Rory O’Brien - Managing Principle, Tech Team
When the first customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce, hit the market in 1999, it revolutionized the industry. Similar to an extremely souped-up digital Rolodex, it suddenly made rich and dynamic customer information available to every salesperson in a given company.
But more than two decades later, we’re living in a very different world than the one Salesforce’s groundbreaking CRM was first born into. And that truth is, the CRM of the early aughts just isn’t enough on its own to keep your business ahead of the pack when it comes to efficiently coordinating today’s mountains of rich, ever-changing product data.
While many CRMs make do with proprietary custom integrations to get product data into their system from Enterprise Resource Planners, or ERPs, the “flavor” of the data isn’t the same as a PIM. Sales and marketing teams need the data from PIMs to deliver a meaningful message to their prospects and customers.
The good news is that there are a lot of ways a product information management (PIM) system, such as Salsify, particularly when paired with a product experience management system, like Pimly, can supercharge your existing Salesforce system experience—not only for your customers, but also for your entire business ecosystem.
When talking to clients, there are three key use cases for Pimly:
1) Get every team access to instantly up-to-date, rich product info
With Pimly on your side, your sales teams will instantly have access to all your latest product information. This data, and the way it is presented, is far more than your standard list of dry bullet points, but rather dynamically modeled rich photos and videos, technical specs, and more—all available at their fingertips without ever having to re-train or even leave the Salesforce environment.
Plus, that convenience applies for every team with access to Salesforce - not just Sales. This means your service teams can more quickly and easily walk through product issues with customers, and marketing can confidently build campaigns from the most accurate product data.
2) Deliver context-specific product data
PIMs are great for maintaining complex data models and helping to syndicate to external sites. However, when we start to pull data from the PIM into CRM, we can join the data in ways not possible to when the PIM is siloed.
A perfect example of joining product and CRM data is having product properties vary on a customer to customer basis. A product might have a Stock-Keeping Unit (SKU) that varies for different customers. Because it is the same product, duplicating the product record is not ideal.
Customer A: SKU = 123
Customer B: SKU = 456
With Pimly, it is easy to supplement PIM data within Salesforce by combining it with data from your CRM. Simply set up the varying product data and Pimly components will know how to display the product data given the customer context. Customer A see’s “SKU: 123”, and Customer B sees “SKU: 456.”
Context can be varied on more than just current running users and Pimly opens up the door of possibilities to customize your product data in ways not previously possible.
3) Easily create customer-facing product websites
A major benefit of Salesforce is that users from different groups have access to the same data. From sales to service to marketing, users are all creating content using the same tools but visualizing it in ways that are specific to their function.
Once you have a connection to your PIM and your data is set up in the ideal state, the areas and ways you can expose that data and utilize it open up tremendously. You can then begin to leverage your product data across your entire business ecosystem.
One way is through Experience Sites, which allows those who aren’t part of your organization—like your customers and partners—to view your Salesforce data. Using out-of-the-box Pimly components, your marketing or sales teams can easily “drag and drop” to create rich websites that display product images and videos in just a few minutes with minimal to no training. Not only that but Pimly’s dynamic product model can deliver targeted content specifically for the audience visiting the site. Pimly allows you to easily start utilizing all of that powerful data in your PIM across all your customer channels.
Turn your Salesforce CRM into a product data powerhouse with PIM experts
Whether you’re ready to take the next step with a PIM or you just want to learn more about what linking up your Salesforce with a service like Pimly could do for your organization, contact an Aleysian expert today.
Interested in seeing Pimly in action? Request a demo here.