If you work in the wholesale industry, it’s most often essential to offer as wide a range of products as possible.
When you expand your product lines, you can grow your target audience, amplify brand awareness and maximise profits.
According to IRI, having a comprehensive product range in place is critical when it comes to discovering new customers, as well as keeping existing ones.
However, introducing new product lines is not without its drawbacks. The more items there are to sell, the more information there is to manage. This can lead to unwieldy spreadsheets, a lengthy time to market and inaccurate data across different marketing channels.
The good news? A Product Information Management system, or PIM for short, can help wholesalers keep track of all their items and result in a faster time to market.
Here’s how you can get the best product onboarding experience with PIM
PIM for marketing: what is it?
A Product information management system has been designed to handle large amounts of complicated product information.
As it is centralised, all data is managed in one place, reducing the need for multiple spreadsheets siloed across different departments.
The advantage of good PIM is it can be easily integrated into your other systems. This means any new products can be pushed out to your distribution channels as soon as possible. As well as this, your customers and suppliers can be made aware of new product lines with one click of a button.
With PIM, you can update new product information rather than entering it directly into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This saves resources and eliminates red tape as you can add new product lines yourself without relying on your ERP team.
Find out more about PIM for marketing in our explainer guide.
The advantages of PIM when it comes to product onboarding best practices
There are several benefits to introducing PIM to your wholesale business:
You eliminate manual processes
With PIM, you only need to add new product data to one place. Not only does this increase accuracy, but it also saves time. This means your team can focus on growing the business instead of checking and updating multiple data sources.
You reduce time to market
Many wholesalers wonder how to reduce time to market and ensure customers can buy new products as soon as possible.
Time is of the essence when making a new product available for sale. If a product is six months late to market, it earns a third fewer profits over the space of five years.
Utilising PIM means you save time and ensure your product data is as detailed and complete as possible.
You get faster onboarding and continuous enrichment of new products
Most wholesale companies make several annual product line replacements every year. This makes it essential to ensure the best and most hassle-free product onboarding experience possible.
Not only is product onboarding faster, but PIM also provides a clear overview of where you lack data, so you can ensure your staff always have the information they need to hand.
How to reduce time to market with Product Information Management
At Perfion, we offer a Product Information Management tool that let you look after your entire product range, whether you need to onboard ten items or ten thousand.
Norwegian business Løvenskiold Handel manages one million products, with amends to data needed every single day. Before PIM, the company relied on a combination of an ERP system and multiple Excel spreadsheets, making it hard to update and validate new information.
The Perfion Product Information Management solution means Løvenskiold Handel can swiftly and accurately verify new product content. The company’s Masterdata department can push new item information to staff and customers quicker than ever before.
Find out more about the product onboarding best practices we provide to Løvenskiold Handel.
In conclusion: PIM leads to the best product onboarding experiences
If you want a faster time to market when it comes to launching new products, the data management tools of a PIM can help you stay efficient.
PIM has many other advantages too. For example, you can use it to update existing product data easily and send it automatically to all your sales and marketing channels. This means your website, product data sheets and print catalogues will always contain the most up-to-date information.
