How to Manage Product Information in Salesforce (+ When to Use a PIM)

While you might be able to track certain products with Salesforce using object-based records, this manual approach gets old fast.

As a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce is powerful for managing sales and service data, but it wasn’t built for complex product management. As your SKU count and digital assets grow, data quickly becomes fragmented across systems and teams.

A Salesforce-native product information management (PIM) tool like Pimly brings it all together, turning scattered product information into a single accurate, consistent source of truth.

What Salesforce offers for product information management

Salesforce uses standard objects to organize information like leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities, and it includes a similar record type for products.

That record, called Product2, lets users load a limited set of product details, such as descriptions and specifications for sales and service teams.

But that’s where Salesforce’s native product management capabilities end. 

If you’ve ever managed product data through the Product2 object, you know it quickly hits its limit. It’s a flat record — no more dynamic than a row in a spreadsheet — making it challenging to scale for mid-market or enterprise use. 

Because of Product2’s spreadsheet-like functionality, Salesforce alone can't:

• Store associated digital assets like images, videos, or spec sheets.
• Define related products critical to enable upsells, cross-sells, or to service replacement or interchangeable parts.
• Control product information for different sales channels. 

Where Salesforce product data lives today

When product data is managed using Salesforce objects, it often ends up spread across multiple systems.

For example, sales operations may create product IDs using Product2 objects and link pricing through a PricebookEntry. Marketing teams manage product descriptions and digital assets in a separate platform or database. Meanwhile, product and engineering teams maintain technical specifications within a product lifecycle management (PLM) system.

When new products or updates are introduced, this fragmentation can trigger version conflicts, manual reconciliation, and information bottlenecks. Over time, Salesforce data becomes unreliable without constant, manual oversight.

The challenge of managing product data natively in Salesforce

Working with fragmented product data in Salesforce may not seem like a problem at first, but it becomes unmanageable fast. When your team has to manually update product fields, disconnected spreadsheets, custom objects, and external systems, the process starts to break down.

The root cause isn't a design flaw in Salesforce. It’s that the platform wasn’t designed to manage extensive product catalogs.

The “before” state: Disconnected data and missed opportunities

Without an efficient product information management system, Salesforce can shift from a powerful tool to a driver of operational chaos.

Because Salesforce on its own isn’t a product information management system, teams often move in and out of the platform to get work done. They juggle spreadsheets, manually import CSV files, and try to match product names with descriptions using list views.

For example, a marketing team might create new product release templates for sales before data is live on an ecommerce site. If product specs or pricing get updated in one place but not the others, the result is multiple, conflicting versions of the same SKU.

Symptoms of poor product data management

Poor product data management might seem like a fixable inconvenience, but it can quickly create larger business risks if left unaddressed. 

Common problems include:

• Quote inaccuracies: When sales teams pull pricing from incomplete Product2 records, they risk sending inaccurate quotes to customers.‍
• Customer service delays: When service reps rely on inaccurate product information or have to validate product information across multiple systems, they’re less efficient in resolving customer service cases. Providing inaccurate information also risks eroding customer confidence.‍
• Mismatched marketing assets: Because Product2 can’t natively store digital assets, marketing teams may launch campaigns with outdated or inaccurate images, videos, or PDFs, damaging customer trust.‍
• Compliance risks: Since Salesforce objects can’t store or validate complex compliance data, teams face higher liability and rejection rates when submitting information to major distributors or marketplaces.

The “after” state: A unified product hub inside Salesforce

A Salesforce-native PIM like Pimly eliminates the data fragmentation inherent in object-based records. It centralizes product and customer data in one hub within the Salesforce platform.

This offers key operational benefits like:

• Total data accuracy and consistency by establishing a single source of truth, allowing all your teams — from operations and support to sales and marketing — to access relevant information in one place
• Detailed product listings that include technical specifications, marketing copy, warranty info, and a range of digital assets like images, videos, and PDF documents
• Efficient product data management with no data lag when synchronizing information across multiple commerce channels
• Faster time-to-market through streamlined data integration, governance workflows, and built-in automation notifications

What makes a Salesforce-native PIM different

Unlike other product management platforms, a Salesforce-native PIM doesn't bolt on to your existing system. It's an enterprise-grade application built to work seamlessly with your current Salesforce environment.

Here’s what sets native PIM solutions like Pimly apart:

• No integration required: Built on and connected directly to Salesforce, eliminating the cost and complexity of external middleware and API connectors.
• Advanced data models: Replaces static, object-based product records with scalable data models that make it easy to organize and maintain large catalogs, all within the same customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
• AI-ready design: Pimly provides the structured foundation needed to make your product information AI-ready, ensuring solutions like Agentforce can access accurate, rich product data. 
• Shared platform security: Inherits your Salesforce security customization, granular permissions (managed through permission sets), and compliance settings, allowing you to scale confidently without adding risk.

How teams use Pimly to manage product data better

Once Pimly becomes your source of truth for product data, every SKU, spec, and asset moves onto the Salesforce platform, creating a unified product catalog that’s easy to manage and accessible across the business. 

With Pimly, teams can apply efficient workflows to create, enrich, and publish product data. Every SKU, along with its attributes and digital assets, stays organized and accessible across the platform.

Product data managers gain accuracy and control at scale, while sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams work from the same rich, reliable product information inside the systems they already use. When your marketing teams create a new digital asset, like an image or product sheet, sales teams have instant access to that same file in Sales Cloud. Updates populate automatically in real time across all channels.

Getting started with a PIM in Salesforce

Implementing a Salesforce-native PIM shouldn't disrupt your operations. Since Pimly doesn't require the setup or maintenance of third-party tools, your team can start seeing benefits to their product management workflows almost immediately.

Adapting your current processes may be intimidating initially — especially if your current data is scattered or unorganized. But here’s how you can leverage Pimly to make the process smooth and simple:

1. Easily assess your data readiness: Pimly helps you identify where product information lives and what needs attention, giving you clarity without the overwhelm of a massive cleanup project. 
2. Map your product structure: Document and connect all the unique features of your products to their parent SKUs. Instead of starting from scratch, Pimly’s Salesforce-native framework makes it simple to organize SKUs, variations, and attributes using best practices built into the platform.
3. Ask Pimly for a sales demo using your own products: Eliminate the uncertainty of how your products will look and function with a custom demo using your own product information. Boost the confidence of your product, commerce, sales, service, and marketing teams by inviting them to the demo. 
4. Roll out governance and sync rules: Pimly helps you set up clear ownership for product data across all your teams. You’ll be able to create easily configurable automation checks across the business to ensure all required product fields are completed before final publishing.

Centralize your product information where your business already lives

Salesforce gives you powerful tools to manage customers, but it wasn’t built to handle complex product data. As your catalog grows, spreadsheets, manual updates, and disconnected systems slow you down, creating a challenge that calls for a true enterprise product management system.

With Pimly, you can bring all your product data into Salesforce, eliminating fragmentation and ensuring teams work from accurate, connected information. You gain control, accuracy, and visibility across channels — improving quoting, speeding launches, and keeping every customer touchpoint consistent.

Ready to simplify product management and scale your business? Book a free demo of Pimly to see how a Salesforce-native PIM drives growth.