[?Lisa] 0:00:10.2: 

Good afternoon, everyone. Hope you're having a fantastic time at Connect Chicago. Welcome to our first afternoon session, Accelerating sales productivity: How CDW cut goal-setting time and accelerated a GTM strategy, with Spaulding Ridge. 

Kate Busi 0:00:31.7: 

Thanks, Lisa. Can you hear me okay? I'm new to microphones - okay, just checking, thank you. All right, well, thank you, as Lisa said, for - I can't gesture with my hands! As Lisa said, thank you for joining us today in our session here with CDW today. We will be going through CDW's journey with Anaplan supporting their goal-setting modelling, as well as their strategic go-to-market initiatives. I will kick us off with introductions here today. My name is Kate Busi. I am a technical director at Spaulding Ridge. I will be your moderator for today. My primary role at Spaulding Ridge is on project implementations, mainly in the role of architect. I've been coming up here now on about a decade's worth of Anaplan projects and implementations. A lot of that time being at CDW actually, so I'm very happy to be here today with CDW specifically. In a lot of ways, I do feel like I have grown up a bit with CDW. I've been doing Anaplan since 2016, and since about 2017, 2018 I've been working with CDW. We have had several different model deployments and implementations over that time. Right now we are mainly in a support capacity with CDW. We'll get into some more of those details here in a little bit. I will pass over to Tammy now.  

Tammy Trakas 0:02:02.7: 

Hi everyone, good afternoon. My name is Tammy Trakas. I'm, obviously, with CDW. I've been with CDW for ten years now. I'm currently managing our quota-setting process across sales and integrated technology, as well as territory-planning and several of our go-to-market initiatives. A little bit more to lean on what Kate said, I've been with CDW since 2016. I started becoming engaged with Anaplan around 2019 with one of our very first go-to-market initiatives that Anaplan helped support build. So I've had about six years of experience and exposure as a customer of Anaplan. 

Pietro Pellerito 0:02:46.2: 

Good afternoon everyone, my name is Pietro Pellerito. I've been at CDW for five years. I joined the sales goals team four years ago and started using Anaplan at the same time. I joined the team to essentially be the Anaplan [?SME 0:03:01.1] and the first step to establishing the center of excellence. I was very much, right out the gate, working on license management, the administrative side of the business, but also managing our data hub and some of our spoke models. 

Kate Busi 0:03:21.1: 

Great. I guess, Tammy, can you kick us off a little bit with some of the basics around CDW as a business? 

Tammy Trakas 0:03:29.1: 

Sure. CDW is a $21 billion leading, multi-brand provider of information technology solutions, to 250,000 customers, across segments such as business, government, education, and healthcare globally. We help customers navigate an increasingly complex IT market, as I'm sure you're all aware. Also, help them maximize return on their technology investments. The products and services that CDW provide range from hardware and software to integrated technology solutions, such as cybersecurity, cloud hybrid infrastructure, and digital experience.  

Kate Busi 0:04:12.8: 

Great. Then can you give us a little bit of the background with Anaplan at CDW specifically, and how your journey started there? 

Tammy Trakas 0:04:20.6:  

Sure. CDW started partnering with Anaplan in 2017, for several reasons. We, as an organization, are always looking to proactively improve and embrace a forward-thinking approach. We knew by taking several of our extremely manual processes that we had at the time and moving them into Anaplan, we would create additional capacity for our coworkers, but also drive towards a more strategic operating model across the board. As CDW continued to expand throughout the years, we had built a series of very interconnected manual processes, like I had mentioned, around managing sales quotas and territory-planning. However, many of our workflows were reliant on very complex spreadsheets and queries that were just not sustainable any longer. So recognizing these inefficiencies, we saw an opportunity to streamline and modernize our approach, and drive greater accuracy and scalability. Also providing significant time savings for our coworkers across several functions. 

Kate Busi 0:05:33.0: 

Great. Just to be specific, which use cases are you handling in Anaplan right now? 

Tammy Trakas 0:05:42.6: 

Yes, so I, in my current role - I joined my current role almost four years ago - we manage all of our sales quotas, so across products, services, and integrated technology. More recently, which I'll touch on in a little bit, some of our territory-planning and book-building as well. I want to mention that it's really critical, obviously, for what we're utilizing Anaplan for because all of our sales quotas are, obviously, the driver for compensation across our sellers. So really critical to maintain accuracy and a consistency there.  

Kate Busi 0:06:19.3: 

Thank you, great. Pietro, to you next. As the lead of your CoE, what has been your approach to setting up your ecosystem [unclear word - microphone fails 0:06:30.3]? 

Pietro Pellerito 0:06:32.0: 

Yes, so early on we only had a few workspaces that we were using and we weren't maximizing the potential space and the workspace. We went through a whole process of expanding our workspaces, introducing ALM, so that we had more of an audit trail, enhanced security. We had a lot of obsolete objects within our models, where we were able to clean it up and cut down our storage usage by two-thirds, about 66 per cent. A lot of our original models, they did not implement the DISCO methodology. We started doing that to streamline the models, have them more efficient and effective. We had a lot of whiteboarding sessions with Spaulding. It was very much a partnership, not reliant on one another, but on a biweekly basis we got together, learnt how to be more an owner of our models. So that way we are more of a solution architect to our internal leaders, rather than just passing off the work. 

Kate Busi 0:07:50.9: 

I know that you all have been on a journey with Anaplan for several years now, as you said. I know part of what you are considering over that time is, as your business changes, how can Anaplan keep up? I think I'll ask Pietro about that in a little bit. First, Tammy, with those business changes, I know one of the largest business changes over the last couple of years has been an acquisition that you did. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges you faced with that acquisition and how you utilized Anaplan in that scenario? 

Tammy Trakas 0:08:21.0: 

Yes. In 2022, CDW acquired a company, which introduced several complexities to our existing goaling methodology. For example, the acquired company did not cover accounts in the same fashion that CDW did, which was the basis for how we set sales quotas for our sellers. We came up with a solution to, essentially, derive a coverage model for the acquired company's sellers. However, that solution did require lots of gymnastics in terms of weighting across legacy companies to ensure that it was fair across sellers covering the same account. The solution that we did come up with was very complex, but something that Anaplan was able to accommodate and manage or handle in Anaplan. Despite the complexity involved, it is something that we were able to develop within just two months. We were under a very tight timeline as it was planning season, and this acquisition happened in the midst of all of that. So it was something that we were able to develop and implement in close partnership with our amazing Spaulding Ridge consultants.  

Kate Busi 0:09:36.5: 

Thank you very much, Tammy. Okay, great. I guess going off of that a little bit, and understanding how quickly you do need to be able to make those changes, I guess my question to you, Pietro, then is what do you consider for having that strong foundation in your ecosystem and when you set up guidelines for your center of excellence? What are some of those considerations for you to make sure you have that strong foundation in your models? 

Pietro Pellerito 0:10:01.7: 

Yes, so we found ourselves that we're constantly adapting to the changes in business. Yes, we've been looking into how do we make this a more cohesive fit? How do we absorb an acquisition into the company? Right now it's, with all the fixes, they were more of like Band-Aid and duct tape fixes, which added up. So we are going through a model replacement initiative, where we can make more dynamic models that can accommodate anything that the business changes throw at us, so that we're a little more predictive and not prescriptive in how we handle changes. That required frequent collaboration with our leaders. What are their pain points? What do they need? Where can we improve? We're actually in a very exciting time right now at CDW with our use cases for Anaplan are increasing. We have new teams joining on and using Anaplan, and it's very exciting. 

Kate Busi 0:11:15.6: 

Great. Yes, I think that whenever you, I think meeting with leadership I think is really useful in this case. I think sometimes we struggle with getting ahead of things with enough time. I think the fact that you guys are focused on that is great as well. I think let's look ahead a little bit and see what's next with Anaplan at CDW? Tammy, if you could answer that for us. 

Tammy Trakas 0:11:39.6: 

Yes. Like Pietro said, it's a very exciting time. As an organization, we're currently focused on re-establishing a book-building tool to optimize territory design, streamline account allocation, and better align sales planning with our strategic objectives. We're doing this for several reasons, which you'll see up here. One, to improve scalability, which enables us to adapt territory models as the business grows or market conditions change. Drive consistency, so establish standardized rules and logistics. Rules and logic for territory and account assignment, as mentioned earlier, obviously, the quotas we're setting are driving compensation, so this part is critical. Also enhancing fairness, which you'll see here. So supporting equitable distribution of accounts, based on data-driven metrics, like IT potential, size, geography. Reducing manual effort, which I've touched on quite a bit already. Then improving transparency, so providing sales leadership with clear visibility into how books are built and assigned. 

Kate Busi 0:12:43.2: 

Awesome. I think then maybe let's, the last question here, as well as what's next for Anaplan at CDW, do you have any insights, maybe just industry-level insights that you could share with us that you're seeing as well? 

Tammy Trakas 0:12:56.5: 

Yes. As we look ahead, the role of platforms like Anaplan in sales planning is only going to grow more strategically. I think we can all recognize that just automating manual processes today is not enough. The future is about intelligent, connected planning. Real-time quota adjustments, based on market dynamics. AI-driven forecasting models that learn and adapt, and are seamlessly integrated across go-to-market functions. In addition, some of the latest technologies, like cybersecurity, cloud computing, AI, are all significant tail-ends for our business. Given our industry is hypercompetitive, we are attempting to execute on this as much as possible as an organization. Much of what you hear in the news at a macro level around tariffs, AI, latest hardware innovations and things like that are all things that we are focused on in driving towards executing on. So lots, obviously, going on in the industry right now, which I'm sure all of you guys are facing similar challenges. Yes, we've all got our work cut out! 

Lisa 0:14:11.6: 

Well, thank you so much for joining the session. Thank you, CDW. Thank you to Spaulding Ridge. Spaulding Ridge is a sponsor partner and you can find them out in the partner pavilion area. Thank you for joining. 

Kate Busi 0:14:25.2: 

Thank you everyone.  

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