Too often, product managers delude themselves into thinking that more is better. Yes, sometimes this can be true, but when it comes to keeping track of customers and product inventory, it turns out that using a database is the key to long-term success…
How things can get out of hand
Although we often talk about this issue when it comes to launching new products, it turns out that it can affect older products as well, it just sneaks up on them. In both cases, things start out good and then take a turn for the worse.
When a company starts selling a product, it always seems to start with an initial sales pipeline. Your product account manager and business development manager will work hard to make this channel a success. In this modern age we live in, it may very well be an e-commerce channel from the start. Customers who purchase the product through this channel will provide the company with a great deal of information about themselves. This information will then be stored in the systems and databases of the electronic commerce channel. This all seems like a standard part of any product manager’s job description, right?
If the company decides to expand this channel, for example by adding a gift card program, this additional functionality can come with its own database to retain information about the customers that interact with it. Now things are starting to get out of hand. Throw in some strategic management and you’ll quickly find yourself adding in-store purchase data collection and tracking systems and perhaps an inventory management system and find that things have gotten completely out of hand.
Once product and customer information has been distributed among so many different systems, problems can start to arise, such as out-of-stock products, but ordering systems don’t show that when customers place an order. Many companies try to overcome the limitations of this type of solution by having people manually type the information that is in one system into the other systems; however, even in the best of situations, there is a time lag here. That means your product’s inventory levels can change and your potential customers won’t know about it until after they’ve placed their orders.
The Power of One (database)
So what’s a product manager to do? Good question. It turns out that the solution is easy to recognize, but difficult to implement. What a product manager should do is move to using a single database to handle all the information related to his product.
What you should be looking for is a single database that can hold all of your cross-channel sales data along with any inventory data that your company has on your product. By implementing a solution like this, product managers will be able to offer their customers a real-time order management solution along with an enhanced customer experience.
Once a single database view of your product has been implemented, you will be able to do things as a product manager that you never could before. The first thing is that you will be able to engage in true cross-channel marketing and selling of your product – you will know what is happening so you can tell the right story to the right channel.
Next, you’ll be ready to move to the mobile (mobile) commerce space. Making it easier for your customers to purchase your product and control the status of their orders. Finally, the customer’s shopping experience will be improved because the company’s staff will have access to all the information, both the customer’s order and the inventory of their product, which will be necessary to answer any questions that arise.
What all this means to you
Product managers know that for a product to be successful, they will have to develop multiple channels To sell. Once you start this process, it can be too easy to start creating multiple databases that don’t talk to each other.
The problem with this is that once you start spreading important customer and product data across multiple databases, it becomes nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of how your product is performing. Product managers need to take the time and effort to consolidate all of these databases into one database.
This single database will enable them to overcome cross-channel inventory disparity that can hold back their cross-channel sales efforts. Putting in the effort will result in the creation of an even more successful product. That’s something you can add to your product manager resume!
