Selling by Storyboard.

Stephen Spielberg and the Watt Disney animators use them to ensure that everything works out the way they intend. Now, Data Concepts Inc. of Nashville, Tenn., has adapted the storyboard technique for use in the marketplace.

The product, known as Adque, works on a Windows NT platform. It can deliver a tailor-made sales pitch to your customers, almost without regard to the way they connect with you. At the ATM, for example, the software can recognize the name of the customer using it, reference his or her personal history and transaction record, and deliver an automated marketing message--in pictures and in real time. If he or she reaches you by phone, the software provides your sales staff with the same sort of information and offers a storyboard "script" for selling the appropriate product Same for online users, and with an online camera--a $40 to $50 device that Data Concepts suggests you supply to customers as an incentive to sign up for Internet banking--you can converse with online customers face to face, more or less as you would if they came into the office.

Each sales message consists of three to five screens and a simple message, perhaps plugging tax shelters, portfolio diversification, auto loans, home equity credit Lines or whatever seems appropriate to the customer at the time.

"We can update our system every hour with news, weather and sports," says sales director John Slayton, thereby providing one more incentive for customers to make use of the service.

Cost for a basic, but complete system, would run about $6,500, Slayton estimates. Regular updates would add about $2,000 annually to the price.