Pimly vs. Salesforce Product2: Understanding the Differences and Unlocking More Value

If your business runs on Salesforce, you’re likely familiar with the Product2 object—Salesforce’s native tool for managing product records. For manufacturers, it can handle basic product data, but when it comes to the complexities of managing detailed, scalable, and actionable product information, you might find yourself hitting limitations. That’s where Pimly comes in.

In this post, we’ll break down the differences between Salesforce’s out-of-the-box Product2 object and Pimly, so you can understand how Pimly extends Salesforce’s capabilities to help manufacturers sell smarter, enable their teams, and serve customers better.

What Is Salesforce Product2?

Salesforce’s Product2 object is a core part of Salesforce CRM, designed to represent products your company sells. Out of the box, it allows you to:

• Create product records with fields like Name, Description, Price, and Product Code.
• Manage products within Price Books for quotes and opportunities.
• Link products to opportunities, quotes, and orders.

For simple use cases, this works well—but for manufacturers with complex, configurable, and highly detailed product catalogs, Product2 can quickly feel limited.

How Is Pimly Different?

Pimly isn’t here to replace Product2—it supercharges it. Pimly brings Product Information Management (PIM) functionality directly into Salesforce, turning Product2 into a more powerful, comprehensive solution for managing and leveraging product data. Here’s how Pimly goes beyond Product2:

1. Advanced Product Information Management

• Salesforce Product2: Limited to basic fields like name, code, and simple descriptions.
• Pimly: Adds rich, detailed product data fields and Digital Assets to manage technical specs, configurations, compliance data, and more.
  • Example: Instead of a single description field, you can manage fields for dimensions, materials, variants, and custom attributes and even have those values vary depending on the Channel and/or Locale the product is sold in.

2. Centralized Digital Asset Management

• Salesforce Product2: No native capability to manage images, videos, CAD files, or other assets.
• Pimly: Integrates Digital Asset Management (DAM) into your product records, enabling you to store and associate images, diagrams, videos, and manuals with each product.
  • Example: Sales reps and customer service agents can visually identify products, reducing errors and speeding up customer interactions.

3. Linked Items: Tracking Non-Sellable Entities

• Salesforce Product2: Designed only for sellable products, with no efficient way to track related non-sellable entities.
• Pimly: Introduces Linked Items, which are used to model entities that have their own images, properties, etc but are not actual sellable SKUs.  These entities can then be linked to products.
  • Example: A furniture manufacturer may sell a sofa as a product.  The sofa is the sellable SKU and the fabric options are linked items.  Each individual fabric option can have many different properties and images so it makes sense to store the Linked Item as its own record that can be associated to the product.
  • With Pimly, Linked Items are managed alongside products, ensuring a complete and organized view of both sellable and supporting entities.

4. Scalability for Managing Large Product Sets

• Salesforce Product2: Does not provide any purpose-built functionality to actively manage and maintain thousands of SKUs and their corresponding product relationships, digital assets, and linked items.
• Pimly: Designed to scale. Pimly can manage and govern large, complex catalogs with thousands of products, variations, relationships, and linked items without performance issues.
  • Example: Manufacturers with tens of thousands of products or configurable options can seamlessly organize and access their product data.

5. Product Readiness Reporting

• Salesforce Product2: Does not offer insights into the completeness or readiness of product data.
• Pimly: Provides Product Readiness reporting—a way to calculate and visualize the "readiness score" of your products for market. This evaluates validation rules and required fields to ensure data is complete, accurate, and ready for use.
  • Example: Validation rules can be tailored to specific Channels or Product Families, ensuring readiness across different markets and teams.

6. Organized Hierarchies with Product Lines and Inheritance

• Salesforce Product2: Requires manual data entry for every product, even when shared attributes exist across product families.
• Pimly: Organizes products into Families and Product Lines, utilizing Inheritance to cascade recurring property values down through a product line hierarchy. This simplifies managing thousands of products at scale.
  • Example: Update a shared attribute (like material type or compliance spec) at the Product Line level, and the change cascades across all related products.

7. Seamless Orchestration with Salesforce Flows and Approvals

• Salesforce Product2: Limited automation for product processes.
• Pimly: Makes it easy to use native Salesforce Flows and Approval Processes to orchestrate common product workflows, such as new product introductions (NPIs) across multiple team members.
  • Example: Automate approval stages for launching new products, ensuring accuracy and collaboration across teams.

8. Enterprise-Grade Sharing and Permissioning

• Salesforce Product2: Does not natively support complex sharing and permissions of product data across teams.
• Pimly: Offers enterprise-grade permissioning functionality, allowing manufacturers to set up detailed and granular permission structures for products across various users and teams.
  • Example: Sales teams might access pricing data, while engineering teams see technical specs, ensuring the right users see the right data.

9. Seamless Product Enablement for Sales Teams

• Salesforce Product2: Basic product records without tools for sales enablement.
• Pimly: Delivers product data where and when your Sales team needs it. Salespeople can easily search for products, understand their purpose, and access product training materials and related assets to sell effectively.
  • Example: When a new product is launched, Pimly ensures Sales has instant access to specs, images, training guides, and sales materials—all within Salesforce.

10. Empowering Customer Service Teams

• Salesforce Product2: Limited to static product fields, making it hard to resolve customer issues involving product identification.
• Pimly: Helps agents quickly identify products by leveraging detailed specs, product relationships, and visual assets. This reduces resolution times and improves customer satisfaction.
  • Example: If a customer doesn’t know the model number, agents can visually identify products using diagrams or photos in Pimly.

11. AI-Powered Sales and Service with Agentforce

• Salesforce Product2: Does not have the rich product information, relationships, and digital assets to properly support advanced AI-powered workflows.
• Pimly: Unlocks the power of Agentforce AI by making rich, robust product data and assets available for AI-driven processes. Agentforce can:
  • Assist Sales teams by surfacing relevant products, specs, and resources automatically during customer interactions.
  • Automate customer service workflows by helping identify products, resolving issues faster, and recommending next-best actions before human intervention is needed.

Why Does This Matter for Manufacturers?

Manufacturers today face unique challenges:

• Managing complex product data for thousands of SKUs.
• Equipping Sales teams to sell both new and existing products effectively.
• Empowering Customer Service teams to resolve issues quickly and accurately.
• Ensuring Marketing delivers consistent, up-to-date product messaging.
• Automating workflows and validating data readiness for faster product launches.

Salesforce’s Product2 object alone can’t keep up with these demands. Pimly solves this by turning Salesforce into a true Product Information Management system, purpose-built for manufacturers with configurable, customizable, and compliance-driven products.

The Bottom Line: Pimly Extends Salesforce for Manufacturers

If your team is relying on Salesforce’s Product2 object today, but you’re struggling to manage complex product information at scale, Pimly is your answer. By enhancing and extending Product2 with robust PIM, DAM, Linked Items, Product Readiness, enterprise-grade permissioning, and AI-powered workflows, Pimly enables:

• Sales teams to find, learn, and sell products more effectively.
• Customer Service teams to quickly identify products and resolve issues.
• Marketing teams to deliver consistent, accurate product messaging.
• Operations teams to manage product hierarchies and orchestrate workflows seamlessly.

All of this happens natively in Salesforce, ensuring your product data and processes live in the same system your teams already use.

Is Your Salesforce Ready for Pimly?

If you’re ready to supercharge Salesforce’s Product2 object with the power of PIM, let’s connect. At Pimly, we help manufacturers transform how they manage product data—so they can sell smarter, serve better, and grow faster.

Learn more about Pimly and schedule a demo today.

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