As the B2B industry gets continuously disrupted, C-level executives are found putting immense pressure on all the functional areas of the businesses they lead to onboard customers, vendors, and products faster and build a more agile competitive strategy. But the immense amount of data involved in each such relationship is gumming up the works. And this data is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly more complex. In that light, it has become extremely difficult for companies to consolidate data from various sources and create a single view across customers, vendors, and products.
A Master Data Management (MDM) solution can deliver the edge businesses need in such an increasingly dynamic business landscape. It can help manage data across different parties, products, and channels and help the organization keep pace with trends and demands that change overnight. In fact, the right solution can provide a 360-degree view of data and make it easier for businesses to understand needs and challenges and onboard customers, vendors, and products faster. Read on to find out how!
The power of MDM
As more and more data gets generated, B2B businesses come face-to-face with the humongous challenge of creating a single source of truth across all domains – while enabling better governance and data visibility. Reducing costs through the elimination of inefficient data redundancies is also desirable. And laying data as the foundation to enable other priorities such as advanced analytics, automation and reporting have also become extremely critical. There is a lot to do here.
A modern MDM solution, with pre-built templates and data taxonomies, makes it extremely easy for businesses to strengthen relationships, improve product quality, enhance customer experience, and boost sales effectiveness. Providing in-depth support on data curation, ingestion, transformation, and ongoing governance, it delivers an end-to-end understanding of activities across touchpoints while enriching vendor and customer profiles.
Using MDM, B2B businesses can unearth previously hidden trends and patterns, make the right connections, and create organizational efficiencies. MDM can also implement and enforce security controls across the organization while reinforcing loyalty and ensuring compliance with the relevant regulations.
Using MDM for quicker onboarding
In a data-obsessed world, MDM is the key to breaking down departmental silos and integrating fragmented sources of data to provide a birds-eye view of stakeholders. By empowering businesses to turn data into business strategy, it can streamline the onboarding process and make it quicker (and easier) for B2B organizations to onboard vendors, customers, and products faster. Here’s more on exactly how!
- Process-driven workflows: Most MDM solutions today offer pre-built workflows that make capturing, reviewing, and approving new records more efficient and accurate. At the same time, they help eliminate duplicate, incomplete, and inaccurate records. Such process-driven workflows enable B2B companies to automatically validate (and enrich) relevant stakeholder data while making it easy for them to onboard them – perhaps easier than competitors do.
- Built-in intelligence: MDM solutions help in assimilating, cleansing, and updating data in a unified manner. By consolidating business-critical data from across applications, it helps create a single, 360-degree view of data while making it easily actionable. Using this data, B2B organizations can more easily understand the relationships between various stakeholders, their needs and wants, the challenges they face, and more. It can also help in understanding customers better: their buying behavior, the channels they prefer, the locations they belong to, and more – thus helping them create products and processes in a way that best meets their expectations.
- Visual dashboards: MDM solutions also allow business users to visually explore data and utilize intuitive graphics to make connections among customers, vendors, channels, locations, products, and more. Such insight can help B2B organizations explore and understand networks and relationships hidden in large volumes of data. They can then use this understanding to make contextual data available to key stakeholders and drive quicker onboarding, retention, and referral.
Increase loyalty and retention
The constantly growing data across product, customer, supplier, location, vendor, employee, asset, etc. has made it extremely difficult for B2B companies to make the right decisions and drive the right outcomes. But conversely, this wealth of data also contains the ability for B2B companies to overcome several organizational challenges.
As competition grows, it becomes extremely important to onboard stakeholders quickly and efficiently and achieve an edge over others. MDM is a great way to build a data-centric culture and deliver more consistent services across products and channels.
With the right workflows, built-in intelligence, and dynamic dashboards, companies can understand how customers and vendors engage over time, tweak processes, and improve the onboarding and nurture approach. They can strategically manage data using a unified platform, understand stakeholder needs and requirements, and strengthen relationships for increased loyalty and retention.