On this episode of the “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, the topic is Product Information Management (PIM) – what it is, how it can help companies, and how it can be implemented in Salesforce® systems.
Our guest is Mike Milburn, Co-Founder/Co-CEO of Pimly, a new and innovative solution that brings all of a company’s product information into Salesforce to easily manage and utilize product data and digital assets across their Salesforce clouds.
This is “Salesforce Simplified”… the podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Here’s your host, Mike Boyle.
Mike Boyle:
Good day everyone, and welcome on this episode of the Salesforce Simplified Podcast. The topic is Product Information Management, PIM, if you will, for short. Everything’s got an acronym, right? So we’re going to talk about what PIM is, how it can help companies, and how it can be implemented into Salesforce systems. And to do all that, we’ve invited Mike Milburn, who is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Pimly, which is a new and innovative solution that brings all of a company’s product information into Salesforce to easily manage and utilize product data and digital assets across their Salesforce clouds.
Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.
Mike Milburn:
Mike, it’s great to be here today.
Mike Boyle:
So, Mike, let’s start here. Fill us in on your personal background and experience within the Salesforce ecosystem.
Mike Milburn:
Yeah, thanks for asking. So, I had an incredible time at Salesforce and that time was actually measured in over a decade. I started with Salesforce in about 2005 and I left in 2020, so about a 15-year run. And so I’m incredibly proud and humble and just thankful for that experience that I had at Salesforce over those 15 years. And the highlights of that were a lot, but to kind of condense them this morning, here they are.
First, I was part of the team that remodeled and rebuilt and created the Customers for Life team, which is kind of the modern success platform that most SaaS companies think about. Second, and probably the focus for my career was I was one of the founders of the Service Cloud, and I remember the day that we got together and we announced that we were going to build and launch a customer service application that later became the Service Cloud, and that’s one of the gems or the largest cloud in the Salesforce portfolio today, and served as GM and VP for that cloud for a number of years. And then finally ended up as a chief customer officer working for Salesforce, working with some of the largest, biggest and most strategic customers.
So just, Mike, a tremendous experience, I think we changed the world and I’m just very, very thankful for all of the learnings and experiences that I got during those 15 years.
Mike Boyle:
Well, speaking of learning, Mike, let’s start here. Let’s try to educate some folks who may not be familiar with product information management. Why don’t you tell us exactly what that is and why it’s such an important tool for businesses?
Mike Milburn:
The image that I’d like to conjure up is actually if you pull out your phone or your computer and you pull up Amazon or Target or Walmart and you look at what you last ordered, and I would like to think or believe and I’m probably pretty sure that most of your listeners have probably ordered something in the last 24 hours or in the last week, but if you pull up that order you’re looking at a modern embodiment of product information. You see unstructured content or pictures and videos and graphics that help inform you of the product, good or service you’re looking at, you can zoom in and you can get really up close and personal with the content. Then you also see structured data, and it could be as simple as the length or width or height of the item that you purchased, it could be the kind of material, it could be the ingredients in that product. But essentially eCommerce is driven by product information.
So, I think almost everybody interacts with product information in some way, shape or form, especially in this 2023 kind of post COVID eCommerce centric way. So that’s what product information is, it’s the set of attributes and the set of videos and pictures. So it’s the structured and unstructured data that makes up the DNA of any product, good or service.
Mike Boyle:
I’m never going to look at anything I’ve ordered quite the same way again, Mike. You painted the picture. I always find it interesting how entrepreneurs such as you and your partner at Pimly, Mike Dannenfeldt, come up with ideas for businesses. What did you see in the PIM world that needed fixing?
Mike Milburn:
This is a really interesting question. So, I’m actually going to go back to some of my early days at Salesforce for this. And what we felt and saw and lived was the pain through our customer’s eyes. And if you go back to a 2004 or early 2000s timeframe, most of technology was delivered on premise and there were servers and there was maintenance and there was hardware involved. And so it kept the pace of innovation very, very slow and very expensive. And when we built Salesforce and when we built Service Cloud for instance, we pioneered a new delivery model, a new business model and you could subscribe to a service and log into Salesforce and you’d be delivered this incredible product and you could focus on innovation.
So, I was lucky enough to be sort of baptized and just brought up in a religion of innovation, speed, and agility. And so when my partner and I, Mike Dannenfeldt got together… Well, first of all, Mike and I have known each other for over 20 years. And so Mike’s got a similar background to myself except he was one of the first architects ever at Salesforce kind of building, designing and implementing some of the biggest projects and then he went on to found a number of other companies. We sort of saw the same problem in the product information management space. We saw the ability to deliver innovation on platforms just kind of lacking. And what we wanted to do was we wanted to bring product information management and marry it with CRM. So all of what we’ve built and designed and implemented and experienced that Salesforce, it was missing product information management.
And so it was a very similar technology problem that we faced in the early days of Salesforce was it was a big white space, it was an incredible market, customers were moving very, very fast. We love our partner ecosystem, and so we applied all of the learnings that we had at Salesforce to this new space, to this product information management space, and that’s how Pimly was born.
Mike Boyle:
Well, let’s take a moment to talk about some of the key features and benefits of the Pimly technology and how that can help organizations manage their product information more effectively, more efficiently.
Mike Milburn:
This is where I spend most of my time, and this is one of the most exciting things. Again, it really reminds me of the lessons that we learned at Salesforce and spending as much time as you can with critical customers. So, the image that I’d like to invoke here is sort of the Salesforce platform itself, that 360 degree view of a customer. And if you think about that wheel or that view of the customer, traditionally you have sales and service and marketing and commerce, and maybe you have integration or Tableau for business analytics, but there’s kind of a missing spot for products. And so the first place to start is what if you could have your company’s critical product information stored natively in Salesforce. And just having that product information, every company has a product or service, and having that information in Salesforce allows your entire Salesforce community to get access to this information. And now we can talk about some of the applications of that.
So, once you have this critical PIM information natively in Salesforce, the first application that I think about is sales enablement. And if you think about how hard it is to be a modern salesperson, you’ve got to learn a product, good or service, you’ve got incredible pressure to deliver it from your management chain. But you really need to know about that product, good or service, and what better way than to learn about it than through product information native on Salesforce. And, so, it starts with sales and sales enablement.
And then you kind of work yourself around that visual wheel or that 360 degree view of the customer, and you think about service my baby, the Service Cloud. And you think about what if you could interact with that same product, that same product that you bought on a major retailer, and you could interact with the videos and pictures. You wouldn’t have to go to punch out to a website or go to an internal site to look at it, but it was native in Salesforce. It allows you as an agent to stay in context.
And then when you’re supporting a customer, I mean the business of customer service is hard. You’ve got a customer on the other end of the phone or other end of a chat or an email that has a question or a problem with your good or service and you’re trying to help them. And so in order to empathize and really passionately care about that customer, you’ve got to know what product, good or service, you’ve got to know what it does, what it doesn’t do. Maybe you got to know the fabric or what it was designed for, and so you can interact with that same information natively inside your Salesforce Service Cloud console. And so I think that that is incredibly powerful.
And then if you double click on that inside of customer service, this is where a lot of order management happens. And maybe order management is a buzzword, and I think you mentioned acronyms earlier, so let’s kind of demystify that. But maybe you’ve bought a good or service and you are trying to move at or change that good or service and you really want to talk to somebody about it. I just did a furniture delivery for our family and we realized we needed to change a piece of the order and I wanted to do it online, and I went through the online experience, but I really wanted to talk to somebody. This was an important order and I really wanted that confirmation. So I called up the furniture manufacturer, found my order number I needed to move at or change something. And so what better way to interact with product information than through order management natively on Salesforce as part of a service experience?
And then you continue to walk around the wheel of the Salesforce 360, and you think of the Experience Cloud or what Salesforce calls portals. Sometimes I wish they would just call them portals, but Salesforce has incredible branding, so they’re the Experience Cloud, and any customer can spin up a tailor-made pixel perfect portal or experience for their customers, and it could be a selling experience or it could be a service experience. But if you’re like me and you’re used to an experience like on Amazon or Target in Walmart, you want that same experience when you’re interacting with a brand or a service. And so now with Pimly, you can interact with a product, good or service natively on an experienced cloud and that exact same eCommerce fashion that you’re used to.
And then finally, other applications. Salesforce has incredible industry clouds that are built natively on Salesforce, and Pimly can be invoked in any one of the industry clouds because we’re standard on Salesforce. And then by the time this podcast airs, everybody’s going to be talking about the Data Cloud, which is Salesforce’s newest innovation, a transactional way to interface and integrate with Salesforce for personalized data. Pimly is one of the first and native applications that integrates to Salesforce Data Cloud.
Mike, can you talk a little bit about the integration of Pimly into Salesforce Cloud’s, pretty easy thing to do?
Mike Milburn:
It is, and it’s kind of funny because it’s not even integrated because it’s built on core, so we don’t have to integrate. And so one of my favorite Salesforce alumni is a guy named Rob Pickeral and he invented this phrase called configuration, and it was really a hybrid of configuration and customization. And this word customization is pretty terrifying because it sounds hard and complex, but configuration is easy. It’s like a paint by numbers book, and any trailblazer can configure in Salesforce. And the neat part about Pimly is that we’re natively built on Salesforce, and that means with clicks not code. You can drag and drop and you can configure your product information natively on Salesforce. We make it fast and easy and simple. So it’s not even integrated, that’s too complex. It’s built natively on Salesforce.
Mike Boyle:
What about challenges, Mike, with implementing PIM system? Can you talk a little bit about the challenges and maybe how folks can overcome them or have overcome them?
Mike Milburn:
Yeah, Mike, this is a great question, and I spent years as a consultant prior to joining Salesforce and when we built the Service Cloud, the implementations of Service Cloud were complex. I remember them sometimes lasting from one season in one calendar year to the same season in the next calendar year, so from winter to winter. And that’s hard, and that’s a long time for businesses. And one of the reasons is because there wasn’t a kind of paint by numbers or a doctrine for implementations. And when we kicked off this podcast, we talked about my initial experiences at Salesforce. My first year was spent doing quick starts and in five days we had to have a customer live. We would fly out on Sunday, land on Monday, implement on Tuesday, test on Wednesday, train on Thursday, and live on Friday. That speed allowed us to learn a tremendous amount, but it also allowed us to create patterns and create playbooks and centers of excellence, and we allowed us to mature the business of customer service. That same thing is happening with product information.
So, when you think about your company’s product catalog, or maybe you went on Amazon and you purchased some shoes and you think about all of the different pictures and style for shoes, and you think about all that information, the first thing you’ve got to do is organize that. And so we’ve made it fast and easier and simple to organize that information in the same UI and UX that 17 million trailblazers are familiar, with the Salesforce Classic or the Salesforce Lightning interface. So I think that’s a neat part of it.
The second piece of it is with our partner first model, we have an incredible delivery arm that has built and designed thousands or millions of Salesforce systems. So we’re seeing implementation times that are delivered in days and weeks instead of months because they simply know the Salesforce platform. So it’s still a process, we’re making it easier.
Mike Boyle:
I picture someone out there listening to this going, holy smokes, I need to do this like yesterday. So they do it, they get it up, they get it running. Talk to me about best practices for setting up and maintaining a PIM system. How can companies get the most out of it?
Mike Milburn:
Yeah, it’s funny because I’m going to visually teleport us to the boardroom of one of our last customers, and we’re going through the kind of final pitch and the executives are sitting around the room and the Salesforce admins and architects are sitting around the room and they get done with the pitch and everybody’s kind of staring at each other and we just say, what do you think? And the admins and architects look at each other and they go, we know what to do, we know what works on Salesforce. And we just sat there. And this image that I just created is what’s happening in boardrooms and conference rooms and Starbucks or coffee shops all over the world. And that is, everybody… Salesforce has a tremendous footprint, as I mentioned earlier. I think there’s somewhere on the tune of 17 million trailblazers globally, admins and architects and developers and know Salesforce. They know what works in Salesforce, so we don’t have to solve that problem for them. We’ve got to help design ways that they can use and build and store and modernize their product information management systems.
So, some of the best practices that we have so far are we’ve created templates that allow you to upload and integration patterns that allow you to upload your product information in a fast, easy and simple way. We’ve created some standard lightning web components that allow you to display that product information easily on a page. We’ve exposed it natively to sales and service so that customers can move very, very fast. We’ve also, and I think your listeners are going to get a kick out of this because this is the talk of the town, we’ve pre-integrated Pimly with ChatGPT and we call it Ory which is a tribute to two of our lead architects, Rory and Cory, and so therein Ory was born. So they can use powerful modern AI tools together with product information to help create content.
Mike Boyle:
So, Mike, we get this all up and running. How do we measure ROI? How do we measure metrics? What should we be watching for, looking for?
Mike Milburn:
Yeah. So we’re really trailblazing a new path here and let’s start off with Salesforce. And so every customer of Salesforce is looking for value. We’re adding value to the Salesforce platform for every single user. And this is a really important point, PIMs traditionally were for 5 people or 10 people or 15 people, maybe a product manager or an eCommerce team. We believe that modern PIMs are for every Salesforce user. So, I think of things like the value of Salesforce overall and the usage of Salesforce overall is going to go up with Pimly. That’s a pretty cool measurement I think of sales efficiency and sales. Productivity is going to go up because you’re using similar, easy, fast, simple tools that are powered by Salesforce. I think of service, service productivity, service enablement, CSAT, all the critical customer service metrics. I think those are going to go up and once they’re powered by Pimly.
And, then finally, I think that there’s an agility quotient. CIOs are looking to do more today than ever before with fewer technologies and more trusted technologies. And Salesforce has certainly earned the right over the last 25 years to be one of the most trusted technologies on the planet. And so you’re putting your critical information in one of the most critical business ready systems, and I think therein is an efficiency of trust and scale.
Mike Boyle:
Another question probably out there in folks’ minds, Mike, is ensuring data accuracy and consistency across different channels and touch-points when using PIM and a tool like Pimly. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mike Milburn:
So, again, when you think of the users of Salesforce and let’s say that there’s a data integrity role in a company and their user Salesforce, they can look at that entire product catalog natively inside of Salesforce. And let’s say that they need a workflow so that I’m going to send one product to Mike one and another product to Mike two for a move at or change. Salesforce has an incredibly powerful workflow and audit engine, so you’re allowed to see and visualize that and make changes almost instantaneously to the systems as needed.
Also, because we sit on Salesforce, you can use the incredible Salesforce sandbox and Salesforce development platforms to test any of your code and push it to production. This is again, another reason, and this was actually really important as we raised money for Pimly on the fundraising road last year, was development tools for traditional PIMS were sort of lacking. If you think about the evolution of Salesforce, we had to build sandboxes and we had to build the ability to have integrations to sandboxes and data migrations and UI and UX. Everything needs to work in a sandbox before you push it to production. And because we’re built on Salesforce, we inherit all of the software development lifecycle tools that Salesforce has built. So, it’s really a powerful platform, an enterprise grade platform to make sure that you’re delivering the best applications to your customers and your employees.
Mike Boyle:
That really leads me to the last question I have here, Mike. I mean, we kind of have touched on customer experience and driving sales throughout our chat here, but any final thoughts on how PIM helps organizations with customer experience in driving sales?
Mike Milburn:
Yeah, we’re calling this the Product Cloud, Mike. And when I think of when we started the Service Cloud, the nucleus of the Service Cloud was case management. And if you can conjure up that image of chemistry from your high school chemistry room and there was sort of a nucleus and you brought things in and around that nucleus, it’s what we did with Service Cloud. And we started with case management and we brought in chat and we brought in knowledge base and escalation management, and gradually we built this incredible platform. Well, the same thing is happening with Pimly, the Product Cloud. We’re starting with product information as the core or nucleus of this. And then as we grow, we’re going to be evaluating the future set of features and functions and adjoining characteristics that we’re going to bring into the product information management space.
And I think that’s the really exciting point and what I would look forward to seeing if I was listening to this is we had the amazing experience of building the Service Cloud and now we’re building the beginnings of the next cloud, which is the Product Cloud, and it’s going to allow CIOs and businesses of all shapes and sizes to take advantage of it.
I guess the last thing that I’ve learned that has sort of peeled back my eyes is product information is not just for physical goods. All the analogies that we’ve talked about on this podcast and the experiences that you have in your life are probably with physical items, but we’re getting requests from people that make software, people that are banks and people that are healthcare providers. And what they’ve even lightened me about is that product information management systems, a checking account is still a product and the checking account has attributes or a health plan is still a product and the health plan has attributes, software companies produce software that still have attributes. So in this digital world, in this era of digital transformation, any product, good or service in my opinion is going to be governed by a Product Cloud in the future. And we’re seeing that move from ERP to eCommerce and that convergence with CRM. And so that’s why I think all of your listeners, regardless of what industry or space or size or scope, I think all of your listeners at some point in their immediate future are going to be looking for PIM solutions.
Mike Boyle:
He is Mike Milburn and Mike is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Pimly. And I want to wish you and your partner, Mike Dannenfeldt, the best of luck. I think you guys have put something really amazing together here with Pimly. So thank you for joining us today, Mike, and I hope you’ll come back. I know there’s going to be some upgrades and cool other things that you’ll be doing with Pimly down the road, and we’d love to hear about them first. I hope you’’ll come back to visit with us.
Mike Milburn:
Thank you so much. Can’t wait to come back.
Mike Boyle:
To the audience I’ll be putting some helpful links in this show’s notes about product information management about our guest, Mike Milburn and about his company Pimly. So look for that in the show’s notes.
I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. As always, thank you for listening to the Salesforce Simplified Podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.
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