Customer satisfaction has been shown to be key in pursuing firm profitability, both in consumer and business markets. However, the relationship between customer satisfaction and the costs that a company incurs to obtain satisfaction has been less widely investigated. The present study seeks to fill in this gap, by identifying the levers controlling the relationship between value-for-customer and costs in B2B service industries. By exploring those characteristics of B2B services that make it difficult to correlate costs and income, the article proposes a model to link the service component to satisfaction, on the one hand, and to activity costs, on the other. The model is tested on a set of business customers of an advertising agency.