This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

In business-to-business (B2B) markets, you might expect customer purchase decisions to be data driven, a dispassionate evaluation of quality and price. However, a recent study of these decisions utilizing modern survey and statistical techniques has quantified something long suspected: subjective, sometimes very personal concerns play an important role in business buyer’s choices.

Among the considerations they weigh: whether a product can enhance the buyer’s reputation, decrease his or her anxiety, or provide hope for the future of the organization. With this more nuanced understanding of what drives purchases, companies can make smarter choices about how they focus their investments and better understand the factors influencing their customers’ loyalty.

Recently my Bain & Company colleagues Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn and Lori Sherer described this research in Harvard Business Review, presenting a new way of evaluating the dimensions of what a business customer values by organizing those values into a pyramid inspired by psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Using scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies that our firm has conducted for clients over the past three decades, the trio identified 40 fundamental priorities that matter most to buyers of B2B goods and services. These are their “elements of value.”

By teasing apart and categorizing these elements, marketing strategists can assemble these building blocks of value to create attractive products and services, and in turn earn superior customer loyalty and higher scores in the Net Promoter System®. The elements can also inform the analysis that firms should perform on all of their customers—promoters, passives and detractors—in order to get to the root cause of those attitudes, and how those attitudes affect behavior.

At the base of this pyramid of values are the four most basic and universal needs: price, performance, regulatory compliance and ethical standards. As a B2B offering becomes commoditized, these four basic values become table stakes. Suppliers can differentiate themselves by focusing on the concerns of business customers captured in the higher levels of the pyramid where subjectivity begins to enter in.

Today B2B companies spend most of their energy addressing the elements in the middle of the pyramid, functional values like innovation and cost reduction, and values that make doing business easier by increasing a customer’s productivity, for example, or improving operational performance. On the more subjective end of the spectrum are things that enhance relationships between the two parties, such as a good cultural fit or a seller’s commitment to the customer organization.

Moving up the pyramid, individual buyers’ priorities begin to play a role. This is where reducing anxiety comes into play, or creating an appealing design and aesthetic. Some elements are career related, such as increasing marketability or network expansion.

At the very top of the pyramid are the inspirational elements: vision, hope and social responsibility. Things like helping to anticipate market changes that improve the customer’s vision of the future, or providing hope for the organization by, for example, enabling them to move to the next generation of technology easily and affordably.

For a strategist or a product manager, mastering the intangibles of the customer’s total experience can be difficult, but there seems to be a strong payoff. In the field of IT infrastructure, for example, this research found that the average Net Promoter Score® of companies excelling at six or more of the elements above the four basic table stakes was 60% higher than that of companies excelling at only one to five elements.

While you could never inject all elements into a single product or service, recognizing the full range of rational and emotional factors behind business purchases—and tailoring your value proposition accordingly—clearly has value.

There is much more to this approach, and you can read the full article here.

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