That’s because building a dynamic PXM practice requires you to have the right processes, people, and tools in place, all working together to create outstanding experiences for your customers on every channel you sell on. And that’s not something that most companies can set up overnight! With so much to do in order to take your PXM practice to the next level, it can be hard to know where to even begin. That’s why Akeneo is holding a new webinar, The Building Blocks to Elevate Your Product Experience, taking place at 11 AM EST/ 5 PM CET on Wednesday, March 3. In this webinar, Akerneo’s senior director of demand generation, John Evans, and our PXM evangelist, Virginie Blot, will look at examples of great product experiences from leading merchants and brands and discuss the best practices for processes, people, and technology that can help prepare your company to unlock growth through better product experiences. Register now to discover

• Best practices for assessing your organization’s PXM maturity
• Tips for tackling technological, organizational, and human challenges
• Key building blocks for mastering product experience management

In years past, our annual gathering was typically held in-person in Paris, France, and welcomed hundreds of PIM and PXM devotees from around the globe. But obviously, due to health and safety concerns, we were forced to call-off our in-person festivities. That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting together to celebrate all things PIM and PXM, however! The show must go on, and so we are thrilled to announce a new virtual event: Unlock 2021! So, what is Unlock 2021? It’s our digital reimagining of APS! The event will feature a mix of forward-looking keynote presentations, best practices, technical workshops, customer testimonials — and of course, product announcements, and a look at our product roadmap. More importantly, it will remain an inclusive experience where every part of our community plays a role, sharing challenges, lessons, achievements, and breakthroughs. This year’s event is all about unlocking growth in the new year by expanding to new geographic markets, conquering new sales channels, and growing your product assortment. We want to help as many people as possible embrace the potential of PIM, build their PXM practice, and unlock growth for their organizations, so this year’s event is designed to be as inclusive as possible! And, to meet the exploding demand for PIM and PXM, Unlock 2021 will be open to all! Unlock 2021 kicks off on April 6 and runs throughout the entire month of April, which means you can experience the event on your own schedule! Plus, attendance is free, and because the event is all online, you can attend from your sofa, office, or anywhere else you like. So register now, and get ready to join us at Unlock 2021 and discover how you can use PIM and PXM to unlock growth!

In fact, it’s said so often that it often becomes rote, leaving merchants confused about what exactly taking an agile approach means for their business. But just because taking an agile approach has become somewhat overused doesn’t mean it’s not important. On the contrary, that’s exactly why the phrase became so common in the first place. So what does taking an agile approach really mean when it comes to managing product information? What are the benefits of adopting one? And how can you successfully and sustainably apply an agile approach to your business?

The need for an agile approach

First, let’s take a look at what an agile approach to product information management really means. Taking an agile approach to PIM means prioritizing flexibility and adaptability both in your technology stack and in your product enrichment processes. It also allows for increased learning and experimentation by promoting small, incremental innovation steps rather than huge projects where it’s easy to fall behind, allowing companies to adapt better when the need arises. An agile approach also calls for cross-functional teams to improve product data. That way, if product catalog and product data specialists are part of these cross-functional squads, they’ll develop a new perspective and better understanding of the role of said product data. Why does all of this matter? Because market conditions and trends are ever-changing (just look at the past year if you need proof) and you need to be able to roll with the punches in order to keep up in the quickly shifting omnichannel commerce space. The number of channels, as well as the amount of innovation on these channels, is ever-increasing, and new ways to reach customers are always arising, leading to new buying habits and expectations with customers for both B2B and B2C companies. Many companies have also changed their assortments — and added new suppliers — in response to changing customer demand during the pandemic. That means you need to be able to flexibly accommodate changes to your product information and catalog and ready to make changes on a dime.

There are no shortcuts

Okay, so speed and agility are clearly crucial to success — how do you pick up the pace? It can be tempting to find shortcuts to help you gather, standardize, enrich, contextualize and distribute product data. But you can’t take shortcuts when it comes to product enrichment! A waterfall methodology for product enrichment can be a barrier to moving quickly. In this approach, you need to wait for each step to be complete before moving on to the next one. If your product enrichment process is slow and inefficient, it will slow time-to-market, which results in lost selling days and lost revenue. To speed things up, you may be tempted to take shortcuts, from which a host of bad things can result. This includes low-quality product data filled with errors, inconsistencies, and incomplete information, which leads to lower customer trust, decreased conversion rates, and increased returns. A great example of a company that benefited from a more agile, easy-to-use PIM tool is Midland Scientific, a distributor of scientific instruments. They needed to change their product enrichment process in order to keep pace with a rapidly growing product line. They were able to rapidly onboard remote seasonal workers such as college students to successfully use Akeneo PIM to enrich products in a matter of weeks, helping them move more quickly without sacrificing data quality. Other agile PIM success stories include companies like French grocery chain Franprix, which was able to use PIM to fix product information problems in just 45 days, and SLV, a German lighting manufacturer and seller that used a minimum viable PIM strategy to cut enrichment time and costs by more than 80%.

Take an agile approach to product information management

So how do you take an agile approach to PIM without taking shortcuts? The key to rapidly getting value from the agility a flexible and adaptable PIM can bring is to take a “minimum viable product” (MVP) implementation approach, one that can help you get your PIM solution online quickly in order to provide accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and better product experiences for your customers. Start by looking for a solution that allows you to start quickly with an “MVP” execution. But not all PIM tools are alike — some take a more waterfall-style approach and require all decisions about the structure to be designed at the beginning. So, make sure you choose a solution that allows you to implement PIM in an as-you-go manner so that your catalog structure can be easily modified and extended as your PIM implementation matures. If you are not sure how to begin taking an agile approach, it’s a worthwhile investment to get an expert on board who can help you to develop agile methods. It’s easy to think you’re agile because of new software or solutions, but it is actually a whole set of methods and a new mindset that takes a bit of effort to adopt. The results for those that are willing to adopt this new mindset, however, can be significant. They include accelerated PIM implementation times, shorter enrichment times, accelerated time-to-market, reduced enrichment costs, increased adaptability, and better product experiences. Add that all up, and with help from Akeneo PIM and an agile approach to product experience management, you’ll see climbing conversion rates and increased revenue!

While employee experience may not get the same hype or receive the same attention that customer experience attracts these days, it’s crucial to provide your employees with an experience they don’t just like, but love. Because giving your employees an experience worth falling in love with, you can help them work more efficiently and be more productive than ever before, giving them an increased sense of satisfaction, morale, and fulfillment at work. That’s especially true when it comes to product enrichment. Giving your product enrichment team a better way to create and manage high-quality product information increases efficiency, accelerates time-to-market, and improves your product data quality. Most importantly, it helps your team deliver a product experience that can unlock growth for your business. So, how do you give your product enrichment team a great employee experience?

Make working together better than ever

Part of giving your product team a great employee experience should include making it easier — and more fun — for them to create a great product experience for your customers. So, give your team the tools that help them work together more efficiently. This includes tools that help them understand precisely what information they are or are not responsible for, so they don’t waste time and aren’t burdened by seeing irrelevant information. It also includes tools to help accelerate and ease your workflow and help managers review and approve changes to product information to ensure a high-quality experience for your customers. Be sure to also give them the tools they need to collaborate more easily with other workers both inside and outside your organization. This can include various departments of your company or even external teams such as suppliers or translations teams.

Help your team work faster and smarter

Teammates always prefer better collaboration with co-workers, but collaboration alone won’t do away with boring and repetitive tasks. Help your team decrease their manual workload by finding a solution that can automate tedious and low-value tasks so they can focus on the most essential part of their jobs — creating a great experience for your customers. To do this, give them capabilities like automation and bulk actions, which can help your team work faster and smarter going forward. Look for solutions that can even auto-populate fields using a business rules engine so manual effort is further reduced. You should also give them a tool that can help them continue to improve over time. A strong solution will score product data, highlight errors in product information and suggest improvements, so your employees know exactly where they can improve the product information. This sure beats manually checking thousands or millions of SKUs! And if you do have millions of SKUs, it’s probable that your teammates each have their own area of responsibility and need for access to the data. Pick a solution that allows you to manage access rights, privileges, and offers a way to only expose them to the product and information for which they are responsible. Being able to control which information is presented, grouping relevant data together, and being able to create sets of relevant products to work will make it a lot easier for employees to navigate the data, which will make them be able to work faster and with greater efficiency.

Get your data where it needs to go

Well-enriched and managed product information is a critical part of your omnichannel experience, but it’s crucial to remember to provide a unified, but not uniform product experience. That means tailoring your information to the many channels and locales you may sell in. This is especially important with both cross-border and omnichannel sales on the rise. But between the large and ever-growing collection of channels used by consumers, the various rules and requirements of each channel, and other concerns, distributing your product data can often be a challenge. Help your team conquer that challenge by giving them tools to help ensure your information is ready for a wide range of channels and locales with tools designed to help them more easily translate, localize, and contextualize product information. This means arming them with capabilities that can help with versioning, export, and publication processes. It also includes connectors to various marketplaces and other websites, integrations with popular eCommerce platforms, print publication platforms, and more.

Give your team increased flexibility

Finally, it’s important to remember that your team is comprised of a wide range of personalities and people. Each of these employees will likely think and work in their own unique way. So, be sure that you’re giving them the flexibility to support the way they work — whatever way they work! This means giving them the ability to manage everything needed to build a great product experience in one place, rather than forcing them to go to a wide range of solutions and tools to get the information they need. This includes capabilities like simplified product forms, a way to manage digital assets like photos and videos together with text-based product information, the ability to organize and group various products together, and more.

Give your team the right tool for the job 

So what’s the secret to offering your employees an awesome experience worthy of their love and devotion? A strong PIM solution like Akeneo PIM! Akeneo PIM has all of the tools you need to not only help your employees feel more efficient and be more productive than ever before, but also provide them with increased satisfaction, morale, and fulfillment. So, if you want to help your team collaborate more effectively, help them decrease their manual workload to work faster and smarter than ever before, get your product data where it needs to go, and give them the flexibility to work the way they want, give them Akeneo PIM! Ready to learn more about what PIM can do for your team? Check out our Customer Stories to see how Akeneo PIM has helped businesses around the globe unlock growth!

Syndication platforms can be a powerful tool to distribute the compelling product experiences you create. But to use that syndication platform to its true potential, you need to have a best-in-class Product Experience Management (PXM) practice anchored by a strong PIM solution. That way, you’ll have the high-quality product information you need to create a truly dynamic experience for customers in an omnichannel world thanks to your PIM solution, and the tools and capabilities to help you push the right data to the right channel with ease and efficiency with help from your Syndication platform.

Still don’t believe that PIM and Syndication go together like two peas in a pod? Read on to find out what syndication is, why the pair combine to create such a dynamic duo, and how Akeneo helps you harness their combined powers to create a great product experience across each and every one of your sales channels.

What is Syndication?

There are two types of sales channels where brands and manufacturers sell their products: owned and unowned sales channels. Owned channels are those that you control: your eCommerce site, your print catalog, your physical stores. Unowned channels are defined and run by someone else: this includes marketplaces like Amazon or Alibaba, social media platforms, and comparison sites like Google Shopping.

Generally speaking, syndication platforms enable you to publish a unified (but not uniform) product experience that remains as consistent as possible across your unowned sales channels. More specifically, best-in-class syndication platforms:

• Allow merchants to adapt to the ever-changing requirements of marketplaces and other unowned channels
• Help optimize product data for specific sales channels and ensure readiness.
• Make it easier to push product data to marketplaces, social media platforms, affiliates, and advertising platforms

If you are seeking to be present on many marketplaces that each have specific product listing requirements – and they all do – then a syndication platform can be a useful tool for managing those feeds and keeping your product listing compliant with marketplace requirements.

PIM and Syndication: perfect partners 

So, now that we know what Syndication is and what Syndication platforms do, it’s time to take a closer look at exactly what makes PIM and Syndication such a dynamic duo.

Some syndication platforms offer embedded PIM capabilities. But there is a very good reason why it makes sense to consider them separately. If you are selling primarily on owned channels, syndication isn’t necessary. PIM tools like Akeneo allow you to enrich and configure your product information for use in your owned channels and offer API-based connectors to eCommerce platforms as well as print channels where syndication isn’t needed. And as you add unowned channels, the product requirements are different. By decoupling your architecture to use both a PIM tool and a syndication platform, you can insulate each channel from the complexity and change happening in another, while keeping your core product information complete and consistent. This will deliver greater agility and reduce errors in your product listings across your different sales channels.

So what is it about these two that allows them to elevate your product experience management practice? The answer lies in a PIM solution’s ability to elevate the utility and value of syndication platforms. A syndication platform can be dangerous without a PIM — the last thing you want to do is syndicate poor quality, incomplete, error-laden product information to hundreds of channels! But when working together with syndication, PIM ensures brands and merchants can create an experience that is consistent across a wide range of channels but remains dynamic by complying with and taking advantage of the rules and properties for each sales channel.

As we say here at Akeneo, there’s no one product experience to rule them all. In other words, it’s impossible to deliver the same experience, or even similar experiences, via both a voice assistant and a social network, for example. Instead, omnichannel commerce requires you to create a unique and tailored experience for each channel in order to resonate with customers. Syndication platforms help you accomplish this by making it easier to send the right data to the right channel in the blink of an eye, ensuring that your customers are greeted with a dynamic yet consistent experience across your many sales channels.

How Akeneo helps PIM and Syndication work even better together

To truly take advantage of all that syndication has to offer, you need the right PIM solution. That’s where Akeneo comes in. Akeneo’s best-in-class PIM solution gives you the tools you need to create accurate, consistent, and dynamic product information. But that’s not all.

You also need a solution with a deep and wide network of partners to take your syndication skills to the next level, especially if you’re a brand or manufacturer looking to start selling direct to consumers via marketplaces like Amazon or industry-specific marketplaces. Fortunately, with Akeneo’s team of more than two dozen technology partners, including syndication partners like Productsup and Lengow, you can find the right solution to help you syndicate your enriched product data to a wide range of sales channels with relative ease. The Akeneo Marketplace offers several extensions to help you and your team find the perfect syndication platform to strengthen your PIM and build the best product experience management practice around.

So if you want to help create the next dynamic duo, pair syndication with Akeneo PIM and discover why they truly are a match made in heaven.

Want to learn more about Akeneo PIM and syndication? Request a demo!

Well, it’s true. If you don’t build your product experience with accurate, consistent, complete product information, that foundation will crumble over time, leaving you to deal with the rubble of a bad product experience. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that your product data is correct, consistent, and complete, and leaves your customers with a perfect understanding of who you are and what you sell. But while enriching products with correct, consistent, and complete product data may sound relatively simple, it’s often a daunting task that can seem impossible on its face. That’s why we put our heads together to come up with this easy-to-follow, three-step guide to perfecting your product data quality and building a strong product experience.

Step 1: Collect and standardize product data

If you want to improve your product data quality, the first step is gathering and standardizing your existing product data. Raw product data will exist in a wide range of systems, including your ERP, suppliers, existing spreadsheets, and other source systems. So, start by identifying your best and most trusted source of information and gathering all of your product data in one place. Be sure to keep an eye out for varying file formats, which often slows down the collection process. Once your product information has been gathered into one single source of truth, it’s time to standardize and structure your product information for future enrichment. This includes the varying file formats we mentioned above, along with any inconsistencies in the format of the data itself and the attribute values associated with this product data. In order to accelerate this process without introducing errors, find a solution that can use capabilities like automation, a business rules engine, and bulk actions that allow you to edit many fields in one step.

Step 2: Identify and correct sources of incorrect and inconsistent product data

You’ll also need to identify what information is missing or incorrect — and where that inconsistent or inaccurate information is coming from. This can seem easy or even obvious but is often easier said than done, so lean on the members of your team with the most intimate knowledge of each product and product attribute. Usually, these people are “business users” – those with deep knowledge of the data and can quickly spot inconsistencies. They can provide a starting point that your technical resources can then supplement. Once you’ve identified the inconsistent and incorrect information that plague your product experience and found the source of your product data problems, it’s time to clean up inaccurate product data. Start by trying to correct the source of your problems to ensure that your product data is accurate and consistent going forward, then use your PIM to update individual pieces of information. It’s also crucial to make sure your customers aren’t left with more questions than answers when browsing your sales channels. So, ensure that your product data isn’t just correct and consistent, but complete as well, by adding any data that may be missing from your sales channels.

Step 3: Iterate to great

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your PIM system won’t solve all of your problems with product data quality overnight. That’s why it’s crucial to remember that offering a great product experience built on a foundation of high-quality product data is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing effort that must be updated and maintained over time. Product information is dynamic — customer preferences and trends are always changing, products and technologies are continually being phased in and out. This means your product data and your governance policy alike will need to be updated in order to accommodate and reflect those changes so it remains accurate and consistent. It’s also vital to remove data that has become irrelevant. Once your PIM is live, you can progressively work towards improving your data by assigning your product team small side projects around certain attributes or parts of the product catalog.

Step 4: Monitor your product data quality

Now that you’ve taken the important first steps to get your product data quality to the level it needs to be, you need to monitor its current state and how it evolves over time. Ideally, your PIM solution will give you insights into not only the state of your entire catalog’s data quality but also for each individual product. That’s why Akeneo offers a Data Quality Insights feature that evaluates and scores product data quality in terms of consistency and enrichment. With the distribution of scores at the catalog level (and as with most things in Akeneo PIM, by channel and locale) you can see at a glance how data quality rates overall and how it evolves by different time increments – daily, weekly, and monthly – along with key indicators for important enrichment topics. An additional benefit of this feature is that it helps your teams easily identify where additional work on quality needs to be done so they can efficiently focus on the most important areas. So, find a PIM solution that helps you identify low-quality product data and gives you ideas to fix it. This includes giving you a quick overview of your product enrichment and consistency and measure your data quality, helping you more rapidly detect poor data and quickly improve it to reduce your time-to-market. That way, you can be sure you’re providing a compelling product experience to your customers and see increased conversion rates as a result!

Perfect your product data quality with Akeneo PIM

Improving your product data quality is no small feat. It takes a knowledgeable and agile team of product information experts and enthusiasts working together to gather product data, identify and correct problematic information, and maintain high standards for product data into the future. It also requires a high-quality solution that is purpose-built to help you collect, standardize, and enrich product information. That’s where Akeneo PIM comes in. It can help you quickly and efficiently upgrade your product data quality without introducing inaccuracies or inconsistencies, leading to a top-notch product experience. And, with our Data Quality Insights feature, you can measure and follow up on your product data quality with a simple, color-coded grading system that helps you identify bad product information and improve your product data quality.

This strange and unexpected year has made its impact felt in myriad ways, from the ways we celebrated major milestones and holidays to ways we do something as simple as buy groceries. And as a result, shoppers the world over were forced to rethink their buying habits and change the way they made purchases for everything from essential items to luxury gifts. So as 2020 turns to 2021 and the hope of a return to some form of pre-pandemic normal appears on the horizon, what can we expect in the new year? To answer that question, we’ve searched far and wide to find predictions on what trends, technologies, initiatives, and more are in store for the year to come. Here’s a recap of notable commerce trends happening in both B2C and B2B, and our perspective on how they will impact your product experience.

More multichannel shoppers

The lockdowns and stay home orders that marked 2020 left brick-and-mortar shoppers with virtually no choice. They would need to change their shopping habits and embrace multichannel shopping – and research shows that most shoppers did just that. eCommerce sales volume grew by nearly 50% year over year in 2020, and many buyers became even more channel-agnostic than they had been in the past: nearly three-quarters of customers are using multiple channels during their shopping journey, and what’s more, as many as 90% prefer the omnichannel experience to single-channel shopping. While many brick-and-mortar stores are now once again welcoming shoppers back into their stores, there’s no reason to believe that the end of lockdown restrictions will be the end of omnichannel shopping. In fact, researchers expect this trend to continue into the new year, meaning that it will be crucial that merchants are able to meet their customers where they are. That means adding new commerce channels to their arsenal and ensuring that you provide a unified, but not necessarily uniform, product experience with accurate, consistent and compelling product information across all channels.

Social shopping

As consumers raced to embrace multichannel shopping options in response to pandemic-related restrictions, a few new channels arrived on the scene at seemingly the perfect time — social shopping channels like Facebook, Instagram, and most recently, TikTok. These platforms accounted for more than $23 billion in sales in 2020, a notable increase from 2019 sales, which totaled just under $20 billion. This is another trend that’s likely to continue into the new year. Researchers expect the social commerce market to grow by 31% as more social media networks add shopping pages to their sites, leading to a global market growth of more than $200 billion over the next four years. So, what’s the key to success on these social shopping sites? Contextualization, or ensuring that you’re providing the right information and experience for the channel that you’re selling on. So, make sure you have a solution in place that can help you manage your product information and syndicate it to the right channels, every time.

BOPIS Is Here to Stay

As we head into 2021, many observers expect brick-and-mortar retailers to make a big push to encourage consumers to return to stores, particularly with hopes of a vaccine and an end to restrictions around the corner. But with omnichannel buying on the rise, these companies will be fighting against consumer habits that have become ingrained over the past year, including some of the trends we’ve already discussed. So, expect many brick-and-mortar stores to continue to invest in buy online, pick up in-store (AKA BOPIS) services.  These have already been popular among some retailers hoping to encourage increased foot traffic. But while BOPIS programs can have big results for brick and mortar stores, such as U.S. retailer Rural King, they aren’t as simple as flipping a switch and allowing consumers to pick up purchases in person. It requires organizations to implement a solution that can help them deliver the most up-to-date product data, including information about the size, weight, shape, and other relevant pick-up information.

Increased emphasis on brand values

Research shows that shoppers increasingly consider a brand’s ethics and values, including its diversity, environmental impact, its impact on the local community, and more when making purchasing decisions. Nearly half of consumers now describe themselves as “purpose-driven” shoppers, who seek products and services aligned with their values. B2B buyers are also increasingly purpose-driven. Akeneo’s own research found that product and brand values have become the leading purchasing criteria following price, with 61% of respondents citing it as a major impact on purchasing decisions. This is especially true of Gen Z, millennials, and other younger shoppers with 90% saying they believe companies must act to help social and environmental issues, indicating that this trend will remain prevalent in the coming years. So what does this mean for you and your business? It means that it’s crucial that you understand what motivates your buyers, broadcast your brand beliefs and show how you put them into action, and give your customers the information they need to make a good purchasing decision. This includes providing information about the origin of a product, organic materials used in a product, a given manufacturer’s social responsibility or carbon footprint, and more.

Continued supply chain transformation

Merchants and distributors the world over were forced to find new suppliers this year as deliveries were delayed or even canceled as a result of the pandemic. This left many organizations scrambling to find new business partners and onboard their product information. In 2021, look for more companies to continue to turn to new suppliers, ideally with an eye to finding more local partners, to be more responsive should a similar situation arise again. This means these organizations will need to be ready to tackle the issue of efficiently onboarding supplier product data, which can often be a time-and-budget-consuming process. What’s needed is a solution that enables willing suppliers to provide their product information directly to you, the retailer or distributor, in the format you need, without having to go through the painful, time-consuming manual process of editing Excel sheets, copying and pasting data, and manually reviewing and approving their submissions.

Make sure your organization is ready for 2021 and beyond

So, how can you make sure your organization will be prepared for whatever 2021 throws at it, be it social shopping, BOPIS, supply chain changes, or anything else? The answer lies in your product information and product experience. When adding to new suppliers, broadcasting your brand values, and adding BOPIS to your offering, you’ll need to be able to easily integrate and enrich product data to have success. And in order to take advantage of increased omnichannel and social shopping, you’ll need to be able to distribute that information to a wide range of channels easily and efficiently. So, make sure you invest in a solution that can help you deal with these changes in product information and create a product experience that will help you succeed in 2021 and beyond. Want to learn more about the power and potential of product information for your business? Check out some customer stories to see other organizations that have benefited from Akeneo PIM!

After a year that surprised everyone, we here at Akeneo want to take a chance to say “thank you” to our community for sticking with us this year. For the work you did to adjust and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. For your continued effort to create exciting product experiences across a wide range of channels. And, more than anything, thank you for your trust and support through the up and downs of this wild year. So, with that in mind, the Akeneo Family says goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our new video. Check it out, share with your own family, friends, and colleagues, and enjoy the holiday season! We can’t wait to continue our journey together into the new year!

So, you’ve decided it’s time for your organization to adopt a product information management (PIM) platform. Now, it’s time to make another, perhaps even more important decision — to build or buy. Will you call on your team of developers to build your own PIM, or will you buy a subscription to a PIM platform from one of the many solution providers on the market? While both building and buying a PIM have pros and cons, we believe that for most organizations, there is a definitive answer to this question — namely, buying a purpose-built PIM solution from a software vendor. Why are we so confident in that? Allow us to explain!

Cost

Let’s start with the most obvious perceived advantage that home-grown systems have over their licensed counterparts — the initial cost. If your company already employs software developers or designers, you may be thinking, why not use those resources to create a PIM rather than pay a large upfront cost or an ongoing licensing fee? You may avoid the upfront operational expense of a packaged PIM subscription when you develop your own solution, but you won’t avoid the ongoing maintenance and upkeep that your custom application will require. When running as an on-premises application, you’ll need to factor in the capital cost of hardware acquisition and upkeep, as well as integration, connectivity, and remote access, especially now.  With a purchased, cloud-based PIM, however, the software provider deals with all of the costs associated with maintaining the solution, including, but not limited to enhancements, fixes, upgrades, and more, allowing you to avoid spending money on depreciating assets like hardware, and the expense to support a technology that is on the critical path to getting your products ready for sale.

Resources

Hardware and software costs are not the only resources you need to consider. To build your own PIM will require significant resources. Consider what a software vendor requires to develop a solution: dozens of dedicated software engineers, product and project managers, and technical support resources who work 100% on PIM, and nothing else. These dedicated individuals spend thousands of person-hours and hundreds of thousands of lines of code, or more, to make a PIM solution that can support all your channels, products, and markets. In order for your organization to even begin to realize the benefit from a PIM solution, you’ll have to make a major investment, not just with your money, but with your people, your processes, and your priorities. Or, if you want to run your business in the most efficient manner possible, you could work with a PIM vendor that has already invested all of this, and more, into their solution.

Control

When it comes to building your own solution, one of the biggest benefits is control. When you’re the owner, creator, and manager of a PIM platform, you have complete control over how the software works. You and your team get to decide what features are the most important to include, what UI is best for your team, and how to prioritize updates, fixes, and other decisions that need to be made. But with great power comes great responsibility. Building your own PIM system means that you are responsible for updating that solution, which in turn means making all of the decisions when it comes to adding new features or making changes to the solution. But when you buy, your software vendor will constantly be updating the SaaS PIM solution with an ongoing stream of upgrades and enhancements, doing so at a rate that your IT team simply won’t be able to keep up with. By working with a solution provider, you don’t have to worry about enhancing or maintaining your solution, and instead be able to focus more on using that solution to provide the best product experiences possible.

Features

Most likely, if you’re reading this blog, you’re not a software developer yourself. You’re an artisan working to design beautiful and comfortable furniture, a manufacturer shipping products to retailers around the world, a retailer yourself, or a distributor. If you want your PIM solution to have the latest and greatest capabilities, including tools like embedded workflows, user management features, support for product variants, an integrated way to manage digital assets, data quality insights, and more, you shouldn’t be opting for a homegrown solution. Buying a PIM is the fastest and easiest way to keep pace with advances in the solution needed to keep your business growing. That way, you can focus on selling your products and not worrying about maintaining the tools you use to get them ready to sell. So, rather than spending valuable resources outside of your core competency, leave designing a PIM solution to the experts who concentrate on doing this on a daily basis. That way, you can focus on running your business while your solution provider takes care of running your PIM instance smoothly and securely on a cloud infrastructure.

Speed

We’ll wrap up with one of the biggest benefits of any PIM, bought, built, or otherwise, is the enhanced product creation and enrichment speeds, leading to accelerated time-to-market. This gives your team more selling days while reducing enrichment costs, helping drive revenue skyward. But developing, designing, and perfecting a PIM is a complex, time-consuming endeavor. If you’re wasting time building your own home-brewed solution, your team may never realize these benefits! Buying a packaged solution allows you to get your new PIM up and running almost instantly, allowing you to start experiencing the benefits and tracking the ROI of your investment in PIM.

Build or Buy — what’s right for you?

When you consider all of the factors that go into making the decision to build or buy software — from the time and cost of implementing a new solution to the speed you can implement it in and even the features it offers — it’s clear that buying a PIM system is the right answer for most organizations. Buying a PIM system allows you to focus on creating great experiences for your customers and growing your business without wasting time, money, effort, or any other resources outside of your core competency. But which solution on the market is right for you and your team? If you need help answering that question, check out our guide to the issues to consider when (s)electing a PIM candidate!

B2B business is going digital. According to McKinsey, 90% of B2B organizations have moved to a digitized sales process in 2020 and more than half of them find it as effective or more effective than previous models. The enforced changes to business-as-usual have revealed huge benefits to companies. However, salespeople still see the value of face-to-face interactions, and many customers still prefer the feel of a handshake deal. As we all adapt to the reality that our habits must change for the foreseeable future, salespeople are looking for tools that encourage clients to move online but still retain the feel of the personal relationships they have always valued. The answer lies in digitized sales processes fueled by conversational commerce.

What is a digitized sales process, and why invest in it?

If you are looking for a loose synonym for a digitized sales process outside of the B2B domain, then conversational commerce fits the bill. This term was only coined in 2015 but has already become a fundamental strategy for increasing sales and customer loyalty in eCommerce. It refers to the system of direct communication between a brand or business and its customers. Conversational commerce uses instant digital messages shared on platforms, and incorporates the ability to make purchases online. It is a response to the 2.5 billion people who communicate using messaging apps on mobile phones for general communication and are coming to expect the same kind of easy and quick communication with their favorite brands. In recent years, companies have started to use chatbots to open new sales channels and save significant amounts of money. This trend is growing fast —about 80% of businesses plan to use chatbots for their online businesses by 2020. Around half of shoppers say that they willingly interact with eCommerce chatbots; the next step is then to go beyond chatbots that answer questions and move to a more digitized sales process. In spite of this rapid development, bots will probably never replace human-to-human interactions between the consumer and the brand. They are improving all the time but will likely never be able to build relationships, understand emotions, and answer complex questions about products.

How using a digitized sales process boosts your online sales

New sales channels

It’s not just end-customer relationships that can benefit from conversational commerce. A digitized sales process becomes a whole new revenue stream. McKinsey estimates that it brings 5 times faster revenue growth, 30% higher acquisition efficiency, and a 40-60% reduction in sales costs.

Building relations and trust

Digitizing your sales processes helps you build better relationships with your partners and clients. It also gives clients a better chance to keep connected and stay informed.

Greater conversion, shorter time

A digitized sales process will also increase conversion rates and shortens transaction times. Sales reps can propose and suggest new products and upgrades more subtly as they talk freely with your customers.

Kickstart a digitized sales process in just 24 hours

There is no shortage of benefits to implementing a digitized sales process—but doing so is often easier said than done. The typical obstacles to success include long implementation times, a high cost of eCommerce development, and a common lack of experience with online sales strategies and tools. There is an urgent market demand for a tool that can easily connect customers with consultants in a virtual sales meeting. One that helps increase sales without disrupting existing processes. This demand has become more urgent due to the necessity of remote work; moreover, in a time of restrictive budgets, the solution should also be affordable, user friendly, and implementable in a short period of time so that Sales Representatives can start their online sales immediately. That’s where Meetsales comes in. It’s a cloud-based solution that puts the shopping cart right inside the call, letting sales reps present and compare products, discuss prices, generate offers and orders, and close deals directly in the video interface. It integrates with different PIM systems, including Akeneo PIM, to bring the product catalog to life and facilitate digitized sales processes. Meetsales integrates with the PIM system and draws all product information such as types, numbers, sizes, and colors of products. It also imports data from the CRM and exports data to ERP. The sales rep then receives this data in an application in the sales dashboard. During a meeting, a salesperson can add, edit, or remove specific items from the basket. With Meetsales, there are no document scans, no emails with offer summaries, and no frustrating price negotiations. After the call, the customer gets an overview of the accepted order, and the sales rep receives the same information in a pdf. It is a simple, mostly-automated process that saves time and eliminates the risk of mistakes. The web app is aimed at medium and small businesses that have not yet taken the step to integrate with eCommerce platforms but are already aware of the need for digitization. Meetsales is a perfect fit in such cases because it can be implemented and integrated within 48 hours. As a SaaS solution, the full functionalities are all in the price of the license and there is no need to install software beyond a simple integration with a widget that will help your new leads to get in touch with Sales. This new approach to the B2B sales process will help encourage customers and partners to explore the value of online meetings and have a substantial impact on their choices. It also allows salespeople to take a more active part in a remote buyer’s purchase decision, suggesting alternative options or complementary products to add to the cart. When sales consultants can add value to the online buying process, customer confidence and satisfaction automatically skyrockets. Learn more about digitized sales processes, Divante, and Meetsales at Divante.com