Álvaro Verdoy, Founder & CEO of Sales Layer talks about the benefits of PIM platforms while highlighting more about Sales Layer’s journey since it’s inception…:
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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat, Álvaro! Tell us about yourself and what inspired the Sales Layer platform?
Tech companies combine my two passions: technology and business. I started working as a digital transformation consultant from a very young age, even while I was at college. At that time my job was to help companies to overcome their challenges by applying digital solutions.
I found this problem with digital catalogues in all my industrial and retail clients. I did a pilot project with a well-known building materials company and despite being more complex than expected, it turned out to be a great success. The customer was super happy as went from updating its catalogue once a year to doing it every week.
From that experience, we decided to focus all our efforts on building a SaaS solution to help companies from any industry all over the world to manage complex catalogues in a simple way. That was the seed for what we know today as Sales Layer.
We’d love to hear about the journey so far and how the platform has evolved over the years. You just announced a new funding – tell us about this and some of your immediate plans around it?
The first 3 years of the company were hard because the market was not mature enough. Nevertheless, when I look at the first investment deck from the early days, the vision hasn’t changed at all. Of course, the platform is much more sophisticated today with many more functionalities but the plan hasn’t changed much.
Our main goal is to lead the PIM B2B market globally, which entails growing mainly in the UK and the US. That’s going to be the main use of these new funds.
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How are you seeing demand and growth of PIM platforms in the B2B market change today? For newer adopters of this technology, what core practices and tips do you feel they should keep in mind to extract most value?
The PIM industry is very interesting as it is already a huge market of over 30 Billion globally and growing 25% YoY. I see an even higher growth in B2B companies as by just comparing it with e-commerce, B2B digital sales are growing 2 times faster than B2C. This means that B2B companies will have to accelerate their digital transformation to capitalise on that trend.
For new adopters of PIM, my main tip will be to think about people: who will be in charge of the project, allocating enough resources and finding outsourced help if needed. Secondly, to think about processes and how they will change with the adoption of PIM as those processes will change for the better but might be very different compared to when doing things manually before the adoption of the PIM.
What are some of the challenges in B2B that you feel platforms like PIM can help alleviate more easily than others?
The main challenge of B2B companies is that product information complexity never ends with regulations, compliance, international standards and environmental footprint. that need to be updated in a growing number of sales channels.
The explosion of new channels in B2B has accelerated for companies going D2C, so they need to take care of very diverse channels, from traditional pricing lists for salespeople to more digital channels like Amazon vendor.
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What are your thoughts on the future of salestech and PIM as a segment and how you feel this space will shape up?
I think that there will be two trends.
One of them will be some companies that to gain size will consolidate the space by acquiring similar technologies, for instance, pure B2C PIM companies by acquiring data feed managers or vice versa.
The other trend will be that some companies will become champions of more specific market segments covering their specific needs.
As the PIM market is huge, there is space for both of these.
Any last thoughts?
It is a very exciting and competitive landscape at the moment, and with the new funding we’ve raised here at Sales Layer, we allow ourselves to be a major player…
Sales Layer is a cloud-based Product Information Management Platform that centralizes product information and synchronizes it in all sales channels automatically (print, web, mobile, product feeds for retailers, and more).
Álvaro Verdoy is the Founder & CEO of Sales Layer.
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