Great salespeople are revered at CDW”

Jill Billhorn

to further its data intelligence and efficiency goals, effectively automating the processing of sales quotes, invoices, and orders from customers.

Anaplan’s Predictive Insights product interprets the context of activities and understands what is being requested of CDW by its customers. It then works behind the scenes to process requests and deliver them to sellers to inform their interactions without them having to do the hard lifting themselves.

“I call it coherent journey connection,” says Amar. “Anaplan will also provide us with intent and signals, gained from various communication channels or publications such as customer websites, press releases, their earnings, or even hiring patterns. We can attach these signals to our own customer journey, meaning we now possess a robust set of intent signals our customer is generating.”

Layering propensity modelling on top based on customer behaviour affords CDW a crystal-clear picture of opportunities with customers, allowing its teams to cross-sell or upsell based on knowledge of what products a particular customer is already purchasing.

“The entire concept is enabling the seller of the future, and the capabilities that we could give them, to help them create an enriching customer experience and to achieve greater success” adds Amar.

CDW has unleashed Customer Mosaic and its Anaplan integration – along with Salesforce and Digital Assistant - to thousands of sellers across its organisation already, and continues to proceed systematically across market segments. The difference it has made already has been remarkable.

Amar says: “We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback. A lot of anecdotes and success stories from sellers, and the sellers who are adopting these products are really pleased with our digital transformation.”

The sellers of the future

Going forward, the job of CDW leaders such as Billhorn and Amar is to encourage engagement and adoption throughout the business. Regional leadership and business champions will evangelise the new tools to the organisation at large and illustrate how to best use the technology. Several roadshows are being held, and the news is being published internally across CDW publications to improve visibility for sellers who may not yet be fully aware of new capabilities available to them.

“The advisory boards were very impactful for our sellers to stay engaged and to feel like they were empowered to deliver feedback, make changes, and offer recommendations for the organisation. ‘Sales’ can have a negative connotation - we really look at it as CDW being a connector and building relationships on both the partner and customer side,” says Billhorn.

Both Billhorn and Amar agree that the sky is the limit when it comes to how the technologies they are deploying will help create the sellers of the future at CDW. For now, the focus is on growing adoption and threading these products together throughout the company, but Amar is driving towards a truly unified seller experience.

“The role of the CDAO is to treat data as a strategic and enterprise asset, drive innovation, and create business value and efficiencies, and to propel growth. That is the core foundation of our strategy. That’s the future - evolving these products further. We have built a robust enterprise level Data Science and Analytics strategy. We have a strong team, we have strong partnerships, and we have achieved success with these various data products. Now I think it’s time to build upon it, enhance it further, and have one of the leading digital strategies in the industry. That’s our goal.”