How to sell PIM to your boss

You know there’s a problem in your company, one that’s slowing your team down, causing them to make mistakes, and, most importantly, costing your organization revenue. It’s your product information management tools and processes.

Fortunately, you also know of the perfect solution — a PIM, or product information management solution. So how do you convince the people in charge to adopt a new tool and new approach? Getting buy-in from company executives is key to making your PXM strategy a success. So, if you’re wondering how to approach each position, read on to discover our tips for on how to sell PIM to your boss.

CMOs and Heads of eCommerce

Marketing and eCommerce executives are typically bastions of brand identity and guardians of growth, asked to push their teams forward to new channels and locales in search of new customers. They know that their success hinges on the quality of the product experience customers are presented with when they shop on any channel and are constantly looking to connect with customers in new and innovative ways. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure they understand just how powerful PIM can be when it comes to crafting a compelling product experience. Explain that your company will be able to enhance its brand identity and growth objectives with an exceptional product experience. This will lead to reduced returns and higher conversion rates.

Product marketers and catalog managers

Speed and accuracy — those are the two biggest priorities for product marketing and catalog managers. These professionals are obsessed with productivity gains and reducing errors. Their goal? To make every process faster, more efficient, and more accurate. So, to convince these managers to invest in a PIM solution, you’ll need to work fast to convince them that your new tool will help you pick up the pace without falling victim to errors or inconsistencies. The good news? PIM may be the perfect combination of speed and precision when it comes to product enrichment. A good PIM solution will simplify the lives of product marketers and catalog managers by automating and accelerating their current processes. Eliminating manual tasks helps cut enrichment time, and accelerates time-to-market — and reduces the incidence of typos, missing data, incomplete data, and other errors commonly found when manually managing product information. What’s more, with all of this manual work taken care of, they’ll be able to focus on more value-added tasks, like creating compelling product experiences. Talk about an easy sell!

IT decision-makers

When it comes to IT managers, they don’t just care whether a job is done — they want it done right. They’re interested in getting the right tools to help marketers do their jobs the right way and ensuring those tools work well in their existing technology infrastructure. What’s more, IT teams typically are dealing with a litany of issues and requests from around your organization, so they want to empower data experts, facilitate data governance, and eliminate gaps from legacy systems in order to ensure your product information processes run as smoothly as possible. So, explain that a PXM solution is specifically designed to play nicely with your existing tech stack. You can also tell them that PIM is a purpose-built tool designed to help control who does what with the product information and sync with other enterprise applications, so they won’t have to worry about who has access to the data. Finally, remind them that a good PIM solution will offer flexible SaaS deployment options and a robust ecosystem of technology and solution partners to help implement, support, and extend the solution.

C-level decision-makers

When it comes to the C-suite, it’s all about the money. Sure, they want to find a solution that can help their teams work more efficiently and reduce manual tasks. But what they really care about is the bottom line — the cost of a solution, whether it will help cut costs, and the impact on revenue the investment in a new solution will deliver. This emphasis on revenue and return on investment may seem daunting, but the bottom line is that PIM truly does help your bottom line. It’s a solution that helps you cut enrichment costs by accelerating time-to-market and reducing your team’s workload while helping you grow revenue by making it easier to expand to new channels and new markets. In fact, Akeneo clients have seen their enrichment costs fall by as much as 80%, conversion rates climb by 400%, and even shopping cart sizes grow by as much as 500%. So, show your executive team how to calculate your PIM ROI and use our helpful list of KPIs to track the performance of your new PIM once you’ve sold your team on its effectiveness.

Sell PIM to your boss

Whether it’s your head of IT, product marketing manager, head of eCommerce, or even your CEO, PIM has something for everybody. The key is to know your audience and make sure you’re telling a story that speaks to what matters most to them. Do they still need further convincing? Tell them they can learn more about the benefits of PXM  achieved by other organizations by checking out some Akeneo customer stories or help them discover more about the sweet science of product experience management with our eBook, PXM for Dummies.