Whether selling B2B or B2C, catalogs remain at the heart of merchandising for most manufacturers. From product photography to design, editorial, and hotspotting – a significant amount of man hours are spent creating this visual representation of a company’s brand and product offering. Moving this valuable tool to digital, though imperative in today’s sales environment, has also become a hurdle in time and efficiency due to manual hotspotting.
What is Manual Hotspotting?
One of the most time-intensive aspects of catalog sales remains manual hotspotting. In this process, an admin or staff member must review every product in a catalog, tag its related SKU, and then associate it manually with the same item in the product offering database. Even the most experienced hot-spotter working through a small catalog can spend hours on this process.
Sales Breakage is Real
When it comes time to buy and sell, reps and their customers are regularly removed from the catalog environment, typing in SKU numbers manually or hunting for associated products through long lists and web-based forms. Once outside of the carefully considered and crafted catalog environment, enthusiasm for the product, and even the sales opportunity itself, can be lost.
Enter Catalog Catalyst
With sales moving increasingly to a remote experience, a tech platform and partner that can solve your day-to-day sales problems and help you sell from anywhere is a business necessity. Reps and manufacturers can now solve the problem of sales breakage and manual hotspotting and level up their selling powers with CATALOG CATALYST, an easy to use point-and-click sales tool that lets users create interactive and shoppable online catalogs and eCommerce websites in minutes.
Rather than spending hours and dollars on the painstaking process of manually hotspotting a PDF catalog, CATALOG CATALYST turns PDFs into clickable, shoppable e-commerce sites. Aleran’s proprietary, first of its kind AI and Machine Learning-based software carefully analyzes each catalog file and then automatically identifies the associated SKU within the product database. These matched items are then immediately made interactive within the catalog as eSKUs. The result? Your PDF catalog is now a comprehensive, interactive sales tool, instantly uploaded to an e-commerce environment. Shoppers can browse catalogs and easily click an eSKU to learn more or to add it to their shopping cart.
Designed and built for today’s manufacturer and sales agency, CATALOG CATALYST will reduce valuable time spent on data entry and manual hotspotting and keep customers in the catalog environment longer. It also integrates easily with MARKETPLACE and REPDESK so users can manage their back office in a single view, with hosting and platform support included with our no-strings-attached subscription.
For more information, contact Aleran today to speak with a Consultant or Request a Demo: 888-388-2408.
