This article was originally published in INC.

Your clients may be businesses, but you need to pay attention to the emotions of the people who work for them.

For many businesses, success depends on putting customers at the center of product design. That means they need to develop an intimate knowledge of the preferences and motivations of the people they're trying to serve. That's hard enough when your customers are human beings. But, as many of my consulting firm's clients often ask, how can you do it when they're businesses?

Customer-focused companies have long hired social scientists (including anthropologists like me) to gain insights into how people think and what they want. But B2B companies have yet to embrace the concept as widely, in part because businesses don't have pain points and emotional struggles the same way that humans do.

Yet B2B companies can connect emotionally with their customers and create products and services that address real human problems. The trick is a simple reframing: While businesses aren't people themselves, they consist of people with needs and aspirations. Once you start thinking about them that way, providing for their needs becomes much more sensible — and just as critical as it is for consumer-oriented companies.

To create truly customer-centric solutions for your business customers, you must follow three steps: thinking physically, mapping emotional ties, and identifying key intermediaries. This works regardless of the size of your business or your customers. While all of the examples below concern larger companies, the steps are analogous for small ones; the key is being able to genuinely understand the perspectives of the people that you're dealing with.

Understand employee experiences in B2B research

Imagining the experiences of individual workers is a critical first step in B2B research. Consider the case of a US freight railroad that recently tried to improve its digital dashboard for B2B customers. The process started with interviews of workers about their experience using dashboards from several major railroads. Overwhelmingly, the company found, inefficient dashboards caused tiring physical inconveniences, which made some individuals feel that certain railroads valued them more than others did. In response, the railroad prototyped efficiency improvements to its dashboard, demonstrating to customers that the railroad cared about them and had their backs.

Map the emotional ties between employees

The next element to examine is how the individuals within the business interact and what they do to help or hinder each other. The people at your client companies who act on behalf of their fellow employees often feel emotional pressure to behave in certain ways, even if they don't benefit directly. If you can recognize that emotional pathway, it can improve your business.

Take, for instance, one business insurer that wanted to improve its claims process. It conducted focus groups and found that the human resources and risk leaders interacting with claims felt deeply motivated to do the right thing for their coworkers. One focus group respondent even said she had gone to the parking lot to cry one day when she realized she couldn't get a claim processed quickly enough.

The responses showed that employees who feel obligated toward their coworkers feel better knowing that the company feels an obligation too. The insurer took this insight to heart and changed its strategy to prioritize elements of the claims process that workers could see were intended to help customers rather than merely being technologically advanced.

Identify critical intermediaries and appeal to them

One of the fascinating elements of thinking about businesses as groups of individuals is recognizing the different "customers" who interact with a product before someone uses it. Often the B2B customer is a conglomeration of separate buyers, intermediaries, and end-users, and understanding those dynamics is crucial. After all, if you can't convince the "buyer individual" you've made something worthwhile, the "end-user individual" will never even see it.

A good example is a life insurance and benefits company that wanted to develop a digital product to help people improve their financial wellness via their workplace benefit plans. In addition to researching employee needs, it conducted interviews with the benefits managers in employers' HR departments. The life insurance company knew that the benefits managers were critical influencers. If they liked the product, they would be more likely to market it internally.

The insurer learned that benefits managers, on a human level, were concerned for their coworkers and their financial well-being. They wanted to help, and many wanted to be able to definitively tell more senior people in the company what kinds of help would be most beneficial. But to do so, most of them needed more data. So the insurer created a financial wellness app that —  without revealing individual data — lets HR managers know about employee problems in the aggregate, allowing them to make more informed decisions about the benefits they offer. Once the managers learned about that capability, they were more likely to promote the product.

Turning customer needs into useful products

Again, as a small business owner, you can apply these same principles to your work. Even if you don't have the resources to conduct extensive interviews, your customers might allow you to contact a handful of employees who can provide valuable insights about their experiences. That may not uncover the needs of the entire customer base, but it will give a good inside view that will help reveal key pain points or areas of satisfaction that you can address when you make product decisions.

Needs-focused research is a powerful method for finding solutions to your B2B customers' problems. It requires a slightly different set of tools than end-consumer research, but it enables you to develop helpful products and services in much the same way that consumer-oriented companies do. Just as importantly, it communicates empathy and care, which is something that all customers value —even when those customers are businesses.

Read the original piece, here.