CDW builds a complete customer view that drives positive business results

Anaplan Predictive Insights enable leading technology solutions provider to identify customer needs and suggest solutions

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With Anaplan Predictive Insights, leading technology solutions provider CDW can understand its customer needs better than ever. This information helps sellers propose solutions to the customers and prospects that need them most. Deals identified with Predictive Insights result in faster sales, improved revenue, greater business growth — and happy, successful CDW customers.

The Predictive Insights tool can give us visibility of where exactly we want to focus.
Georgia Katsis, Senior Manager, Enterprise Data Science and Advanced Analytics

More than a quarter-million business, government, education, and healthcare customers count on CDW for their technology needs. Over the course of 40+ years, CDW has built its $24 billion business on more than simply selling tech gear; CDW employees apply their knowledge and expertise to offer strategic advice that can help customers thrive in the current business environment. That sometimes means that a CDW advisor suggests a product or service before a customer knows they need it, because the technology can deliver a positive impact on the customer’s business.

To support that proactive level of customer service, CDW has an advanced analytics team that provides business analytics, data analytics, and visualization solutions to the company. “We try to identify the best opportunities for us and our sellers, and accelerate our growth journey while we fulfill the customer’s expectations and needs,” explains Georgia Katsis, Senior Manager of the Enterprise Data Science and Advanced Analytics team.  

Building a complete customer view

“We try to give our sellers a full 360-degree view of our customers,” Katsis continues. “How things were performing for them in the past. How things look now, in the present. And by using Anaplan Predictive Insights, we try to give them some futuristic views.”

The Predictive Insights solution Katsis and her team developed combines multiple data sources to anticipate a customer’s future technology needs.   The solution enables CDW sellers to serve existing customers better, and it also helps identify net-new opportunities in organizations that have not yet purchased from CDW. “The Predictive Insights tool can give us visibility of where exactly we want to focus,” Katsis says.

Helping CDW and its customers achieve growth goals

The results to date with the Predictive Insights solution have been impressive. Sellers using the insights have expressed their approval, indicating that the solutions they’re offering are a good match to their customers’ needs. Revenue from sales driven by Predictive Insights is strong and growing steadily.

These results realized by CDW highlight an important underlying fact: By leveraging Anaplan solutions to extract insights from their data, CDW can provide both existing and new customers with a personalized experience and tailored advice that meets their specific needs. That capability supports the growth goals of both CDW and its customers.

Georgia Katsis, Senior Manager, Enterprise Data Science and Advanced Analytics, CDW:

CDW is primarily a B2B solution provider.

The advanced analytics team of CDW is focusing on business analytics, data analytics, and visualization solutions.

We try to identify the best opportunities for us and our sellers and accelerate our growth journey while we fulfill the customer expectations and needs.

Our sellers are always looking for opportunities. And our commitment is to expedite their selling to earnings. So we are giving them insights to make the appropriate decisions on where they want to focus, what actually their customers need, and how they can start strategy discussions with our customers.

So recently my team has developed a data-driven — AI-driven, also — product where we try to give to our sellers a full 360-degree view of our customers. How things were performing for them in the past, how things look now in the present. And by using Anaplan Predictive Insights, we try to give them also some futuristic views.

From the Predictive Insights platform, we're able to combine external and internal data, get profiles for different companies, for different entities across the US or even internationally.

One of the major business challenges we're facing is expanding to net-new market opportunities. Customers that have never bought from CDW before. Through the Predictive Insights, we're able to identify companies that look very promising, and target our selling towards those customers.

The Predictive Insights tool can give us visibility of where exactly we want to focus and which products to target the customers with.

Sellers that are using the insights we provide to them, they're closing deals much faster than those that do not. On the revenue side, we see higher growth as well. We see that there is higher revenue within the last quarter for those targets that have been identified from our modeling team.

CDW is a leading technology provider, and Anaplan can help us a lot in our growth journey.

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