How Pimly Solves 7 Key Product Data Challenges in Salesforce

Key takeaways:

• Fragmented product data creates errors, delays, and lost trust. When product information lives across spreadsheets, ERPs, and point systems, inconsistency is inevitable. Centralizing product data inside Salesforce is the only sustainable fix.
• Manual product updates don’t scale and introduce risk. Email-driven workflows and rekeyed data slow launches and increase errors; automating product updates within Salesforce dramatically improves speed, accuracy, and accountability.
• Lack of governance makes growth and compliance impossible. Without clear ownership, permissions, and auditability, product data quickly becomes unreliable. That’s why strong governance built directly into Salesforce is critical to scaling safely.
• Disconnected teams lead to misalignment and outdated information. When teams work in different systems, collaboration breaks down; a single, shared source of truth keeps product, sales, and marketing aligned in real time.
• Poor product data quality limits revenue and AI performance. Inaccurate or incomplete product data slows sales cycles and undermines AI initiatives—maintaining clean, validated, AI-ready product data at the source is the best way to accelerate growth.

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If your business uses Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM), you already know you’ve got a single source of truth for customer data. But what about your product data?

Many businesses rely on a mix of spreadsheets, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and other ad hoc systems to track and update product info. This leads to a significant problem: inconsistent data.

With multiple disconnected platforms housing data, quality control starts to slip. Teams and customers get frustrated by inaccurate or missing information, leading to a loss of trust — and potentially a loss of sales.

The core issue is that while Salesforce is great for managing customer relationships, it's not a product information management (PIM) system.

As a Salesforce-native PIM, Pimly elevates Salesforce data capabilities, turning it into a central hub for easily managing all your product information in one place. Below, we'll break down common challenges when managing product data in Salesforce and how Pimly can help.

1. Inconsistent product information across systems

For companies with thousands of SKUs, product information can easily get out of sync if it’s siloed. Your ERP might contain inventory and pricing data; marketing or commerce teams manage product descriptions in bespoke systems or spreadsheets; the rest of your product information lives somewhere else entirely.

Operating with this level of data fragmentation can result in products being loaded into your ecommerce platform with incorrect attributes, mismatched images, or outdated pricing information.

Using a PIM system solves these issues by eliminating product information silos in your business, centralizing and governing all your product information so product data and updates flow automatically to Salesforce. Because Pimly is built natively into Salesforce, there are no complicated middleware or API connectors to manage. Product data remains synchronized and accurate across every Salesforce environment your company uses.

2. Manual data entry and error-prone workflows

Without a unified system to manage your product information, your teams often need to chase down the data they need. They may have to confirm engineering specs from one team and get updated product images from another. This results in endless email chains and Slack messages that throw sand in the gears of new product launches and updates. 

This manual back-and-forth doesn't just act like an anchor on product information processes; it also makes them more prone to error. With so much information in flight through emails and Slack messages, someone is bound to make a mistake.

Using a PIM system to manage your product information streamlines this process by automating product updates. PIMs can import data, route new records as they become available, and validate all product data with minimal manual effort.

Pimly strengthens this by using Salesforce as the workbench for every product update. A product manager can generate a new product or product line with AI, route it to engineering, marketing, revenue, and operations, and collect each team’s inputs directly in Salesforce using field-level permissions. Agentforce (Salesforce’s AI agent layer) keeps the process moving by automatically reminding teams when their submissions are overdue. The result is a workflow that cuts product updates from weeks to hours and gives teams accurate, AI-ready data inside the platform they already use.

3. Lack of governance and control over product information

Allowing all your teams to edit and upload product data might seem like a good way to keep things moving quickly. But in reality, it often leads to compliance risks and data inaccuracies spread across multiple channels, and this lack of data governance makes it impossible to scale.

Pimly gives you the tools to execute smart governance frameworks directly inside Salesforce by separating access to the PIM into two distinct applications: Data Management for product managers needing full editing rights, and Experience for sales and service teams that only need real-only access.

Because Pimly uses Salesforce's native permissions, you can also set custom rules — like allowing your marketing team to update product copy, but locking their ability to edit attributes like engineering specs. 

However, getting control of your product data requires more than just visibility. Pimly makes it easy to ensure strict compliance with the Audit Record feature that tracks your entire data lifecycle — telling you who, where, and when any changes are made.

Pimly also helps to remove guesswork behind product launches by providing teams with Readiness Reports. These on-demand reports for single or multiple products across your entire catalog help to validate if and when product listings are still in production or ready to go live.

4. Poor collaboration between teams managing product data

When teams work in different systems, collaboration breaks down. Product updates get lost, sales and marketing drift apart, and no one has a clear view of which version is current or correct. This lack of transparency not only leads to project delays, but can also lead to inaccurate product data spread across multiple channels.

Pimly solves this challenge by creating a single source of truth that all your teams can access instantly. Product records update in real time, teams move in step instead of in silos, and stakeholders have the clarity they need to keep customer-facing work aligned. With one trusted source of truth powering every workflow, product data owners can make timely, accurate product updates, while sales and service teams get access to highly reliable data sources.

5. Difficulty scaling product data for new markets or channels

Salesforce offers some product data functionality out of the box via the Product2 object. But Product2 is a static product record that functions more or less like a line in a spreadsheet. It’s inflexible, and while it may be fine for businesses with only a few products sold through limited channels, it’s not scalable.

Let’s say you decide to launch an ecommerce store in a new country, start selling on Amazon or Walmart, or merge product lines from different brands. That growth introduces new requirements for structure, governance, and enrichment. 

Without a PIM, your only option in this scenario is to create massive spreadsheets with different tabs for every channel and locale. A PIM system eliminates this need, standardizing attributes and supporting the multi-language, multi-market enrichment required to scale cleanly. Instead of recreating product information for every region or marketplace, teams can manage variations through a consistent data model.

Pimly offers several features specifically designed for this type of scalability challenge:

• Catalogs: Separates distinct product lines so they’re easily managed with the Data Management application.
• Channels: Manages product information for each channel, tailored to its unique requirements.
• Locales: Divides product information based on location and language.

Trying to recreate this structure in spreadsheets introduces unnecessary risk. Pimly replaces that burden with a scalable Salesforce-native model that keeps product data organized, accurate, and aligned — even as your business enters new markets or adds new channels.

6. Limited visibility into product data quality

Teams move quickly, and they need confidence that the product data they see in Salesforce is accurate. But because Salesforce doesn’t provide a structured way to approve records or track completeness, users often rely on information that may be outdated or partially filled in, sparking doubt and uncertainty that slows down decisions and creates inconsistency between teams.

PIM solutions give teams clear visibility into product data quality. Readiness scoring, version tracking, and governance rules make it easy to see which records are ready for the market and which require updates before they move downstream. Pimly amplifies this with governance and audit controls built directly into Salesforce. 

This level of integrity also strengthens your AI strategy. Agentforce relies on trustworthy product information to generate accurate recommendations and actions. With Pimly maintaining quality at the source, AI agents can respond confidently, automate more tasks, and support workflows across your Salesforce environment without the risk of amplifying bad data.

7. Slow sales cycle due to disconnected data

Buyers expect precise answers on the spot, and disconnected data undermines that expectation. Revenue stalls when reps are forced to jump between systems to find specs, pricing, digital assets, or updated product details. Every switch introduces delays and disrupts the momentum of a deal. 

PIM systems solve this problem by unifying disconnected product management systems into a single place. Salesforce-native solutions like Pimly empower your reps by surfacing rich, accurate product data directly within Salesforce.

With Pimly providing a single source of truth for product data, sales teams can then access up-to-date specs and pricing instantly, allowing them to build accurate quotes in minutes, not days. This accelerates deal velocity and dramatically improves the customer experience.

Pimly: The ultimate enterprise solution for product data in Salesforce

When your product information lives outside of Salesforce, it slows teams, weakens data accuracy, and limits your ability to scale. As Salesforce expands its AI ecosystem with Agentforce, enterprises that rely on scattered or inconsistent information will struggle to benefit from AI-driven selling, service, and automation. Strong performance now depends on a clean, connected, and governed product foundation. 

Pimly delivers that foundation by making Salesforce the single source of truth for every product detail. Product data becomes consistent, validated, and available to every team, supported by governed workflows, readiness checks, and granular permissions. 

Pimly also gives enterprises the scale and stability other PIMs can’t match, supporting large SKU volumes, complex hierarchies, and extensive catalogs — without limiting channels or locales. Because Pimly runs natively on Salesforce, teams gain the security, uptime, and API flexibility of one of the world’s most trusted business platforms, and they gain a product data model designed to power Agentforce with accurate, AI-ready information.

See how you can simplify product data management across your business: Book your free demo of Pimly today.