Electronic Marketing in Business-to-Business Markets – User Related Benefits of Sales Configurators

Abstract

Electronic marketing is becoming an integral part of the sales process in business-to-business (B2B) markets. In line with that, sales configurators are emerging as novel applications that help companies engage customer and drive sales. This research investigates the feature related benefits of sales configurator. Our goal is to categorize the benefits and to identify the important ones. In order to reach the goal, personal interviews were conducted and data was gathered through an online questionnaire. Responses from 152 business-to-business customers were analyzed and a factorial model of the feature related benefits of sales configurators was developed. The results show a model with five factors: versatility, configurability, user experience, security, and customizability. Of these, user experience and security were found to be the most important. In light of this, we suggest that companies emphasize the aspects of user experience in addition to core functionalities when developing sales force automation systems.