Great out of school entry level position, making it a long term career is questionable. - Account Manager CDW Employee Review

2.0
Nov 4, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very excellent work culture. It is full of young enthusiastic people. There is no real micro-managing occurring, you are measured on call stats such as talk time and amount of dials, but those are so easy to cheat it's not even an issue. You are left alone for the most part to do your job, and hassled no where near as much as other IT sales positions. A lot of great benefits such as free happy hours, after work events like cubs games, whirleyball, free premier steak dinners, and great location.

Cons

You are blinded with all the amenities of the workplace, especially when you are young, and do not really realize how your profit is being nickel and dimed away from you. The pay structure is terrible when you actually take a good hard look at it. You are payed on a trailing 3 month matrix. This means that you are responsible for having at least achieved an 80% sales goal for the entire total of the previous 3 months, otherwise you receive no commission for the current month. What this requires employees to do, at least the successful ones, is try and sandbag orders by spreading out their orders in order to cover themselves for the next 3 months. Also this means that one bad month can drag you down for the next 2 months after that. So a real life example is if your goal for the last 3 months in total was 600k and you only sold 479K because of one tough month that you had, you receive none of the commission on that 479k. This place is really a coin flip on whether you will be successful or not. All the good accounts are being hoarded either by more senior AM's or by your manager, so basically you have to wait around for someone to quit, die, or until your manager has believed you to prove yourself. You will not find some hidden gem that no one is working, that truly is not possible. So if you get put on a very veteran team where no one is leaving any time soon, and your manager is hitting his sales goal through these workers, there is little to no chance you will ever be allowed to work anything of importance. CDW is great for working with enterprise level facilities, but if you do not have accounts with 500 users and up, you will struggle to win deals because they are so overpriced on everything.

Explore other reviews about CDW

5.0
Jul 15, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice place to work at

Cons

nothing comes to mind now

3.0
Jul 6, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You have the ability to sell full stack solutions, services and software.

Cons

I have worked at CDW for 10yrs and every single year they have changed the comp plan in a way that makes it harder for sellers to make money (constantly moving the goal post). Prior to 2020 CDW had little to no lay offs now it is happening every six months. They say the reasons is to reduce cost and improve efficiencies BUT as a company our sales continue to grow along with the C-levels pockets.

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