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Assignment 2 B2B Marketing
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Essay of 8 pages for the course B2B marketing at RuG (VTB assignment)
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B2B MarketingVTB assignment
Wietske Anema
S3971317
w.h.anema@student.rug.nl
, Question 1: Current Situation
VTB has experienced many difficulties in the past years, as a result, sales have decreased by
10-15% per year. This is due to the increase in competition on the market and several
changes in the business structure. Further problems have occurred due to opportunistic
salespeople and a loss of employees. This can be explained by the Agency Theory. “Agency
theory argues—using fundamental assumptions that agents are: (a) self-interested, (b)
boundedly rational, and (c) different from principals in their goals and risk-taking
preferences—that a problem occurs when one party (a principal) employs another (an agent)
to make decisions and act in their stead. Essentially, the value of a principal-agent
relationship is not optimised because the two contracted parties may have different interests
and information is asymmetric (not equal)” (SOURCE) This principle applies to salespeople,
often incentives are added to ensure that this opportunistic behaviour is avoided.
The main problems were several missing services and problems with account management.
Further, competitors with similar quality products but substantially lower prices have entered
the market. This means it is of high importance that VBT increases the value for customers.
Interviews were conducted to find out what problems customers were experiencing. The
survey was conducted as customer relationships are highly important in B2B environments.
Within the interviews, the customers are divided into three different segments, these being;
Intrinsic value customers, extrinsic value customers and strategic customers. Each of which
have different values they look for. This is the reason the customer segmentation was
included in the interviews. There have been many complaints from customers and a survey
conducted shows that for overall satisfaction;
● 4 customers are very satisfied (16%)
● 13 customers are satisfied (52%)
● 6 customers are dissatisfied (24%)
● 2 customers are very dissatisfied (8%)
Good performance in the market is greatly based on the strength of customer relations. Strong
customer relationships lead to loyalty and advocacy. “Several scholars studying business
markets observed early on that continuous relationships are common and important in
business markets.” (La Rocca) Further, it is important to consider that “business relationships
between customers and suppliers in business markets are thus typically broad in scope and
have important consequences for the businesses directly involved but may also have
consequences for those indirectly involved.” (La Rocca)
Question 2: Missing Services
The missing services that have been identified at VTB are
1. Early involvement in projects
2. Attention on the installed base of the customer
3. Cooperation in jointly reducing the costs of the installations
4. technical know-how transfer,
5. Acting as systems integrator
6. taking over operations
The 3 most importantly ranked attributes are reliability of products, competent advice and
product know-how. These attributes should have been focussed on when selecting 2 services
1
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