Samenvatting

Sales Channel is a company, that offers quotation comparisons on behalf of their partners to companies, that need telecom, energy, printing, software or hardware. Because Sales Channel does not generate enough leads for the partners of the company via the current routes, the marketing department wants to create more leads through the website. They want to aim at companies that have two to twenty employees, because the companies larger than twenty employees are being targeted by the sales department.
To create more leads for the suppliers, the marketing department would like to know how big the target group is and how they search for the target products printing and energy. Therefore, the main question of this thesis is: what is the searching behavior of the end-user on the products energy and printing and how can Sales Channel respond to this in the appropriate manner to generate more leads through the website?
The leading model for this research is the consumer buying model. The consumer buying model distinguishes five stages, which occur when someone is searching for a product.
Field research was performed on twenty respondents. These respondents are all companies with two to twenty employees. The responders were asked questions about the need of printing and energy in this group. They were also asked question about their search behavior and the person’s responsibility for searching and buying the products in the company. Also, the website of Sales Channel was shown to them and they were asked to compare the websites with similar websites. Finally, they had to choose, which website they preferred and on which website they would buy the products energy and printing.
It can be concluded that the target group is not interested in the product energy because most of the respondent didn’t have their own building and hence were not responsible for energy. This is because the rent price of office space is lowering and young companies want to be flexible. Also, almost all the companies were contacted by phone and/or in person by sales representatives for energy comparisons. That is why we can conclude it is not a reasonable decision to continue the work on the website and to post online advertisement for energy. Further sub-analyses were not made.
The three tiers that were used in this thesis to analyses the need on printing was as followed: companies that have two to five employees, six to ten employees and companies that have eleven to twenty employees. Companies that have two to five and six to ten employees are not interested in printing. Companies that have eleven to twenty employees are moderately interested in printing. The intensity of the competition is also high. That’s why it is advised not to continue to improve the website for printing.
If Sales Channel still wants to address the energy and printing market, than the website must be improved. If they have improved the website correctly, then they can advertise their products online. Most of the respondents searched directly for the website Tweakers to compare certain electronical products. So, that is why it is advised to place the online advertisement on this website.
Because Sales Channel has not conducted any strategic research, it is advised that they conduct research for other markets that are more attractive for Sales Channel. Furthermore, the respondents pointed out that the quality of the website is poor. That’s why it is advised to conduct research on how the website can be improved and the proposition of Sales Channel.
This thesis contains 9 chapters in the following order: introduction, issue, theory and models used in the research, research accountability, results, conclusions, recommendations and implementation.