There are two types of businesses: those that get ahead by adapting and those that blend into the noise. If you’re reading this, I know which side you’re after.
But here’s the brutal truth – most businesses fail not because their products or services are bad, but because they have **no clue what their market actually cares about. They’re stuck playing in a battlefield they didn’t design, throwing out offers, content, and messaging that might land but usually doesn’t.
At The War Table Mastermind, we don’t play that way. We plan. We attack. We dominate. In our latest session, we dissected a critical strategic exercise: Identifying and Ranking Customer Pain Points.
Because here’s the deal: whoever owns the most painful, urgent, and costly problems in their market wins. This isn’t some feel-good brainstorming session. It’s an execution-driven framework that guarantees your offer, positioning, and messaging hit where it hurts (in a good way).
So if you’re ready to become the obvious solution in your field, let’s break down the exact process our War Table members used to increase their positioning power and messaging relevancy.
The Game Plan: Identify, Rank, and Exploit Customer Pain Points
Every market has problems. Every high-growth business profits from solving them. But not all problems are created equal. You can waste time pushing a pain point that customers don’t actually care about, or you can laser-focus on the ones that drive action and revenue.
Here’s the model we used in the mastermind to guarantee that no marketing effort is wasted.
STEP 1: Identify the Pain Points
First, we forced our members to stop guessing and start listening. Your customers are telling you what frustrates them, what they need, and what they’re desperate for—you just have to pull the intel from the right places:
- Direct Customer Interactions → Sales calls, support tickets, email inquiries, survey responses. Real words from real people.
- Market Research → Reviews on competitor products, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, Quora discussions. If they’re complaining online, they’re feeling the pain.
- Industry Trends → Reports, studies, emerging shifts in technology, pricing, and consumer behavior. (If you’re in a shifting industry and don’t see what’s coming, you’re already behind.)
- Your Own Observations → If you’re a coach, consultant, or service provider, you *already* know your clients’ struggles. Write down what comes up the most.
Inside The War Table, one of our fitness coaches, Ben, identified a recurring frustration among his clients: They expect to see results in 30 days, despite years of bad habits. That’s not just an annoyance – it’s a core psychological pain point.
Your job is to list every single pain point your market experiences. But don’t stop there. Because some pain points matter way more than others.
STEP 2: Rank the Pain Points Using The War Table Method
Here’s where we separate the amateurs from the true market leaders. Not all pain points are equally valuable. Some problems are minor annoyances; others keep your customers up at night. We used a 4-metric ranking system to determine which problems were worth going to war for:
1. Severity (1-10): How painful is this problem? Does it cause stress, financial strain, or massive inconvenience?
2. Urgency (1-10): How quickly does this problem demand a fix? The more urgent, the more likely they are to buy NOW.
3. Market Size (1-10): How many people experience this issue? Hyper-niche pain points can work—but only if they come with high pricing power.
4. Willingness to Pay (1-10): Are customers already spending money to fix this? If they’re actively searching for a solution (or spending on bad alternatives), it’s a high-value pain point.
Example: A consultant inside the mastermind, Paul, helps entrepreneurs grow wealth through financial literacy. One of his top-ranking pain points? Business owners are making money but have no idea how to build long-term wealth.
- High Severity (Financial stress = major issue)
- High Urgency (Nobody wants to wake up at 50 realizing they’re broke)
- Huge Market Size (Every entrepreneur who isn’t already set for life)
- Strong Willingness to Pay (People pay big for financial security)
When you score and rank your market’s pain points, you eliminate noise. Instead of playing the guessing game, you work backwards from the most urgent, profitable problems – the exact ones that drive leads, conversions, and loyalty.
STEP 3: Align Pain Points With Your Offer, Messaging, and Positioning
Now that you’ve ranked pain points, you need to weaponize them in your business strategy. Here’s how to do it:
- Refine Your Offer – Is your product/service actually solving the top-ranked issues? If not, tweak it. The easiest way to grow is to sell what people are already begging for.
- Upgrade Your Messaging – Does your website, ads, and content immediately hit on your market’s biggest pains? If you’re not addressing their urgent problems in the first 5 seconds, you’ve already lost them.
- Create Irresistible Hooks – Great marketing isn’t about your product—it’s about the problem you’re solving. Your copy, emails, and funnels should mirror the exact frustrations your audience is feeling.
EXAMPLE: One War Table member in the coaching niche rewrote their entire homepage after this exercise. Instead of generic positioning like “I help entrepreneurs grow,” they pivoted to: “Tired of working 60-hour weeks and still not making six figures? We fix that.”
Within two weeks their inbound leads doubled. Pain point mastery = revenue growth.
STEP 4: Implement, Test, Adjust (Then Do It Again)
Winning businesses don’t “set and forget” their strategy. Customer needs shift. Markets evolve. If you’re not constantly testing and refining, you will get left behind.
Inside The War Table, we pushed our members to commit to:
- Testing new messaging based on their top-ranked pain points.
- Collecting direct customer feedback to validate what’s actually resonating.
- Tracking conversion rates to see which pain points drive the most action.
- Iterating their offers and positioning every quarter (at minimum).
The market changes, and you should be at the front of those changes, not adapting after everyone else. This is the difference between evolution and adaptation. If you’re not revisiting your market’s evolving pain points every quarter, you’re throwing money away.
Key Takeaways: The Difference Between Playing and Winning
Your market’s deepest pain points determine your success. We help you master them.
Rank them strategically: Severity, Urgency, Market Size, Willingness to Pay. Every piece of your business (offer, messaging, positioning) should attack these issues head-on.
Test, adjust, and refine, because market shifts will leave you behind if you’re not paying attention. Weak businesses hope for leads. Smart businesses make themselves the unavoidable solution.
This is the difference between random marketing and unquestionable market dominance.
Ready to Build A Category-Dominating Business?
What we just walked through? It’s just one of the powerful strategies we execute at The War Table. If you’re ready to stop “trying things” and actually build a bulletproof growth strategy, you’re in the right place.
We equip business owners, consultants, and marketing leaders with battle-tested strategies that create category leaders, not just participants.
If you want:
- Sharper positioning that eliminates competition
- Marketing that actually converts (not just “builds awareness”
- Aggressive growth systems that put you in control of your market
…then it’s time to lock in your seat. We meet weekly. We strategize. We execute.
We win. Apply now, and let’s make sure your business is designed to grow, not just exist.