B2B product data mastery: 9 winning strategies for 2025

B2B product data is the backbone of every successful B2B transaction. Whether you’re selling industrial components, raw materials, or specialized equipment, your buyers need accurate product information to make informed purchasing decisions. Many businesses still have overly complex or manual approaches to managing product data – leading to costly errors, inefficiencies, and lost revenue opportunities.

According to the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Production Information Management (PIM) Solutions, B2B companies, especially in manufacturing, need help improving their data quality, syndication, and governance. PIM solutions are often the simplest way to centralize product information processes and reduce the risk of inefficiencies and data inconsistencies continuing to impact your bottom line.

But PIM is about more than just centralizing data. Here are 9 ways it can help you turn your data into a real asset.

• Strategy #1: Give your teams a single source of truth
• Strategy #2: Integrate AI in a targeted way
• Strategy #3: Optimize your syndication
• Strategy #4: Strengthen your compliance processes
• Strategy #5: Improve your collaboration with suppliers
• Strategy #6: Easier customization and configuration for complex products
• Strategy #7: Boost your competitive advantage with digital shelf analyt
• Strategy #8: Prepare for 2D barcodes
• Strategy #9: Enhance your personalization
• Future-proofed B2B success in 2025

Strategy #1: Give your teams a single source of truth

B2B businesses often manage vast product catalogues with multiple variations, technical specifications, and compliance data. This data is frequently scattered across different systems. Without a centralized repository, teams waste valuable time verifying product details, rectifying inconsistencies, and aligning data across departments.

A robust PIM system consolidates all product-related information in a single source of truth, ensuring marketing, sales, product management, and supply chain teams work with consistent, accurate, and up-to-date B2B product data. In real terms, better data accessibility and synchronization means better decision-making and faster time-to-market.

Strategy #2: Integrate AI in a targeted way

Bringing in product data from suppliers used to require teams to manually standardize attributes, correct inconsistencies, and enrich product descriptions. Now, AI-powered PIM solutions can take care of data classification, mapping supplier-provided attributes, and detecting errors before they impact operations.

In fact, leading PIM solutions help embed AI throughout the product life cycle. Not only can you onboard new products faster, but you can also automate data classification and standardization for consistency across all channels. Additionally, AI-enabled content generation improves product descriptions and attributes, while error detection algorithms help correct inaccuracies without manual intervention.

Strategy #3: Optimize your syndication

Your buyers expect a frictionless experience across multiple sales channels, from direct procurement platforms to third-party marketplaces and distributor networks. PIM systems centralize and automate product data syndication, ensuring that every sales channel has accurate and standardized product details.

Eliminating data discrepancies, redundant manual uploads, and outdated listings will help you build more trust with buyers and drive higher conversion rates. It will also help you improve your marketplace ranking. A PIM system ensures that businesses can syndicate product information effortlessly, so that your products are seen by as many potential buyers as possible.

Strategy #4: Strengthen your compliance processes

Regulations around product transparency, digital product passports, and sustainability are changing across industries. Managing compliance data manually is inefficient and error prone. A PIM solution ensures you can:

• Store and manage compliance-related product information centrally
• Track and update sustainability credentials like recyclability and sourcing information
• Meet evolving regulatory requirements effortlessly

By proactively managing compliance, businesses can mitigate risks and avoid costly penalties.

Strategy #5: Improve your collaboration with suppliers

Managing supplier data in a B2B ecosystem is challenging due to multiple data formats, inconsistent specifications, and frequent updates. A PIM system acts as an integration hub, facilitating seamless data ingestion, validation, and synchronization between suppliers and manufacturers. It standardizes supplier-provided data, ensuring that product attributes meet regulatory and industry requirements before reaching the market.

Additionally, PIM enables real-time collaboration by providing suppliers with direct access to data updates, allowing all stakeholders to work with the most current information. By streamlining collaboration between manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors, everyone benefits from reduced errors, improved supply chain efficiency, and enhanced overall operational effectiveness.

Strategy #6: Easier customization and configuration for complex products

B2B customers often require highly customizable or configurable products, particularly in sectors like manufacturing, automotive, and industrial equipment, where product specifications vary based on unique buyer needs. Managing these product variations manually creates logistical bottlenecks and increases the risk of order inaccuracies. PIM solutions simplify sales processes by enabling structured, variant-rich data models that allow your sales teams and buyers to configure orders accurately and efficiently.

Strategy #7: Boost your competitive advantage with digital shelf analytics

Understanding how your products perform online is essential in today’s competitive environment. Digital shelf analytics (DSA) provides insights into product visibility, completeness, and competitive positioning. By integrating DSA with PIM, you can see gaps in product listings and optimize descriptions, track competitor pricing and positioning, and make data-driven improvements to boost conversions and sales.

Strategy #8: Prepare for 2D barcodes

The transition to 2D barcodes (Sunrise 2027) will require businesses to manage more complex product data than ever before. Businesses with barcode-ready PIM solutions will have a strategic advantage as the industry shifts toward enhanced product tracking and authentication.

Market leading PIM software facilitates the seamless integration of 2D barcodes by standardizing and structuring B2B product data for barcode integration, ensuring compatibility across various platforms and systems. With 2D barcodes, each product can carry detailed information such as batch numbers, expiration dates, and manufacturing details, allowing businesses to track these details efficiently, providing greater visibility and control over the supply chain, improving inventory management, reducing counterfeiting risks, and ensuring product authenticity. As regulatory bodies adopt more stringent requirements for product labelling and traceability, PIM ensures that businesses stay compliant with these evolving standards.

Strategy #9: Enhance your personalization

Giving your buyers personalized product experiences, including localized content and dynamic recommendations, helps extend the lifetime value of each of your customers. With the right PIM solution in your toolkit, you can customize product catalogues for various buyer segments, optimize content for different regions and languages and improve the customer journey with rich media. This results in higher engagement, better conversions, and stronger customer relationships.

Future-proofed B2B success in 2025

If you are struggling with inconsistent, incomplete, or scattered product information, that doesn’t have to be the case in 2025. Choosing a PIM solution is the fastest way to embrace a smarter, more strategic approach to data management. PIM is not just a tool – it’s a business enabler.

The strategies outlined in this guide are not just best practices; they are essential steps for future-proofing your business. Whether it’s optimizing omnichannel syndication, preparing for regulatory changes, or enhancing AI-driven product data enrichment, businesses that invest in a modern PIM solution will be the ones setting the standard.

Contact us today to take your first steps on path to a more profitable 2025.