Hi Scott,
This type of escalation alert management was exactly the use case under which SolarWinds developed the FREE Alert Central product - Alert Central - Free Alert Management Software by SolarWinds. You can intelligently manage Alert Escalation paths and route alerts based upon content all from a single console for ALL of your IT monitoring tools. You could try to manage this through VMAN alone, but it would be much harder and not as flexible.
Hope that helps!