Tools for Mapping Out Client Pain Points

Cheat Code for B2B Sales Outbound Research - Bookmark this one! After analyzing 1000+ cold email campaigns, I discovered the real differentiator: it's not the templates—it's the depth of prospect research done before writing a single word. Here's exactly how I use AI + Clay to understand prospect pain points at a level my competitors can't match: I Use AI Prompts to Uncover Hidden Pain Points My process starts with targeted research prompts that go beyond surface-level information. 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: I need to understand the professional challenges facing [JOB TITLE] at [INDUSTRY TYPE] companies with [COMPANY SIZE/CHARACTERISTICS]. Please analyze: 1. The primary responsibilities of this role in 2025 2. How their performance is typically measured 3. Common obstacles preventing them from achieving their objectives 4. Recent industry changes affecting their role 5. Technology disruptions impacting their workflow 6. Organizational tensions they likely experience 7. Budget constraints they typically face For each category, provide 3-5 specific pain points, not general statements. -- Let's say I was selling a solution that worked well for a VP of Sales profile and a Director of Digital Marketing. Here's how we'd take those outputs and do a second round of deep dive prompts... 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐕𝐏 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐁2𝐁 𝐒𝐚𝐚𝐒 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬: Analyze the specific challenges facing VPs of Sales at B2B SaaS companies with 10-50M ARR in 2025. I'll tell the AI to Focus on: - Their KPIs and how they're measured internally - The reporting roadblocks they face when forecasting - Specific friction points in their sales-to-customer success handoff - How market volatility impacts their quarterly projections - Team performance visibility issues in hybrid/remote environments - Tech stack integration challenges between CRM and other tools 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐭 𝐃2𝐂 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬: Identify the top operational headaches for Digital Marketing Directors at D2C brands with 5-20M in annual revenue. Include: - Attribution modeling problems after iOS privacy changes - Performance marketing channel saturation issues - Reporting challenges when justifying budget to leadership - Creative production bottlenecks they face monthly - Customer data fragmentation across platforms - Current workarounds they're using for these problems It would take hours to get this type of information when I started my sales career. Most cold emails or outbound campaigns fail because they jump straight to solutions without demonstrating you understand the specific problems your prospect is facing right now. The deep research capability on ChatGPT and Perplexity can now take this to a whole new level and Clay's targeted data enrichment can help you turn these insights into relevant copy at scale. Have you tried anything like this?

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

When's the last time you thought about your customer's experience? With Generative AI you can continuously map, monitor, and optimize every customer touchpoint. Here's how. 1 Start by cataloging every customer touchpoint. You'll revisit this workflow quarterly, so use AI that lets you save documents. Create a new project called "Customer Experience Analyzer", tell it about your business, and ask it to help you identify every possible customer touchpoint. Your firsthand knowledge is invaluable here. List everything from social media interactions to packaging to post-purchase follow-ups. 2 Feed your AI with real customer data. Upload: * Customer service call transcripts (last 3 months) * Social media data * Survey responses and NPS feedback * Sales call notes * Website analytics summaries * etc Try a prompt like: "Analyze this data and reveal: 1) What touchpoints are customers actually experiencing that we might be missing? 2) Which touchpoints generate the strongest emotional reactions (positive and negative)? 3) Where are the biggest gaps between our intended experience and what customers report?" 3 Create a customer experience map. Ask your AI to organize these touchpoints into a logical sequence, but avoid the traditional linear journey map trap. Instead, prompt it with: "Create a network diagram of how these touchpoints connect and influence each other, highlighting the critical moments where customer decisions are made." 4 Score each touchpoint on multiple dimensions by asking your AI to evaluate each on: * Emotional impact (highly negative to highly positive) * Functional performance (fails to does the job perfectly) * Frequency (rare to extremely common) * Business impact (minimal to mission-critical) 5 Identify optimization opportunities. Try prompts like: * Where are the biggest disconnects between what customers expect and what we deliver? * Which touchpoints have the most negative emotional impact but would be relatively easy to fix? * If we could only improve three touchpoints this quarter, which would create the most significant positive impact? 6 For each prioritized touchpoint, use your AI to generate multiple improvement hypotheses. Try a prompt like: "For [specific touchpoint], generate 5 different ways we could improve the customer experience. For each improvement, explain: what exactly would change, what resources would be required, how we could measure success, and potential unintended consequences." You don't need to become a CX expert overnight. Start with just three touchpoints that matter most to your business. Getting those right will teach you the process and create immediate impact. How are you currently using AI to improve your customers' experience? Drop it into a comment :) ✨ ✌🏻 ✨ If this kind of advice is helpful, then you'll love my AI for SMBs Weekly newsletter. Subscribe link in the comments or click "view my newsletter" next to my name. #generativeAI #claude #gemini #chatGPT #SMB #CX