Sales Pain Points: Types and How to Find Them Before a Call

A sales pain point is a specific problem that a buyer's company or role has right now. It costs money, time or risk, and someone inside that company would pay to make it go away.

B2B pain points fall into four common types:

• Financial: margin, cost and cash
• Productivity: time and capacity
• Process: how work moves between people and systems
• Support: help that is missing after something has been bought

One fact makes the list useful: every pain has an owner in the buying group.

Only some pains leave a public trace you can find before the first call. Budget pressure, hiring gaps and angry reviews of a current vendor usually show up online. The internal cost of a problem, the politics around it and what it means for one person's career come out only when the buyer tells you.

Most of this guide is about the buyer's side. If you searched for your own sales team's pains, they have a short section near the end.

My team books the meetings, and our clients' sales teams run them and close the deals. So this guide is about the work before the call. That work decides whether a buyer agrees to talk at all.

Why do buyers arrive with the problem already half-formed?

They have been working on the problem without you. Gartner's survey of 646 B2B buyers ran from August to September 2025. It found that 67% prefer a buying experience without a sales rep (Gartner, published March 2026).

The same release says buyers now find suppliers, check them out and decide what they need, with fewer early conversations along the way. The release gives no breakdown by industry, company size or role, so read it as a broad direction.

The group doing that thinking is large. Forrester's summary of its State of Business Buying 2024 report came out in December 2024 (Forrester). It reports that:

• 13 people are involved in a buying decision on average
• 89% of purchases involve 2 or more departments

The public summary gives no sample size or fieldwork dates. For more detail on head counts, see how big a buying committee really is.

The preparation is heavy too. CEB surveyed more than 600 B2B buyers, and Harvard Business Review published the results in 2017 (Harvard Business Review). 65% of those buyers said preparing to talk to a rep took as long as they had expected the entire purchase to take. The same research put buying groups at 6.8 people, up from 5.4 two years earlier.

The research comes from CEB's own authors, and the numbers are nine years old. Its head counts differ from Forrester's.

So the pain you hear on a first call has partly been defined by people you never spoke to. A finance lead may have capped the budget. An operations head may have written the shortlist. An end user may have described the problem in a review of the vendor they want to replace.

The checking also runs the other way. While the buying group shapes the problem, someone looks you up. Nobody buys from an email. They only buy once they have checked you out. That is why I tell founders the sale happens online, before the call. On the call you mostly share details and prices for a decision the buyer has half made.

What types of customer pain points are there, and who owns each one?

The four types become useful once you know whose problem each one is and whether you can see it from outside. The table maps both. The examples are illustrative and were written for this guide.

Open roles are a common signal in construction. The 2025 AGC and NCCER Workforce Survey found 88 percent of US firms that employ craft workers had craft openings. About four fifths had openings for salaried workers. Most of those firms said the roles were as hard or harder to fill than a year earlier. So an estimator post that sits open for months is worth noting.

The right-hand column matters most. Some pains never leave a trace, and you can only learn them by asking:

• Internal cost: what the problem costs in their own numbers, hours or lost bids
• Political risk: who chose the current setup, and what it costs that person to admit it is failing
• Personal stakes: a target someone is measured on, a workload burning out one person, a promotion riding on a project

The owner column is where most lists go wrong. On every list I build, I use the job titles that buyers in that niche really hold, and I never settle for a generic "manager". In construction that means estimator, contracts manager, project director or head of procurement, depending on what you sell.

Treat the owner column as a first guess. No single map fits every market. Check it against the buyers the client already sells to before you trust it.

Pain, need or complaint: how do you tell them apart?

A complaint is a passing frustration. Nobody owns it, nobody has put a cost on it, and nothing bad happens by a given date if it stays.

A pain passes three checks:

1. Someone owns it.
2. The buyer can roughly say what it costs.
3. Something bad happens if it is left alone.

A need is the buyer's own picture of the fix. "We need a new estimating tool by Q2" is a need. It was often shaped before you arrived, by the research described above, and it may or may not match the pain underneath.

The difference matters because sellers hear plenty of complaints and then build whole proposals on them. A complaint gets sympathy on the call and nothing after it.

This test does not replace qualification. Scoring a lead on budget and timing is a separate job. The test only tells you whether what you heard is worth building a conversation around.

How do you find a prospect's pain points before the call?

Run this routine once per segment and keep the per-account part short:

1. Begin with the people who already pay you. List who already buys from the client, past and current, then look for companies that resemble them. The pains your existing clients had are the best guess for their lookalikes.
2. Find out who really decided. On past projects, I check who actually made the buying decision, because the title on the contract is often not the person who pushed it through. Write down that person's title and the problem they named, in their own words.
3. Write one hypothesis per audience. Pick one segment and one role, and write the pain as a single sentence. For example: "Civil engineering contractors with 50 to 200 staff lose tenders because estimating capacity has not kept up with invitations." If you are unsure whether you are describing a company type or a person, here is the difference between an ICP or buyer persona.
4. Check each account's public signals. Spend about 5 minutes per account, using the checklist below.
5. Mark each line as researched or ask. Anything you saw can go in the message. Anything you only suspect goes on the list of questions for the call.

The per-account signal checklist:

• Careers page and job boards: roles open for months, or a new team being built
• LinkedIn: a recent new head of the department you sell to
• News: funding, an acquisition, a big contract won or lost
• Footprint: new sites, offices or regions
• Reviews of their current vendor on G2, Clutch or other public review sites
• Their own posts: what leadership says the priority is this year

Step 5 for the contractor in step 3 looks like this. "3 estimator roles open since July" is researched. "They are losing bids because of it" stays a guess until someone on the call confirms it. Mix the two up and the first message makes a claim the buyer knows is wrong.

How do you use one pain point in a first message?

Name one pain, the one the reader's role owns. A message that lists four pains reads like a brochure and tells the reader you did not look at their company.

A first message has one job: getting a reply that leads to a meeting. In my campaigns, the first message sells the meeting and never the service. When I see a pitch in the opening message, I expect silence back.

Proof belongs in the message itself. I put a relevant past result inside the message, because a claim with a similar client behind it is easier to believe.

This is a made-up example. The seller, the names and the result are invented to show the pattern. The seller provides outsourced estimating support, and the reader is a head of estimating at a civil contractor.

Subject: 3 estimator roles since July

Hi Sam,

Your careers page has listed 3 estimator roles since July. When that happens at civil contractors, tenders can start going unpriced before anyone is hired.

A civil contractor of a similar size had the same gap last year and cleared its unpriced tender backlog within two months.

Would a 20-minute call next week be worth it, to see whether your team has the same gap?

Each part of the email does one job:

• The opening line is one researched signal, and the reader can check it is true.
• The pain belongs to the reader's role and is stated as a pattern. It does not accuse them.
• The proof line names a similar company and what changed.
• The ask is one question, for a meeting.

You cannot write that by hand for thousands of accounts. Keep the pain line at segment level for most of the list, and add a researched signal only for your top tier. This guide on how to personalize at scale without faking it covers that split. Once the meeting is booked, the questions that explore the pain are covered in SPIN selling questions.

The pain line earns attention, but whether you get a reply depends on what the buyer finds when they look you up: your profile, your site and your proof.

I have seen one company get a 2% reply rate. Another got 7.5% with the same message. The words did not change, only the company behind them. If a buyer looks you up and finds only a title and a photo, you have probably lost them already. Before you send, look at what a buyer will see when they look you up.

What about your own sales team's pain points?

Some people searching for sales pain points mean their own team. In practice, four come up again and again:

• The wrong list. Generic titles and lookalikes that are not really alike, so the message never reaches the person who owns the pain.
• A generic message. It could have come from any competitor, so the buyer has no reason to answer.
• No proof. Claims with no client, result or timeframe behind them.
• A weak close rate. Meetings happen and nothing gets signed.

A wrong list, a generic message and missing proof all sit before the call. A weak close rate is a different kind of problem. I treat booking meetings and closing deals as separate jobs that need separate skills. When the close rate is weak, more meetings make it worse: every booked meeting costs money to produce, and each one that ends without a contract adds to that bill.

So fix whatever is actually failing first. If meetings are scarce, fix the list, the message and the proof. If meetings are plentiful and contracts are not, fix the sales process. This week, put last quarter's booked meetings next to last quarter's signed deals. That one ratio tells you which half to fix.

Not sure which pain your buyers own before they ever reply? Book a call and tell me the role you write to. I will help you draft one pain line to test on a small batch.