Zeron Corporation sells vitamins, mineral supplements, and veterinary products to horse trainers. The company has just over 100 salespeople who call on trainers at horse tracks, rodeos, horse shows, and other places where they gather. These salespeople also call on feed stores, to sell products through the stores.
Zeron’s salespeople have gathered e-mail addresses for about 30 percent of its 200,000 accounts. Of those 60,000-plus e-mail addresses, probably 45,000 are for feed stores, but the company isn’t sure. The company has created a website for its feed store clients, so that store managers can re-order Zeron products at wholesale rates, without having to contact their salespeople. (New stores have to be set up with accounts by salespeople, who verify that they are, indeed, stores and qualify for wholesale pricing.) The company also has a website for trainers, also allowing them to order products directly, at business prices (which are lower than suggested retail, but higher than wholesale). In addition to the 60,000 e-mail addresses by Zeron’s salespeople, the company has another 60,000 e-mail addresses gathered from its website— and a way to know whether these additional addresses belong to trainers or feed stores.
Zeron’s VP of sales would like to create a campaign strategy encouraging smaller customers to always order via the company’s website. Moving some customers to the website for orders would give the firm’s salespeople more time to focus on larger accounts. But, because customers sometimes buy from several vendors, knowing which customers are big and which customers are small can’t be determined by looking just at their purchases of Zeron products. A potentially large account can look small if the customer only buys a few products from Zeron.
If you were a sales manager for Zeron, how would you go about developing a rules-based campaign covering all 120,000 e-mail addresses?