How to Drive Growth with an Integrated PIM
Analysts define business growth as improving some or all aspects of an enterprise’s operations. Many organizations typically pursue business growth through some means. Product Information Management software drives growth for all companies that sell a product.
These methods include boosting the business’s top line or revenue streams with increased product sales or service income.
Some schools consider ‘business development’ a form of business growth. Business development involves aggregating tasks and processes for creating and implementing growth opportunities within and between organizations.
Business growth/development can be considered a subset of business commerce and organizational structure theory. Some scholars also regard business growth as pursuing medium—to long-term value for a business concern through employees, customers, markets, and relationships.
Overview
In a review of scholarly work, professionals view business growth as a concept relating to discrete projects, specific/targeted types of growth, and enhanced organization processes.
Business growth measures value increases in one or more units of a business concern. Such groups may include Sales, Marketing, Finance, Mergers and acquisitions, Strategy, and proposed management.
Fundamentals of Business Growth
Business growth does not occur in a vacuum. Instead, businesses and organizations undertake deliberate and measured steps toward achieving growth in desired areas of their enterprises.
Business growth entails cultivating long-term value from a business or enterprise within the limits of available resources. In other words, entrepreneurs look to achieve sustainable business growth. While no two companies share the same peculiarities, there are viable growth fundamentals that are common to most enterprises. They are as follows:
Clear Statement of Purpose
Every business/enterprise needs a clear statement of its purpose. Also called the “Why we are here and do what we do” term, a statement of intent serves as a bulwark or foundation upon which entrepreneurs execute business ideas and strategies.
A definite purpose affects decisions regarding what employees to recruit, what relationships to cultivate, and other issues.
Sustainable growth thrives on a sense of purpose. A strong statement of intent forms the basis for a company’s Unique Selling Point (USP), which gives insight into why a venture’s product or service is better than a competitor’s.
With a clear statement of purpose, a company can chart the best route or process path to achieving its growth objectives.
Brand Presence
Another important vehicle for creating sustainable business growth is having a powerful brand. Your company’s brand speaks for you when you are not there. All the time, every time! It is the medium by which your business emotionally connects with your customers.
A strong brand focuses on a business’s target audience, connects with the general public, and inspires existing and potential customers.
Building a strong brand that ensures repetitive business and fosters customer loyalty is crucial if you desire sustainable growth.
Build Partnerships and Collaborations
Business owners might multitask at the early stages of the venture. Such entrepreneurs may function as business directors, managers, stockkeepers, and secretaries, among other roles. However, as the business gathers momentum, taking on more than one can handle might be damaging.
Achieving sustainable business growth entails managers focusing on areas of strength while outsourcing other tasks.
Maintain your customer base.
Research reveals that finding new customers costs more than retaining existing ones. Other studies show that reducing customer defection ratios positively impacts profitability by as much as 25 percent.
Statistics such as the above show that sustainable growth hinges on making your existing customer base happy and contented with your products and services.
Be mindful of Business Ecosystems.
Organizations in the new millennium thrive in a functional business environment with mutually beneficial inter-relationships.
One such ecosystem is the Information Technology sector, where website designers/developers, software programmers, and SEO marketers collaborate to achieve common goals.
Identifying communities and relationships that provide structures and support is essential for your business to experience sustainable growth.
Hustle for repeat sales.
One hallmark of a business that desires sustainable growth is creating avenues for repeat sales. Beyond having a clear purpose and a powerful brand, your product must consistently and profitably satisfy a want.
Repeatable sales hinge on a scalable sales model. Once businesses meet this criterion, sustainable business growth is possible.
Proactive and Adaptive Management
Business plans help to give a venture solidity and focus. However, times will come when prevailing realities demand that the entrepreneur make decisions to match such extraneous factors.
A proactive and adaptive leadership ensures businesses have the leverage and freedom to create, adjust, innovate, and lead.
Achieving sustainable business growth becomes a concrete possibility when personal, interpersonal, and working lives cohabitate in mutual understanding.
The Stages of Business Growth
Businesses, no matter their sizes, organizational structures, and management styles, face similar challenges on the path to growth/expansion. However, companies can overcome these problems by applying themselves to the stages of business growth. These stages equip businesses to make informed decisions and follow the most expedient pathways to growth. They are as follows:
Existential Stage:
Under this stage, the company is concerned with acquiring new customers and providing products/services for a fee.
Entrepreneurs, at this stage, grapple with questions such as:
Can the business get enough customers, deliver products, and provide services well enough to become viable?
Can the venture expand from the first customer or pilot production process to a broader sales base?
Is there enough money to cover the financial demands of this teething phase?
This stage of business growth is peculiar to small businesses, whose primary concern is staying afloat. Companies in the Existence Stage range from newly founded restaurants and retail stores to high-technology manufacturers that have yet to stabilize production or product quality and build a steady clientele base.
Survival Stage:
Ventures that reach this stage demonstrate that their business has the potential to succeed. The organization has built a pool of customers and offers them products/services when needed.
The survival stage shows that the business has progressed from mere survival to determining the relationship between revenue generation and running expenses.
Sustainable growth is assured when businesses can create a balance between income and expenditure.
Gathering Momentum/Success
At this stage, the business owners face some critical decisions. The question is whether management should seek expansion by taking advantage of positive cash flow, a reliable brand, and an increasing pool of loyal customers. Or would it be preferable to steady the ship and consolidate the gains recorded thus far?
Sustainable growth for companies at this stage depends on whether the owners decide to divest their interests by bringing on more shareholders or selling the business outright.
Take-off
The business is nearing most of its goals/objectives at this stage. It features surplus cash (a favorable bottom line), a powerful brand, loyal customers, scalable sales, and a stable organizational structure.
Operational and strategic planning are other features of business at the Take-off stage. The power of delegation is an essential tool at the venture’s disposal.
Maturity
Maturity signifies that a business is expanding on most or all of its projected sales and revenue streams. Repeat business occurs across multiple customer engagement channels, with a responsive and competent management structure.
Companies in this stage can achieve sustainable growth by implementing key budgeting tools, strategic planning, and management by objectives and operating standard cost objectives.
What is an integrated PIM System?
An integrated Product Information System (PIM) communicates with other essential systems to automatically display real-time, updated, and accurate information about products /services for sale.
These critical systems include E-commerce websites, online marketing platforms, web portals, internet services, and electronic product catalogs. These systems link seamlessly to the integrated PIM System to obtain product information, specifications, and images. Employees display this data in the desired information channel or route.
Overview of an Integrated PIM System
It is established that storing product information in a centralized PIM system is powerful. However, present-day business realities also demand sharing these data/information packets with other business systems to boost sales and revenue earnings.
Businesses opt for an integrated Product Information Management software to retrieve and distribute information from a centralized location to other business ecosystems.
Customer-facing, prospect-facing, and peer-facing systems associated with e-commerce websites, web portals, and electronic catalogs need information from a central store. An integrated PIM system can help in this regard.
Linking Products for Kits, Bundles, and Increased Sales
An integrated PIM system allows businesses to link products and other items for up-sells, cross-sells, kitting, and bundling transactions.
These terms are features of a typical business ecosystem involving mostly related industries or sectors. Linked products are defined as similar items or items that often lead to the purchase of other products.
Businesses deploying integrated PIM Systems can feature their products alongside sister items. The product data is extracted from their electronic catalog or e-commerce website.
Indicators that a business needs an integrated PIM
Specific signs indicate that a business concern can make the most of an integrated PIM system. These indicators are as follows:
The haphazard search for product information within and outside the organization
When pieces or sets of essential product data are stored in various locations within and outside information repositories, a business needs an integrated PIM.
A scenario where some product information is on a spreadsheet, some on a hard drive, and some is stored in a sister organization’s repository reduces efficiency and promotes customer drawbacks.
Such a PIM system collates and organizes this information into a cohesive whole. It enhances access to multi-channel and multi-organizational structures, and customers gain quick access to various levels of product data across similar/related fields, boosting sales and revenues.
Employees spend unnecessary time on searches and queries
If staff and team members spend copious amounts of time rifling through tonnes of product data, it is time to go for an integrated PIM system. With no organization or structures to access product prices, images, and specifications, what results is an inefficient process that may yield no tangible results.
The situation worsens when customers demand information about related products and services.
An integrated PIM system efficiently links and extracts relevant product information across multiple repositories and channels, allowing employees to attend to customer queries promptly.
Conflicts in Product information and its veracity
Customers need accurate and updated product data to make informed purchases. Where this is lacking, sales drop and customer retention plummets as well.
The business suffers when employees find it challenging to select appropriate product data and ensure its accuracy.
An integrated PIM system creates linkages to verified and accurate product data and the structures for accessing such data at the click of a button.
Inconsistent storage of data
Product data stored in various formats poses challenges for sales staff in any business organization. Uniformity in product data storage, including product prices, images, and specifications, ensures employees can access and distribute such information across multiple channels/funnels for customer engagement.
This feature assumes greater significance for collaboration among firms offering similar product types, where sales of one item lead to purchasing another.
Errors discovered post-sale
Mistakes detected after a product’s sales usually stem from incomplete pricing and specification details available to the affected staff at the time.
Underpriced merchandise may stem from missing or outdated information; the employee might charge less for a product with extra useful features.
The losses become significant if this information shortfall is transmitted to unrelated systems. With an integrated Product Information Management system, all systems that need product information can automatically retrieve it from the PIM.
Customers and Inaccurate Information
Customers must make informed purchase decisions based on accurate product data and specifications. Time also counts when such clients visit several similar sites offering related products.
If available product data is inaccurate, customers get frustrated, hurting a business’s revenue and sales target.
An integrated PIM system averts this potential crisis. Such a system is structured to effectively link, organize, retrieve, and distribute accurate product information from data repositories to the connected systems.
Receipt of Inaccurate Orders
This problem stems from point 5. Inaccurate product information leads to purchasing the wrong product based on misplaced expectations.
If product data listings fall short by some parameter, it may translate to a customer receiving a dress with the wrong color or size.
Businesses can prevent these mistakes by using an integrated PIM system.
How does an Integrated PIM system drive growth?
Businesses desire to work in cohesion and with a strategic focus, both within their borders and in cooperation with other companies, suppliers, and vendors.
This desire translates to the ability to harmonize operations involving the availability of product information in an accessible manner.
When employees can retrieve product information across multiple engagement channels to serve clients’ needs, sales boost.
An integrated PIM provides the platform for attaining this level of operational efficiency. With an integrated PIM, businesses are empowered to Maximize Profits, Streamline Operations, Cut Costs, Increase Customer Satisfaction, and Optimize Productivity
In more detail, an integrated PIM system boosts business growth in the following ways:
An integrated PIM enhances e-commerce
Firms manage their e-commerce websites from backend portals by using an integrated PIM system. The process begins with product information added or updated in the company’s PIM system. The linkage to an integrated PIM ensures that the e-commerce site seamlessly retrieves and displays the affected product data, with a click of a button.
Smooth access to product data ensures that customers find the information they need on the go, ensuring that the business consistently makes sales.
This functionality exists for other engagement platforms like web services, portals, and electronic catalogs.
An integrated PIM boosts employee productivity and reduces downtimes
Businesses save on labor costs and experience a boost in operational efficiencies with an integrated PIM system.
With all product information and data in a single store or repository, it is easier for affected staff to retrieve targeted information and relay it to customers.
Another benefit is that updated or added data in individual PIM systems is communicated to other systems via an integrated PIM. An integrated PIM also plays the crucial role of ensuring the accuracy of product data, including prices, images, and specifications. With improved data accuracy and reduced contradictory information, employees and customers do not grapple with the consequences of fixing intensive/extensive marketing mistakes.
An integrated PIM assists with Kitting and Bundling
Businesses achieve cross-organizational cooperation, whereby products are linked together. Take, for instance, a toothbrush and a toothbrush holder.
An integrated PIM system retrieves the information to automatically show the companion item (the holder) on the primary item’s (the toothbrush) product page. In this way, customers can choose to pick one item over the other if they wish.
The cycle flow for an integrated PIM shows that the toothbrush has a companion item, which staff can then offer as an upsell to the customer.
How Using PIM Can Lead to Better Sales, Higher PIM Brands Valuation, and Enterprise Success?
Product Information Management software (PIM) helps companies maintain data and drive their expansion forward. Since competition is high in the manufacturing and automobile industries, companies must use suitable PIM software.
A strong PIM strategy supports businesses’ expansion, improves their brands, and overcomes typical manufacturing obstacles.
Improved product information can sharpen sales, while proper product data can hinder them. PIM tools care for product information so businesses can send accurate product details everywhere.
- When the catalog is organized and simple, customers benefit.
- Real-time updates allow dealers and sellers to minimize their manual mistakes.
- Faster data allows more rapid launches of products and boosts the company’s PIM sales.
People are more likely to buy when products are clearly shown and specifications are correct. As a result, there is a direct relationship between PIM development and sales performance.
Helps Manufacturers PIM Increase Their Revenue
Many people working in manufacturing find product complexity and scattered information to be complex problems. Having effective product information management software means everyone works from the same facts.
- The platform assists marketing, sales, logistics, and customer service staff.
- It saves time that would be used to fix or change product details.
- Businesses can quickly expand their market by having local and channel content for social media.
An efficient production workflow helps drive mMFGrevenue growth, making it possible. Using a PIM solution improves a manufacturer’s financial performance.
Supporting a Brand Value Gain by Communicating Consistently
The trust and dependability customers experience are at the heart of brand value. If the information about the product is not the same everywhere, people become confused, and the brand’s credibility weakens.
Making use of a PIM system:
- Through testing, the data in marketing content is up-to-date.
- Link up with digital asset management tools for a fully informed brand look.
- Allows local branches of brands to use content in numerous languages (as seen in PIM for brands).
This lowers consumer risks and increases the brand’s value and reputation.
Resolving the Existential Crisis of Product Information
Since businesses must handle many sales channels, different products, and digital tools, many end up in a PIM existential crisis. When product information grows too quickly, teams find it hard to manage, resulting in mistakes, wasted time, and things they miss.
You need to implement a PIM enterprise solution. Such a system makes it possible to efficiently manage large numbers of products, their versions, and their digital assets in one place. It ensures that all software is compliant with regulations everywhere it is used. Organizations that streamline their work can focus more on creativity and future growth.
Dealing with the PIM Meaning and Its Scale
Many companies want to learn what PIM means and how it helps before investing in a system. Fundamentally, a Product Information Management tool involves creating a place to assemble, manage, and disseminate product details on different platforms. Companies must maintain good online listings, add new products more quickly, and improve cooperation among departments.
Conclusion
The norm for many businesses is pushing the narrative toward conducting transactions on e-commerce platforms across various channels, with efficiency and accuracy.
At the heart of this projection is the need for accurate and qualitative product information. Wholesalers, distributors, suppliers, vendors, and customers require comprehensive information management and workflow automation.
An integrated PIM system harmonizes the various facets of the business ecosystem by offering automated client/server systems, web-capable solutions for customer relationship management, order entry, inventory control, shipping, returns management, accounting, Electronic Product Data Interchange, and E-Commerce enablers.
Now that you know how PIM drives brand and distributor growth, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
