Business-Cost Breakdown: The True Price of Labor-Intensive GTM Processes | Salsify

The retail landscape is continually evolving as consumers gain even more control over how, when, and where they shop. It’s both an exciting opportunity and a challenge for brands as they struggle to keep pace.

Success today relies on how quickly brands can adapt to new customer demands, new market forces, and new category disruptors. Digital transformation is essential, but many brands are caught up dealing with labor-intensive, go-to-market (GTM) processes that result in unnecessary business costs.

How Brands Manage the GTM Process

The rules and requirements for digital shelf success can change on a monthly, weekly, and (sometimes) daily basis. If brands are managing all of these processes manually or are using a disparate set of tools, they risk falling behind the competition.

Success requires speed — and speed requires an efficient GTM strategy. But many brands continue to rely on manual, labor-intensive processes.

Consider some of the most common GTM steps for brands:

• Creating and managing product information;
• Responding to changes in products, including packaging, descriptions, and pricing;
• Responding to changes in retailer requirements across priority channels;
• Setting up, mapping, and managing new channels;
• Supporting changes for seasons, holidays, or targeted merchandising promotions;
• Creating space for experimentation.

Forrester research outlined three primary challenges brands face delivering product content to retailers’ digital shelves and catalogs: content stewardship is labor-intensive, content gaps aren’t visible, and commerce partner connections are often manual and error-prone. The truth: There is a better way to face these GTM requirements that will eliminate unnecessary costs and labor-intensive processes.

How Does Your Brand Manage Content Stewardship?

Teams often use a combination of tools to manage the creation, curation, and management of product content, such as spreadsheets, emails, cloud drives, and hard drives.

There are also many people involved in the development and approval of product content. These people are spread across the organization, and it takes a lot of time and coordination to get the information needed to create or update product pages.

Centralizing your product information can give you a single place to create, approve, store, and syndicate content, improving data agility while ensuring data quality. This central source of product information unites sales and marketing, giving them easy and fast access to up-to-date content.

How Does Your Brand Identify Content Gaps?

Finding content gaps and inaccuracies is another key challenge. Brands that only use systems like product information management (PIM), master data management (MDM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) cannot fully analyze content and find these gaps.

The process of analyzing content for gaps is often manual and time-intensive. The manual process of identifying content gaps also means it’s also error-prone, and employees can easily miss key content needed to support product sales.

A product experience management (PXM) platform offers insights, which allow you to analyze your existing content to identify gaps and continuously improve the product experience.

How Does Your Brand Manage Its Ecommerce Channels?

Most brands sell their products across multiple retailers and distributor channels. Every channel has its own set of requirements, leading brands to manually manage connections and deal with customizations to distribute and manage products.

Having the ability to connect to your entire ecommerce ecosystem — whether you are distributing products to retailer sites, marketplaces, or distributors — can get your product live everywhere, as quickly as possible, through built-in connectors.

Every channel you distribute your product to has its own set of requirements and may include specific actions you can include in your content. Every channel also caters to certain audiences. Brands need the ability to manage channel-specific requirements automatically, including managing multiple versions of product content for every channel.

A PXM solution can help a brand decrease these labor-intensive processes, leading to a reduction in GTM business costs and faster time to market.

Success Requires Continual Iteration

The faster you can get your product to the digital shelf, the better. The faster you can make updates that reflect the ever-changing retail landscape, the better.

Iteration is critical to the success of your products on the digital shelf. A PXM solution can help you set up your product experiences across channels and iterate on them quickly, improving your ability to go-to-market quickly and with less labor-intensive processes.