From Spreadsheets to Automated Solution
February 7, 2019
CDW
CDW REINVENTS THE BUSINESS OF SPONSORSHIPS
CDW provides technology products and services to business, government, and education. It drives $12.9 billion in sales and employs over 8,400 full-time employees.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
By replacing its manual process with a streamlined solution, CDW uses real-time events data to unlock significant new value from its sports sponsorships.
THE CHALLENGE
Dan Frystak joined CDW in 2008 to manage their sponsorship portfolio, which was based primarily in the PGA TOUR. CDW provides technology solutions to businesses, and the company understood that sports sponsorships were a creative way to reach prospects and customers in a unique setting.
Events are a huge part of CDW’s culture. We use them to generate excitement, tell our brand story, and inform prospective customers of our solutions capabilities.
Sponsorships & Brand Marketing
The problem? Despite its sophisticated understanding of the sponsorship market, CDW still relied upon old-world techniques to manage its portfolio and tickets.
“When I originally came in,” recalls Dan, “we were managing all of our tickets through spreadsheets and email.” Initially, these manual systems were used to primarily track tickets and assets for the PGA TOUR, but Dan soon started to grow the company’s broader portfolio into other sports.
“And spreadsheets and email just didn’t scale to a business of our size.”
To make things more complicated, this manual approach was managed by individual salespeople at the regional level. This made it difficult to tell if event tickets were being used properly, and if they were being given to the right people.
“We needed a more holistic approach.”
THE SOLUTION
Dan soon discovered TicketManager in his search for a centralized, scalable solution to manage all of his sponsorship assets. With TicketManager, he could easily organize, track, and measure all of his event assets across all of CDW’s sponsorships. Data which had previously been maintained by regional sales officers was entered into the system, giving Dan a 360°-view across his entire portfolio.
“I could suddenly see results,” he explains. “I no longer had to rely on anecdotal evidence. TicketManager helped me really understand the impact of our sponsorship efforts.”
Today, CDW’s sports sponsorships extend beyond the PGA TOUR. It sponsors properties in the MLB, NFL, NBA and more.
And it manages all these event assets through TicketManager.
Thanks to TicketManager, we have a really rich data set for tickets and event ROI that lets us make truly data-driven decisions.
Dan Frystak
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