It's not all special effects. Paramount Pictures Corp., which brought you Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is using more mundane technology to go where no sales force has gone before. Given that the movie industry's 1991 ticket sales fell 6.4% to $4.7 billion from 1990's $5.02 billion, and that both the cost of, movies and the cost of marketing went up 10% last year, Paramount has wisely decided to make sure it doesn't miss any sales opportunities anywhere in the world.

The company is now midway into an automation program for its international sales offices in Los Angeles, London, Toronto, and Sydney, Australia. Paramount the largest entity of the $2.3 billion entertainment unit of Paramount Communications Inc., has only 10 salespeople in those four offices to manage 1,200 movies and television series in 212 TV markets around the world. With retirements narrowing the knowledge base available to the sales force, and the number of worldwide customers on the rise, Paramount felt the urgent need to improve the delivery of information to those offices, says Diana Nail, Paramount's West Coast systems development director.

The U.S. sales force has been using a similar but less sophisticated system for three years; the international offices will get an enhanced version of that system. "Our people wanted to be able to see the worldwide marketing opportunities for our MacCyveu episodes, or for Star Trek VI, "explains Gary Naiman, VP for Paramount's West Coast IS group in Los Angeles.

To that end, Paramount recently began installing a PC-based sales management system connected via modem to a mainframe at the New York headquarters that has world- wide sales data on Paramount's properties. The hookup enables sales people to immediately check the availability of a TV series or film for a specific market. They previousIy used a book that had to be updated manually.

The system portrays the world as a giant grid, showing each product and its availability by market. The marketing opportunities for MacCyver episodes, for example, can be easily identified; similar to a spreadsheet, it depicts rows and columns with, for instance, one axis listing Cheers, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley, and each market on the other.

A blank space at a column intersection indicates that a particular product has not been sold in that market. So salespeople focus on that niche. "It means a lot to the sales force, because there's an awful lot of those rows and columns - more than your administrative staff could ever cope with," says Naiman.

When negotiating a sale with a customer, being able to confirm product availability on the spot-and whether a particular film or TV series has been licensed in that market can make the difference between making or losing a sale. "If you can give the customer that information while he's on the phone, you are more likely to make the sale," says Nail. "We've been finding product that we didn't even know about." Adds Naiman, "It gives us a major competitive advantage."

That could be important, especially in the difficult environment Paramount and other major studios now face. "The movie business suffered a pretty rough year in 2992," observes entertainment industry analyst Harold Vogel of Merrill Lynch Co. Inc. in New York. He says Paramount's sales management system "will help, but it's not a critical variable." Paramont's key to success, he argues, is still making films with boffo box-office appeal. - Doug Bartholomew -