Professional Client Management - Results of a telephone survey in the German market of tool-dealers

Wissenschaftlicher Aufsatz aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich BWL - Unternehmensführung, Management, Organisation, , Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Wholesale enterprises - those enterprises, which act as agents between manufacturers and commercial/institutional purchasers/recipients buying investment goods, commodities and auxiliary materials and supplies - have ever since provided their clients with quite a number of services. Targeting the client is, according to the opinion of representatives from the areas of science and business, one of the core steps that are needed to make an enterprise successful. Taking this into account, it shows that wholesale enterprises make the issue of client management a central element of their business activities. Despite its important role, the area of wholesale does not receive the amount of scientific attention adequate for an area involving such a number of companies and employees, such turnover and such a number of economic challenges. The primary goal of the telephone survey is to show that there is nearly no Key Account Management in the branch of tool dealing companies. It might be that the gross of the tool dealers do the main business with handicraft companies. In this business-periphery the customers are quite small. So the employment of key-account-management does not make sense. Another fact might be, that the company size of the tool-dealers is not big enough to deal with the idea of Key-Account-Management. But all these thoughts and hypothesis will be shown by the analyses of a telephone survey. The number of enterprises in Germany dealing with tools is about 950. For the current purpose, we will refer to a sample-number of 70 enterprises. With this exemplary (sample) size of 70, sampling errors will be at 15%, the confidence interval at about 99%, and the sampling moment at 50%. The number of posed questions will be restricted to 12. This will make sure that for each telephone conversation, not more than 10 minutes have to be invested, so that the interviewed person does not feel molested by too large a number of queries. Furthermore, only closed questions are going to be used. This is easier for the interviewed, and it will also facilitate evaluation and lead to more structured results.