Buyer Experience
Pain-Point Map
Every industry creates friction somewhere in the buyer experience. Some pain points are obvious. Others persist because customers are forced to tolerate them and the industry has accepted them as normal.
But tolerance isn’t loyalty.
When someone creates an offering that eliminates pain points industry customers have been forced to tolerate, guess what happens?
Customers may leave—and established providers may find themselves competing on price because their offerings no longer deliver enough distinctive value to earn loyalty.
This exercise considers the buyer’s experience across your INDUSTRY—not merely your company’s offering or that of a particular competitor.
How to Complete Your Map
Each column represents a general stage in the buyer’s experience with products or services in your industry. Each row represents a different way the industry may create friction.
Click each intersection where you believe an unaddressed industry pain point makes the buyer experience more difficult, frustrating or unpleasant than it could be. Said differently, identify the pain points that, if eliminated, would make it easier or more appealing for customers to do business within your industry.
Don’t worry about whether or how the problem might be solved. We tap deeply into our creativity to explore those possibilities at the heart of the strategic framework. Here, we’re focused solely on identifying opportunities within your INDUSTRY, not developing solutions.
What Does “Supplements” Mean?
SUPPLEMENTS refers to anything customers need in order to use the primary product or service. For example:
- A car requires fuel or electricity.
- Some children’s toys require batteries.
- Toothbrushes are used with toothpaste, dental floss and water.
Helpful Tips
- Put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
- Envision each stage of the buyer experience across your industry, regardless of the provider.
- Imagine, in painstaking detail, everything customers experience throughout the entire cycle.
- Don’t overlook pain points you’ve learned to take for granted or accept as necessary frustrations. Wouldn’t it be great if cereal boxes used zip-lock bags!?
Most Importantly
Get creative. Ask “What if?” Color outside the lines. Defy convention. Break some rules—BE A MAVERICK!
Where Does Your Industry Create Friction?
Click every intersection where buyers may encounter a pain point. Click a selected intersection again to remove it.
| Purchase | Delivery | Use | Supplements | Maintenance | Disposal |
|---|
Your selections remain editable until you leave or refresh this page.
Which perspective best describes how you completed this exercise?
I mapped the buyer experience of:
Please select the perspective you used.
You’ve Made a Useful Start
Most leaders habitually examine their own offering, their competitors’ offerings or a combination of both. The observations you identified may still be valuable—but viewing the buyer experience through the same familiar lens hinders the unmasking of pain points your industry currently ignores.
Possible white space becomes easier to see when you’re able to zoom out and interrogate your industry as a whole, revealing opportunities previously hiding in plain sight.
Your work hasn’t been in vain. You’re welcome to revisit your map, this time using the broader industry lens and adjust any selections that look different from that perspective.
You’re Seeing Things Differently
By examining the buyer experience across your industry, you’ve stepped beyond benchmarking against your competitors.
The pain points you identified represent possible opportunities the industry may have overlooked or normalized. That alone puts you ahead of competitors as they continue viewing the market through the same familiar lens.
Your completed map is valuable—but it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle. The next step is understanding where this information fits and what else must be considered before pursuing the creation of an innovative offering.
Where Your Map Fits
Your map highlights pain points buyers may be forced to tolerate across your industry. Identifying them is meaningful work—but pain points alone don’t reveal which opportunities are worth pursuing or how to create an offering customers will value and your company can deliver profitably.
This exercise is one piece of a broader Strategic White Space framework.
Loren guides leadership teams through the complete process:
- Gaining clarity on themes among industry competing factors
- Identifying possible white space and developing an innovative and commercially viable strategy competitors aren’t pursuing
- Exploring the buyer experience beyond what the industry has accepted as normal
- Identifying potential customers your industry is ignoring and strategizing how to reach them
- Rethinking self-imposed industry boundaries to unlock innovative value-cost trade-offs and develop proprietary advantages
- Making Your Maverick Move!
The goal isn’t simply to collect interesting ideas. It’s to efficiently create and implement an innovative, commercially viable offering.
Keep a copy of your work. Print your completed map or save it as a branded PDF for future reference.
To preserve the intended layout and live hyperlinks: In the print window, select Save as PDF—not Microsoft Print to PDF.
Curious about the innovative opportunities your map may have surfaced?
A complimentary Focused Thinking Session provides a confidential place to discuss what surfaced, test the lens you used and consider where your findings may fit within the bigger picture.
Schedule a Focused Thinking Session →