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Contributed on August 20, 2020

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How to Sell the Business on Master Data Management

Blog: The Tibco Blog

Reading Time: 3 minutes

These days you compete with data, especially when engaging with your customers. Data helps you understand what they bought, what the sales process was, what marketing was aimed at them, and so much more. With such a 360° view of this data—you can engage, delight, and upsell—and thus grow revenues while reducing sales and marketing costs.  

You can achieve a similar top and bottom-line value with your product data, for instance when bringing new products to market and/or optimizing your supply chain. And successfully tapping other key data domains such as employees, facilities, and vendors can yield huge business value as well.  

With impacts such as these, it is little wonder organizations spend over $7 billion annually on Master Data Management (MDM) software and services that help ensure their most important shared data is consistent, accurate, and accessible. 

Yet freeing the funds for MDM investments can be a challenge in many organizations. In this blog, we’ll provide some tips you can use to sell your business on MDM. 

The Benefits of Master Data Management

To get the business on board, it’s best to use clear business language and avoid specialized IT terminology that “can lose sight of the forest for the trees.” Try these six unambiguous MDM business benefits when building business support for you MDM investments:  

1. Increase revenue: To provide personalized cross-sell and up-sell offers, you need complete, reliable data for all customer touchpoints. MDM can provide a consolidated source of key master data across your customer data entities. This accurate data source provides a better understanding of your customers that you can use to ensure that the right cross-sell and up-sell offers are sent to the right customers at the right time.
2. Improve customer satisfaction: With MDM, you can also strengthen loyalty and increase sales by personalizing interactions, delivering a consistent experience across channels, and tailoring products and services to your customer’s specific wants and needs.
3. Accelerate new revenue streams: Your R&D teams can introduce new products and services faster using MDM as the source of project, product, vendor, and employee data across every stage of your new product development lifecycle.
4. Optimize your supply chain: MDM’s centralized product perspective is the key to accessing timely, accurate information on inventory, product returns, and out-of-stock items across your supply chain. With this data, you can improve inventory turns, forecasting, and customer service. 
5. Identify and act on insights faster: MDM provides a complete, consistent, and reliable source of master data across your organization. With it, you can speed up time-to-insight and action by allowing business users to directly access, manage, and visually interact with master data. Furthermore, MDM simplifies and accelerates data integration, yielding even faster time-to-insight. 
6. Improve compliance: Centralized and complete master data helps to reduce costs associated with compliance reporting and penalties. 

Building your “CFO-ready” Financial Case

As you can see above, MDM provides compelling value. But how can you transform this value into a compelling financial case? 

Fortunately, Gartner provides a seven-step playbook in their April 2020 report 7 Steps to Build a Successful Business Case for MDM. This report also includes best practice instructions and detailed worksheets so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  For a complimentary copy of the report, go here. 

The Bottom Line

Your customers, products, employees, facilities, and more are both real and digital assets you can use to drive new revenues, optimize processes, ensure compliance, and more. A thriving MDM program is key to your success. But you cannot gain MDM’s benefits without first getting your business sponsors on board. Take the tips from this blog to start building a compelling business use case. 

A thriving MDM program is key to your success. But you cannot gain MDM’s benefits without first getting your business sponsors on board.
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To learn about how TIBCO customers such as Panera Bread and Netspend benefit from their TIBCO EBX master data management software investments, check out this webinar.  

And to better understand MDM in general, please download a complimentary copy of the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions.

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