Caselet 2: Zeron Corporation 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...

Caselet 2: Zeron Corporation

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, and other places 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 e-mail addresses, probably 45,000 are for feed stores, but the company isn’t sure. The company has created a Web site so that feed stores can reorder its products at wholesale 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 Web site that allows trainers to order products directly, which are sold at retail prices. 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 Web site. It does know whether these 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 Web site. Moving some customers to the Web site 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 rulesbased campaign for the 120,000 e-mail addresses the company has?