CDW Field Sales Force Reaches 30 States
The Vernon Hills, Ill.-based solution provider has more than 80 field-sales representatives, mostly servicing public sector accounts, Edwardson said. But CDW has its sights set on increasing its commercial field-sales business, he said.
For example, during a CIO panel at the Raymond James conference, Ron Melnyk, the CIO of Anne Klein, mentioned that his company had a $9 million IT budget this year. Edwardson immediately wired an e-mail back to headquarters to find out how much of the pie CDW had won. Within minutes, he received a reply that Anne Klein had bought $40,000 from CDW in 2002 and $63,000 in 2003. "I sent Harry [Harczak, CDW's executive vice president of sales] back an e-mail that it sounds like a good opportunity for our field-sales force to make a call," Edwardson said.
"We're not looking to service Fortune 500 companies with a field-sales organization. We're looking at Fortune 2000. Those are the companies that will be very interesting to CDW. We will grow our field sales next year," Edwardson said.
CDW plans to increase its own IT investments to better support a field-sales force and to help integrate its recent acquisition of MicroWarehouse assets, he said.
"We need to upgrade to handle increased levels of revenue and volume. We're moving more and more toward wireless. We have wireless throughout our buildings now," he said.
CDW also plans to open a second distribution center next year, but it likely will not be MicroWarehouse's facility, which CDW is jointly looking to sell with MicroWarehouse.
CDW has no plans to build a field services organization such as the one competitor Insight Enterprises has after that company's acquisition of Comark.
"Our model is we will do configuration and imaging only on our own premises. I'm not really interested in having 10,000 people in 10,000 service vans," Edwardson said.
Instead, CDW will continue to sell services SKUs, mostly from large service providers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Decision One and Unisys, Edwardson said.