Conference ilbbak::us_sales_service

50.0. "How to map product license to account manager name" by SMAUG::GARROD (An Englishman's mind works best when it is almost too late) Fri Nov 22 1991 22:25

    I'm an engineering supervisor and my group has just developed some
    products that are of particular use to customers that already have
    DECforms or VTX. We're currently in FT but after announcement which is
    very soon I'd like to build off this base.
    
    Here is what I'd like to do. I'd like to send an electronic mail message
    to the sales account manager for every account that has a DECforms or
    VTX license. In this mail message I will explain the new products that
    will have been announced and suggest that he find out if there is any
    interest in a particular named account (his/hers) in these products given
    that they have a license for product X.
    
    Now for why I'm here:
    
    I know (or at least my product manager does) how to pull a listing of
    all US customers that have a particular license. What I don't know how
    to do is feed that customer name into an MIS tool that will give me the
    account managers NAME and ELECTRONIC MAIL ADDRESS. If I could do this I
    know how I could write a quick procedure to write a personalised form
    letter to each account manager. Variables would be:
    
    	1, Account Managers Name
    	2, Name of Account who has the product
    	3, Date on which license was purchased
    	4, Customer Name
    
    So how can I do this? We're a computer company I presume it is easy.
    Help and advice would gratefully be received.
    
    By the way if the US problem looks difficult I have an even bigger task
    with non US customers. In the database that says who has what license
    all non US licenses get rolled up under a DEC subsidiary name (eg
    DEC UK is one of our top customers!). In order to find the real
    customer I'd have to go to some database owned by the subsidiary.
    A different one for each subsidiary.
    
    The reason I want to do the above is that I know our sales people
    probably get bombed with a lot of very generic stuff. My approach here
    is targetted mailing. The idea would be to get my products sales off to
    a good start and to help the account manager book some incremental business.
    It strikes me that this is the sort of thing that makes our direct
    sales force valuable over an indirect sales force. Now all I need is
    the MIS systems to support this idea.
    
    Thanks in advance for any help,
    
    Dave