Sales, Selling, Marketing, CRM & Sales Force Automation Tips & Tactics

I assume you’re growing frustrated with the cost and hassles of getting and managing product data from your suppliers.  And I’m sure you aren’t happy about missing out on sales and marketing opportunities as a result.

Product information management or PIM is designed to fix those problems and more. Specifically designed for the complex product data requirements of distributors, a Supplier Portal can save you time and money in dealing with your vendors’ data and can help you get your products to market faster, publish your catalogs more efficiently and with fewer errors, and keep your e-commerce Web sites dynamically up to date.

A fine  Supplier Portal is a secure Web-based application that lets your vendors easily post their product content for your use in sales and marketing channels.  Here’s how it works:

• Your suppliers upload their data using a variety of convenient methods

• Business rules and workflow ensure the data conforms to your requirements

• The data is housed and managed in a central repository that all authorized users can access

• You enrich the basic product data with detailed, search-friendly marketing content and attributes

• And, you dynamically connect the data to your catalog software, Web content management system, and other channels for product content

Think how much faster you could roll out new products, publish catalogs, update your Web site, and jump on new business opportunities with this secure, browser-based system.  Even better, the Enable Supplier Portal gives you a channel to collaborate and communicate with your suppliers, too.  It’s like a social network for your supply chain.

Now compare that with what you have to go through now to get product data from your suppliers.  Chances are you have to scrape content from PDFs and spreadsheets and carefully post it into your internal systems.  Then you have to comb through every bit and byte to make sure it conforms to your naming conventions and other parameters.   And, there’s a good chance a lot of it will be out of date by the time it’s published to your catalogs and Web pages.

If that sounds all too familiar, then it’s no surprise to you that companies spend an average of 25 minutes per item per year manually fixing and cleansing out-of-sync product information – that’s more than $3 million in annualized operational costs for a company with 250,000 items.

On the other hand, getting a better handle on your suppliers’ data means…

…thousands of hours saved in data entry and merchandising time

…a two-week average reduction in speed to market for new items

…a 3 to 5 percent reduction in stock-outs

…and many other benefits, too.

Our company, PIM-data.com has written a report on how to set up a Supplier portal. Please send a request to info@pim-data.com and your copy will be sent to you.

Thank you, Peter Fuller, http://www.pim-data.com