Observations
How to Build a Pain Map: A Practical Guide for the B2B Marketer
Open your company’s website. It probably says something about “innovative solutions,” a “comprehensive approach,” and “business process optimization.” Now, open the websites of ten of your competitors. You will see roughly the same words.
As a result, these correct but faceless phrases turn into “white noise.” They don’t engage or evoke emotion. Most importantly, they don’t make potential clients think, “They understand my problem better than I do!” Your message does not resonate.
Breaking through this noise isn’t possible by making louder statements; it’s possible by achieving deeper resonance. The foundation for this is a “pain map”: a detailed, structured document describing all the fears, difficulties, financial losses, and personal concerns of your ideal client. It is your main strategic marketing asset.
In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide to creating and using a pain map. We will walk you through the entire process, from collecting “raw” information to analyzing, structuring, and transforming it into content that sells.
Collecting the “Raw Material”: Where to Find the Client’s Real Pain
The main rule is that pain cannot be invented or “creatively” discovered in a conference room. It can only be learned about from those who experience it daily. Your first task is to become a “prospector” and search for this “gold.” Within your company, there are four of the richest deposits.
The first and most obvious group is your sales department. These people are your “field agents” who deal with reality every day. Arrange interviews with them and ask specific questions such as: “What are the three main objections you encounter?” “What questions do customers ask during the first call?” “How do they describe their problem?” Write down their answers verbatim.
The second source of information, which is often overlooked, is the customer support team. If the sales team knows why people buy, the support team knows why they suffer after the purchase. Analyze their tickets. What do customers complain about most often? Which features generate the most questions? This information is invaluable because it allows you to create content that proactively addresses these issues.
The third source is your CRM system—more precisely, an analysis of the reasons for lost deals. This is a true “gold mine.” For example, if you find that 30% of deals are lost due to “implementation being too complex,” then you have identified a major pain point that your marketing team needs to address.
Finally, the purest and most valuable source is direct, problem-focused interviews with customers (customer development). Talk to five to ten of your best customers. But don’t ask them about your product. Ask them about their work, their goals, and what’s preventing them from getting promoted. This will allow you to identify the deepest, most emotional pain points that drive their purchasing decisions.
After gathering information from these four sources, you will have “raw ore” in your hands—dozens of real pain statements. Our task now is to turn them into a structured map.
Designing the Map: The Three Layers of Pain
After collecting dozens of “raw” statements, you are left with a chaotic yet valuable dataset. Simply listing them in a column is not enough. To transform it into a useful tool, the information must be organized. Like an iceberg, any significant B2B problem has three levels: one visible (functional) and two hidden (financial and emotional) ones.
Level 1: Functional pain. This is the most superficial and obvious layer. It answers the question, “What exactly is broken in the process?” Clients usually talk about it directly. Example: “My employees spend three hours a day manually consolidating data from Excel and our ERP system to prepare a report.”
Level 2: Financial Pain. This layer quantifies the financial impact of the “functional pain.” This layer answers the question, “How much money are we losing?” It’s the language spoken by executives and decision-makers who allocate budgets. As a marketer, your task is to learn how to “translate” functional problems into financial terms. Example: “Three hours of an employee’s time costs the company five thousand rubles per day, or one hundred thousand per month. Additionally, manual work leads to constant errors in reports. One such error in the last quarter resulted in a fine of five hundred thousand rubles.”
Level 3: emotional (personal) pain. This is the deepest and most powerful layer. It answers the question, “How does this problem affect me personally?” People make emotional decisions and then rationalize them with numbers. Understanding the personal pain is the key to gaining the client’s trust. Example: “As a manager, I appear incompetent to the board of directors because the data in my reports is constantly inconsistent. I am afraid that, because of these errors, we will make an incorrect strategic decision and I will be blamed. This is enormous stress.”
As you work through each identified problem across these three layers, you will build an incredibly powerful marketing foundation. You can create content that addresses functional problems, advertisements that strike emotional pain points, and commercial proposals that speak to financial losses.
Segmentation: One Map Does Not Work for Everyone
You have done a great deal of work, structuring the pain levels into three categories. However, there is one more nuance. Your product is not purchased by a “company,” but rather by specific individuals within it. Each of these people “hurts” in their own way.
That is why the final step in designing the pain map is segmentation. You need to create different versions for the various members of the “buying committee” and for different types of clients.
For example, consider our reporting case again. The Chief Financial Officer is primarily concerned with financial pain, such as fines and direct losses. The Chief Technology Officer, on the other hand, is concerned with functional pain related to the complexity of integration. Your “champion,” the department head, is driven by emotional pain related to loss of reputation. Your marketing message for each of them must be different and strike precisely at their specific “pain.”
Creating such segmentation logic allows you to transition from marketing “for everyone” to highly targeted, nearly personalized communication. You stop firing a cannon at sparrows and start working like a sniper.
Activation: Transforming the Map into Marketing
A “pain map” is not something that should be stored away on a shelf. It is a working tool that should inform your entire commercial strategy.
First, it is a direct content plan. Each financial or emotional pain point that you’ve identified can be transformed into a topic for an article, case study, or webinar. Instead of guessing what to write about, you can systematically answer the real questions of your audience.
Second, it is a source for advertising creatives. The most effective headlines for your targeted advertising are the sharpest formulations of emotional pain, such as “I look incompetent in front of management.” They instantly capture attention because they’re not about you, but about the client.
Third, it is the foundation for sales scripts. By equipping salespeople with this information, you give them a superpower. During the qualification stage, they can ask questions to quickly determine which type of pain dominates for the client and build the subsequent presentation around it.
From Guesswork to Empathy at an Industrial Scale
Creating a “pain map” is a fundamental shift in the process. It elevates your marketing from the realm of “creative ideas” and “guessing” to one of profound, nearly scientific empathy—but on an industrial scale.
It’s the difference between a company that says, “Look how great our product is!” and a company that says, “We see what pains you. Here’s how we can help.” The second approach always sells better.
Take one of your key segments. Talk to one salesperson and one support team member. Write down five to ten “pain points” you hear from them. That is the beginning of your map. Save this article as a guide for conducting full, systematic research.
