important aspect of having a buyer/customer persona. The market is constantly changing, and so are market forces, buyer behavior, and even your own business can change with time. Make sure you and your team challenge the initial assumptions and periodically re-validate or adjust buyer personas."
- Tomer Jakov, Founder & CEO
Social listening is another powerful tool for tracking how customer opinions and pain points evolve. Set up alerts for relevant keywords and topics to catch emerging issues early.
Finally, use persona validation surveys to measure how accurately your personas represent your customers’ goals, challenges, and preferences. Sharing these surveys with existing customers can confirm if your personas are still on target.
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Using Personas for Content and Product Planning
Once you’ve developed detailed personas, it’s time to put them to work. These profiles aren’t just for show – they’re your guide to creating content and products that truly connect with your audience and solve their real-world problems.
Content Plans Based on Pain Points
Personas built around pain points can transform how you approach content creation. Instead of guessing what your audience might want, you can focus on addressing their specific frustrations and needs.
Content that connects with your audience’s challenges shows that your brand understands their struggles. By creating educational content that explains solutions, you can showcase your expertise while building trust and credibility. On top of that, conversion-focused content can clearly demonstrate how your product solves these issues, helping turn potential customers into loyal ones.
A great example of this strategy is Column Five Media. They’ve tackled topics like common B2B mistakes, hurdles in finding a reliable B2B agency, and new buying trends in the B2B space.
Here are some content formats that work well for addressing pain points:
- Educational content: Blog posts or videos that break down challenges (e.g., “The problem with X”).
- Entertaining content: Social media posts, including memes, that highlight shared frustrations.
- Expert advice: Interviews with industry leaders or internal experts.
- Best practices: Articles offering actionable strategies to overcome specific issues.
- Resource sharing: Guides, templates, or tools designed to help users tackle problems.
- Case studies: Real-world stories showing how others solved their issues using your product.
Take Val Katayev’s Twitter thread on building a billion-dollar sales strategy – it’s packed with practical tips and insights. Similarly, Ellevest uses Instagram graphics to deliver quick, educational content that resonates with their audience.
By integrating these pain points into your content calendar, you can ensure every piece you produce is aligned with what your audience actually needs. And the benefits don’t stop there; these insights can also steer product development.
Product Plans That Match Personas
Personas can also guide product development, ensuring that your offerings are tailored to solve real customer problems. When you design features based on actual pain points, you create products that feel indispensable to your audience.
For example, a software company might focus on a persona like "Tech-Savvy Manager Tim", who values seamless integration and automation. To meet his needs, they could prioritize APIs and workflow automation. Meanwhile, an e-commerce platform catering to "Busy Parent Pat", who values convenience, might streamline the checkout process, optimize for mobile, and introduce a “quick reorder” feature.
Adjusting your development processes – such as reallocating resources or fast-tracking timelines – can help you address the most pressing customer needs more efficiently. Feedback loops, like surveys and user testing, keep you in tune with your audience’s evolving expectations.
During the design phase, referring back to personas can help prioritize features. For instance, a home automation company might lean on "Techie Tom" to focus on voice control and smart home integration, ensuring these features are intuitive and reliable [36, 38]. Personas can also inform testing scenarios to confirm that your product effectively solves the problems it’s designed to address.
Getting Teams to Work Together
Aligning your content and product strategies with personas doesn’t just help customers – it also brings your teams together. When everyone is focused on solving the same customer challenges, collaboration becomes second nature.
The real power of personas emerges when your entire organization uses them. Cross-functional collaboration ensures that marketing, sales, and product teams are all on the same page.
Start by defining your ideal customer clearly, using both quantitative and qualitative data. For instance, Fama Technologies – a B2B candidate screening company – boosted its pipeline by 400% by combining these data types to define their target audience. Shared metrics and KPIs further unify teams around common goals.
Cognism’s CMO, Alice de Courcy, highlighted in February 2025 that marketing should be measured by the same metrics as outbound sales. This shift helped bridge gaps between generating leads and converting them, fostering better collaboration between teams.
Breaking down silos might mean involving marketing in sales activities, like cold calling to gather insights, or having sales contribute to marketing efforts, such as webinars or content creation. Introducing personas during brainstorming ensures that everyone understands who they’re working for. For example, in a SaaS company, personas like "Startup Founder Alex" and "Corporate IT Manager Chris" can shape campaigns, sales pitches, and support content across departments.
Empowering teams with shared tools – like CRMs, project management platforms, and communication apps – keeps everyone aligned. Referring to marketing and sales as a unified "revenue team" can also reinforce a shared focus on customer success.
Consistent communication and feedback loops ensure that insights about customer pain points, campaign results, and lead quality remain aligned across all teams.
How M Accelerator Helps with Persona Development
Turning customer frustrations into actionable strategies is the cornerstone of effective persona building. It’s not just about gathering data; it’s about ensuring every insight leads to a clear, practical step forward. M Accelerator takes this concept further, transforming insights into actions that bridge the gap between understanding customer needs and addressing them.
Connecting Strategy, Execution, and Communication
One of the biggest hurdles in persona development is the disconnect between identifying customer pain points and implementing solutions. Many companies recognize challenges but struggle to act on them effectively. M Accelerator eliminates this gap by combining strategy, execution, and communication into a seamless process. This ensures that every customer frustration uncovered leads directly to actionable solutions and messaging that resonates with the target audience.
Understanding customer pain points is critical for creating a smoother experience and improving retention. For instance, when working with early-stage startups, M Accelerator goes beyond surface-level assumptions. They use a structured approach to pinpoint challenges, which then informs product development, marketing strategies, and sales efforts – all within a unified framework.
Workshops and Coaching for Personas
M Accelerator provides hands-on programs designed to uncover and address customer pain points. Their Customer Journey Mapping workshops help businesses identify the exact moments where customers face friction. Meanwhile, their coaching sessions focus on asking the right questions and analyzing behavioral patterns to uncover deeper insights. Unlike generic market research, this personalized coaching helps businesses clearly define what success looks like for their clients.
Programs like the Elite Founder Team mastermind and early-stage coaching sessions teach entrepreneurs how to create personas that go beyond basic demographic profiles. Instead, the focus is on understanding the emotional and practical challenges driving customer behavior. This approach is especially valuable for startups seeking product-market fit. For businesses in the scaling phase, M Accelerator’s coaching refines these personas to stay aligned with evolving customer needs.
Proven Results for Entrepreneurs
M Accelerator’s results speak volumes about the power of their approach. With over 500 founders supported and more than $50 million in funding raised, their pain point-driven methodology has proven effective in creating dynamic personas that fuel innovation and attract investors.
Their success extends to collaborations with major corporations like Solana and Siemens, as well as government agencies. By deeply understanding customer challenges, M Accelerator has demonstrated how this approach works across industries. Additionally, their network of over 25,000 investors benefits from founders who can clearly articulate the specific problems their businesses solve. This clarity not only secures funding but also lays the groundwork for sustainable growth.
Conclusion: Building Personas for Business Growth
Crafting personas centered on customer pain points transforms how businesses connect with their audience. Instead of relying solely on demographic data, this method dives into the core challenges that influence customer decisions and actions.
The process thrives on continuous improvement driven by data. Each step builds on the last, laying the groundwork for sharper marketing strategies, smarter product development, and better customer service. And the payoff? It’s measurable. Companies that leverage buyer personas see marketing outcomes improve by 2–5 times compared to those that don’t. Even more telling, 71% of businesses that surpass revenue and lead goals have documented buyer personas. These numbers underscore the real-world impact of understanding what truly drives your customers.
Beyond the numbers, effective personas bring teams together. They improve email click-through rates by up to 14% and boost conversion rates by 10%. This alignment ensures that messaging resonates with customers, addressing their needs directly. And when 78% of customers feel misunderstood by the brands they engage with, getting this right isn’t just helpful – it’s essential.
Personas built around pain points also encourage a shift in strategy. Instead of focusing on products, teams are inspired to create content and messaging that solve real problems. It’s no surprise that 62% of customers prefer marketing content that directly addresses their challenges. This shift fosters collaboration across marketing, sales, and product teams, ensuring everyone is working toward a unified goal: meeting customer needs.
The secret to success? Treat persona development as an evolving process. Customer needs change, markets shift, and new challenges arise. Regularly updating personas keeps them relevant and actionable in a dynamic business environment.
Pain point personas are more than just tools – they’re the backbone of customer-centric strategies. Whether it’s shaping product roadmaps, refining content strategies, guiding sales conversations, or improving customer support, these personas ensure every decision is rooted in a deep understanding of what matters most to your audience. In today’s competitive landscape, this approach is what helps businesses not just survive, but thrive.
FAQs
How can I gather and organize customer pain points to create effective personas?
To build precise customer personas, begin by collecting insights using tools like surveys, interviews, focus groups, or market research. These methods reveal the real-world challenges your customers encounter.
After gathering this data, categorize pain points into groups such as productivity challenges, financial hurdles, or support-related issues. This organized approach helps you spot trends and shape personas based on their distinct struggles and motivations.
By zeroing in on these pain points, you can develop personas that genuinely represent your customers’ needs, enabling you to craft strategies that effectively address their concerns.
What are the most common mistakes businesses make when creating personas around customer pain points?
One mistake businesses often make is assuming they understand customer pain points without backing it up with real data. Instead of digging into actual insights, they might lean on stereotypes or broad generalizations, which can lead to personas that miss the mark. Another common misstep? Letting personas collect dust. Customer needs and motivations evolve, but some businesses fail to revisit and update their personas, treating them as if they’re set in stone.
The solution? Make data-driven insights your foundation. Regularly revisit and refine your personas to align with how your audience’s behaviors and challenges shift over time. This way, your personas will stay relevant and genuinely address what your customers need.
How often should you update customer personas to keep them effective and relevant?
To keep your customer personas accurate and useful, make it a point to review and refresh them at least once a year. If your market shifts, customer behaviors change, or your business strategy takes a new direction, it’s worth revisiting them sooner.
Frequent updates ensure you’re staying on top of changing pain points, motivations, and trends, helping your strategies stay in sync with what your audience truly needs.
