THE SELLERS OF THE FUTURE

After 40 years in the game, IT industry stalwart CDW has built the selling tools of the future to make sure it stays ahead.

AUTHOR: Sam Jermy

CDW Corporation (Nasdaq: CDW) is a leading multi-brand provider of information technology solutions to business, government, education and healthcare customers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. A Fortune 500 company and member of the S&P 500 Index with four decades of experience, the company is an industry veteran. But it has continued innovating to maintain its position as the primary source for a vast array of IT products and services for customers across a spectrum of sectors.

As the technology world has become increasingly complex, so has providing optimum service as a reseller of IT products. From humble beginnings in the 1980s, USA-based CDW is now a multi-divisional organisation making transactions in over 160 countries. Its 15,000strong workforce generated sales of more than $23 billion in revenue in 2022, with the company serving five key sectors: small and medium-sized enterprises, education, healthcare, and government.

After building a substantial global capability over the last six years, the company is now looking to take things to the next level. To do this, it must empower its sales workforce to become even more responsive and in-tune with customers’ needs, in turn enabling a higher level of service throughout the end-to-end sales process and beyond.

Jill Billhorn, Senior Vice President of Commercial Sales at CDW, says: “Our business is to take customer challenges, issues and opportunities and match them up with the best manufacturers and service providers in the world.

“We are one the largest partners of all these major manufacturers. It gives us increased leverage, both from a knowledge and technical resource standpoint, which helps us wade through all the complexity around technology and how it makes businesses work. CDW is a bit of a one-stop shop for technology needs in today’s more complex marketplace.”

Shifting Landscape

As with most companies, the way CDW operated changed during the pandemic era. It did so in concert with its customers, who were also shifting the way they did

Jill Billhorn business. Remote and hybrid working environments emerged at pace, accelerating a trend that was already in motion.

“I think it created some vulnerability across the customer landscape. Regardless of what kind of customer you were, nobody had a standard operating procedure, or a manual to say ‘this is how I should do business during a pandemic’. I think the creativity and innovation around that time really accelerated digital transformation,” says Billhorn.

“The relationships we’ve fostered were very important because of the trust involved. But we were all navigating this together. I would say the digital acceleration and that landscape around doing business differently was already happening, but it took a major lightspeed acceleration. Technology solved those unique problems. We are now helping customers understand what the future looks like in a more hybrid way.”

There were learning points gleaned from the pandemic for CDW, primarily that its own infrastructure needed to transform to keep pace with growth and the changing nature of its customers’ needs. As the spine of CDW’s success, Billhorn says its sales teams needed to demonstrate to customers how they were relentless in transforming themselves to provide better service. Sales advisory boards came to prominence - set up to provide continuous feedback in realtime, ensuring the sales organisation understood what changes needed to be made, and then make them quickly.

A significant change more recently has been upgrading the company’s enterprise CRM. Billhorn says: “It was an extremely important decision. It was also a very large investment for us. We chose Salesforce as a platform. We’re at the beginning of a journey to automate and modernise everything in our systems from the tip of the spear all the way through to our cash and invoicing.”

These changes have been geared towards helping make CDW staff better salespeople, less burdened by process, better informed, and empowered with data. It is a cultural journey as well as one of digital transformation, and the evolution has enabled the CDW sales team to be more attentive and tuned in to customers’ needs.

The average seller has been working at CDW for more than 12 years, and the average customer has been involved with the company for over a decade. A reason for this, believes Billhorn, is the trust management has deferred to its sales teams. She says: “Great salespeople are revered at CDW because they build their own sales pipelines. They drive those customer relationships. They work hard. We give them a lot of autonomy and flexibility on how they want to build their own books of business. They must get to know customers’ businesses very intimately to understand how it matches up with the right solutions. We are major connectors in this regard.

“The single biggest problem for any sales organisation is how to take non-selling time off the plates of sellers. We believe that our recent technology additions help us to achieve this goal.”

Smart Business

CDW has experienced enormous, rapid growth, with revenue rising by more than $5 billion since 2020. Its serves customers with a portfolio of more than 10,000 products, ranging from laptop microphones to entire server farms and attendant services. However, its burgeoning expansion meant it became necessary to overhaul its entire technological makeup to keep pace. A legacy ecosystem - built internally over a number of years - couldn’t scale to accommodate the company’s quickly evolving needs. In order to meet its own high standards of customer service, further transformation was required.

Amarnath Lingam, Vice President and Global Head of CDW’s Enterprise Data Science and Analytics organisation, explains: “If you look at our impressive supply chain, the way we operated so far has got us to this level. But if we really want to scale to even higher growth, we can achieve much more productivity through the transformation of the technology that we have. There are many opportunities to make a difference for our customers through our solutions and product offerings.”

Amar leads CDW’s development of advanced technologies in the data, analytics and data science space to deliver powerful new insights to its sales team. Installing a comprehensive new CRM system is the latest highlight of a programme that has also seen Amar working closely with Billhorn to construct an advanced AI-driven product for the entire sales organisation. A gamechanging innovation, it has been dubbed Customer Mosaic.

Ingesting and processing data from both internal and external sources, Customer Mosaic is described as a single place for a seller to learn everything about their customer, to find new opportunities and to