Have You Hit the PIM Ceiling? | Jay Roxe, CMO, inriver | Ep. 9

[00:00:00] Welcome to Data vs. Commerce, where we explore the messy middle between database and doorstep. I'm Matt Johnson. And I'm Floyd Blakey. Let's dig in. Okay, we are here with Jay Roxe. It's the first time I've said it out loud. It sounds like a diagnosis instead of a name. Did I get that right, Jay? You want to tell us about yourself? It is, Floyd. Great to be here with you and Matt. And as somebody said, it's not just a name, it's a sentence.

[00:00:27] But the... With an exclamation on the end, Jay. With an exclamation on the end. Yeah. Jay Roxe. Don't I wish. I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. So tell us about yourself, Jay. Why are you here? What do you do? And what are you interested in? Floyd, Matt, everybody listening, name is Jay Roxe. I work at InRiver on the marketing team

[00:00:52] and really just interested in the shifts we're seeing in the market, the move to people trying to bring products to market faster, what's required, and how the commerce landscape is changing. Cool. Also in marketing. Kind of what we're all about too, Jay. It absolutely is. And that's why we're having you on here. We're kindred spirits.

[00:01:13] And I'm also in a marketing role in my day job. And one of the exercises that I do on an ongoing basis is, you know, listening in to our own customer calls and some of our sales calls and, you know, really getting a feel for how prospects and customers talk about their problems. I think that's so important. And one of the phrases that I keep hearing, especially in the last six months is this feeling of hitting a ceiling. They're, you know, chugging along,

[00:01:42] but they feel like they've outgrown their tools or their processes. Everything is run by workarounds. Everyone's living inside an Excel spreadsheet, which I think is how most businesses operate. So I want to dig into that a bit with you, given your expertise in the PIM area and talk about what you see when folks come to you and they want to know more about moving to a modern PIM. What's the, I guess, what is the biggest trigger that you see when you're talking to manufacturers,

[00:02:11] distributors, retailers, and they're thinking to themselves, it's keeping them up at night. I might need to think about this, this PIM thing. What's going on there? I think there's a couple of different things. And let's acknowledge that for a lot of these folks, the landscape has changed dramatically. If you look, if you go back and you start looking at the world, maybe even pre COVID or even just coming out of COVID since then, what we've seen from our customers

[00:02:40] is the number of channels they're going to market through has more than doubled. And as they're doing that, the number of things, the number of attributes they need to store on each product has also more than doubled. So it's a much more complicated landscape for people. And at the same time, there's a huge pressure, even for manufacturers, distributors, retailers, everybody to be taking

[00:03:05] products to market more quickly and to be recognizing that value a lot faster. So that was sort of the substrate that was, that's been happening for a couple of years. And then that got turbocharged this year as AEO, GEO. And that work really became core to the buyer's journey. Like more and more people

[00:03:30] are building their shortlists. They're looking for product information. They're doing their selection process based on what Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini is telling them they should be going after. And your marketing copy isn't necessarily the thing that those tools are like consuming and building their lists on. They're really consuming and building the list based on structured, materially correct

[00:04:00] product data. And that's, I think, some of the things that are causing people to say, hey, wait, Excel is the second best tool for any job ever, but maybe it's not serving me well. As we go through here. So, Matt, I'll toss that to you. I'm curious if that resonates with what you're seeing also.

[00:04:24] Yeah, it's exactly right, Jay. You know, as I'm thinking specifically as a manufacturer, I think it's a great example because there are more channels than ever before. And couple that with the expectation around how to serve up product information to those channels, keeping it consistent

[00:04:51] is as important or keeping it as up to date is as important as making sure that it's complete and consistent on those channels. And I think what I've been seeing is manufacturers in particular, they are overrun with channel requests and they don't have a good process for renewing or refreshing

[00:05:17] those product data feeds. And they don't have the organizational structure to support, you know, five, 10, 20 person teams in the, you know, working on merchandising spreadsheets. And so, you know, there are, there is a real need. And even when I see that manufacturers have a pin, maybe they have a legacy solution that they implemented, you know, seven, eight years ago. And what they're finding is

[00:05:46] that it got really stale and they stopped using it to the, its full capabilities. And some of these platforms haven't evolved to think about the way that data needs to be structured for these LLMs, for the modern buyer, and they're stuck. And I think we've seen it before. We're seeing it more

[00:06:10] and more today than ever, like to your point. So how do you get unstuck? Is it a platform switch? Is there something else that goes on? And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this is what are some of the best manufacturers doing in terms of, you know, taking action and solving, you know, these myriad of problems that they're having today?

[00:06:36] I think part of the key question for manufacturers, and I'll come back to your direct question in a second, is there's a whole different revenue stream that they need to be very conscious of, which is the look, if you have a pair of shoes or other things, and it doesn't, they don't work, you're likely to just replace them. If you have a multimillion dollar HVAC system or combine,

[00:07:05] in the field or whatever, you're not going to chuck it out. You need to be able to accurately get the aftermarket parts and that sort of service environment working. And it's hard. I have a challenge that I give everybody just to make this real. Go into your refrigerator tonight, break one of

[00:07:28] those little clips that holds the shelf in place and go try and order the replacement part. I've done this. It's not easy. And so I think when you blow this out to a manufacturing level, we're seeing a lot of manufacturers that have woken up to the fact that or have known for a while, but are having their PIM

[00:07:51] have to serve this entire environment of the aftermarket parts and replacements. I think when we're seeing the people who are doing the best on this is when they realize this is really a layered project. It's what's your underlying data foundation? Where are you getting that from? And can you trust it?

[00:08:17] Are you connected with your ERP instance? Are you connected with your downstream merchandising platforms in an automated and structured fashion? And then have you built the right enrichment and then the right workflows on top of that? There's a fundamental evolution that's happening in PIM that's being driven by some of the agents and the other things we can now do with workflows.

[00:08:44] And PIM is evolving from being a system of record into a system of work. And when we talk to people who are on legacy systems, be that a legacy PIM or a legacy Excel, they're frogs that have been boiled slowly, if you're familiar with the analogy, where the pain of the work has just built up and they haven't even

[00:09:09] noticed it until they stop. And they say, how should this be working? What should our workflow be? So that orchestration and governance piece is really where we see the best in class spending a lot of their time. First of all, I don't have to break my own fridge. I've got kids that do it for me. And I had this exact problem. I think we talked about it like the first episode of the podcast,

[00:09:35] where just trying to replace a part from my own dishwasher became an absolute nightmare because the product information was not up to date. They had switched from like a three pin to a four pin connector at some point in the model year. And it was an expensive and annoying mistake for me. That feels like a getting to market accurately problem. What is the difference between

[00:10:00] what the people with legacy PIMs are dealing with and what the people who are running on the second best tool for everything Excel, what are they seeing? What's the feedback they're getting from their customers, their buyers? Is it the same? Is it we can't find your stuff accurately? We can't, you can't get to market fast enough. We can't publish your catalog fast enough. Are there differences between, you know, legacy PIMs, strugglers and Excel strugglers?

[00:10:25] I would say, Floyd, you know, in answer to that question, it really is a matter of digital maturity and the way that the company thinks about tackling these sort of problems. At the end of the day, they're the same problems. And, you know, it's just, you know, have we, do we have the discipline

[00:10:45] to implement the governance and the processes inside of a system of record that, as Jay has pointed out, has become much more than that. Now we can orchestrate complex workflows. Now we can, you know, manage the entire product life cycle. Whereas before all of this usually lived inside somebody's head, inside spreadsheets. Now the difference between a company that's using spreadsheets and a company

[00:11:15] that's using a legacy system is that at least they understand the importance, the companies that are using the legacy system, they understand the importance of consolidating the product data into one, you know, golden record. And so the spreadsheet world that that world is disconnected

[00:11:38] connected, it's highly manual. So step one is okay, you created a system great or you have a PIM. Awesome. The question I would ask in Jay can speak to this. Does that system actually fit the way product information needs to move through the digital supply chain? In other words, is there process is their governments is their automation automation, I think is the game changer with some of this,

[00:12:06] these modern PIMs, like in River. I think what, so Matt, 100% agree. I think what we find when we talk to customers that may still be on Excel is in many cases they have consolidated product information, but it's consolidated in somebody's head. There's the person that knows this is the spreadsheet or these

[00:12:29] are the people I need to talk to get the information. And they have all of the workflows kind of mentally mapped. And if that person wins the lottery and moves to Hawaii, there's a massive challenge for the organization. So understanding that workflow piece, building the business case of okay, if I actually

[00:12:56] invest here, like first cut, I can, it's not only a reduction in work, but it's also the possibility of reducing customer returns, reducing churn, launching faster. We did a study that with some where we interviewed about 65 customers found out that on average, they were launching products about 30% faster

[00:13:20] once they made the transition. And that's a meaningful difference. When we're talking with customers that are looking to make this transition or considering it, one of the questions I always ask is, okay, of the SKUs that are published ready, that should be available to be sold, what percentage of them actually are?

[00:13:45] And we find about a third of organizations on older systems have less than 85% of their SKUs ready to be sold. And that's a pretty meaningful difference. The other thing that organizations are starting to think about is what's the future. And I think for a lot of that, we're going to move to more of a prompt-based

[00:14:12] MCP driven environment where you have agents like executing across the various stages of your workflow and humans validating and governing. And look, that's not happening overnight. That's a multi-year transition for particularly for most larger organizations, but it's the starting point is now

[00:14:41] that you're going to be on how to get there. Yeah. Starting point is five years ago. And I think, I often think that the exciting part that a lot of distributors and manufacturers in particular don't think about is the long tail opportunity that you have when you have an automated process for bringing products to market.

[00:15:11] And I think you pointed out rightly, Jay, like we are displaying, I say we as an industry, because I throw myself in here as being guilty in the past. We display a fraction of what our customers actually need. Therefore, we are stuck in a manual order inquiry, RFP process where I have to go to the rep

[00:15:36] to see if this part is available. Right? That's that full dishwasher experience. You thought you could trust the website. It turns out you probably should have just called in. So like, that's the opportunity. How much dollars are we leaving on the table when we don't bring our complete catalog to market? And I think that's where we need to think about big picture strategy. What's our go to market strategy?

[00:16:06] How are we working with our channel partners? And then taking that to governance process and ultimately implementing a system of record that allows us to execute on that vision. I'd say both system of record and system of work to execute on that vision, because when companies are looking at this product data is

[00:16:34] more than ever a competitive asset. When it's the, if you're a manufacturer and you don't have your complete product catalog online, someone who's going to offer gray market parts is going to sell Floyd the replacement three pin piece that she needs for that dishwasher and carry that forward into combines

[00:16:56] and HVAC units and all of that. It's also for everybody, just how fast you can take a new idea, get it to market and be reflecting that accurately in every channel is just being magnified right now. So I think it's an, I'll say, I'll echo your point. The starting point was five years ago,

[00:17:21] but there's a proverb that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So for organizations that haven't started this transition, there are, they're not alone. There are many who are in that same boat and are starting to figure out what their strategy is. I love that.

[00:17:42] So if I'm, if I'm like, um, a VP of merchandising, or if I'm a leader in channel sales, or if I'm a CTO, something I'm hearing a lot about, you know, sellers who are missing out on sales because their products and their product information is not ready for a Gentic or for LLM search. They don't know that though, right? Because you don't get the bounce rate on your website anymore.

[00:18:07] You don't get the digital tells that the sales aren't happening. So how could I, as someone in that kind of position, understand what is being left on the table? What are the dollars being left on the table to Matt's point? How do I know that? I have an exercise that I love that I would encourage any merchandising manager to go through.

[00:18:30] Staple yourself to an order, take something that your team is looking to take to market and follow absolutely every step of the process and what the results are. I've always found it incredibly eye-opening the difference between how the process should work and the workarounds that have developed

[00:18:56] that make it sort of work, but may be causing a huge amount of latent pain. I would also just suggest that people take advantage of some of the free tools that are available just to get a quick pulse check. I know we're working with customers and interested parties on doing AEO assessments,

[00:19:20] just free quick, like here's how you actually show up in an answer engine. And it's a very insightful, like here's an anchor point for just understanding current state for how you're showing up in modern commerce. And there's a lot of different things organizations may choose to do from there, but having those couple that understanding of the workflow and understanding of how you're perceived in the

[00:19:48] market are the key points. I often think that, you know, part of the advantage that we have today is the difficult work that used to be required to get people in the room or to, like you say, staple yourself to the order, to the workflow. It can be so amplified with AI. And in a lot of times people would come to us

[00:20:17] and that's where we would start is we would say, let's map out the digital supply chain. Let's map out all of the processes that are required to take something to market and let's identify the points of friction. Theoretically, you could do all of that, you know, within a few days, right? By ingesting data from your

[00:20:42] own organization around your operations, put that into an LLM, create the process, take that to a system integrator like us or somebody and say, this is my process. Let's re-engineer it. And let's start implementing the system of work that is going to help me eliminate all of the manual friction so that

[00:21:08] I can tackle that list of stuff that we never get around to actually doing. That's not about, and this is a great example of where, you know, in merchandising, it's, this is definitely not a case where AI is replacing anybody. This is a role that has needed significant automation for a long time.

[00:21:33] And we can be a multiplier. We like as if I'm AI, I can be a multiplier for these departments, these organizations. It's very exciting times. This is one of the hardest problems in B2B. I think we're just going to call it MI, Matt Intelligence, as opposed to AI. But I agree with you,

[00:21:55] it's the opportunity for people to start to automate things that have been a challenge for a while for many people. This has been super interesting, Jay, and I feel like there's a whole other data layer to dig into, and I'd love to have you back to do that. I would go over to part two, Floyd. Yeah, part two, and then part three, we debut your rap alter ego, Jay Rocks. I'm already working on

[00:22:21] that. I can handle the branding. Don't worry about it. I've got you covered. But before we wrap up part one, can you tell listeners where to find you and how you might be able to help them on their product information journey? Yeah, I'd love to have people come to inriver.com. And there's a host of resources there, both around best practices, research that we've done that can be useful as people are

[00:22:46] coming up to speed on PIM or understanding some of the best practices. And then also reach out about the AEO assessments that I mentioned earlier, and an opportunity just to get that snapshot of where you are on the market today. Thank you, Jay. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Data vs. Commerce. New episodes drop weekly. So if you're responsible for any part of how products get

[00:23:12] from a database to a doorstep, subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.