B2B Buyers Demand More: Is Your Catalog Ready?

B2B buyers have changed. They expect instant access to precise product data, B2C-style personalization, and self-serve purchasing – and they’re voting with their purchasing behavior. If your product catalog is incomplete, inconsistent, or slow to update, you’re not just losing convenience – you’re losing deals. 

Here’s what’s happening in 2025 and how to make your catalog the competitive engine your sales team needs.

The New Buying Reality: Faster, Smarter, And Self-Directed

Today’s B2B market is enormous and increasingly digital. The global B2B e-commerce market was estimated at over $32 trillion in 2025, with continued growth into 2026 – that’s a vast pool of digitally-directed buying activity.

Buyers arrive with expectations formed by consumer retail: more than 70% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C-like, personalized experience when they evaluate suppliers. Gen-X, Millennial, and Gen-Z decision makers use online research, catalogs, and AI tools to shortlist vendors long before sales meetings happen — in fact, Forrester finds buyers often pick vendors well before formal evaluation starts.

Why Catalogs Matter Now (Not Later)

A modern catalog is more than a PDF or CSV. It’s the single source of truth that powers search, commerce, quoting, eProcurement, marketplaces, and sales enablement. Firms using mature Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) practices reduce order friction, speed time-to-quote, and present accurate specifications and compliance data that procurement teams require.

The PIM market underscores this urgency: industry analyses project PIM market sizes in the billions, with aggressive CAGR forecasts (mid-teens in many reports) as companies invest in structured product data, syndication, and AI-driven enrichment. Efficient PIM is now table stakes to reach omnichannel buyers.

Data Points That Should Worry (Or Wake Up) Your Leadership

• Generative AI Is Reshaping Research: Forrester found that nearly nine in ten B2B buyers use generative AI as a top source of self-guided information in buying stages — meaning your catalog content must be machine-readable and AI-friendly.
• Self-Serve Is Winning: Forrester predicts more than half of large B2B purchases will be processed through digital self-serve channels by 2025 — catalogs feed those channels.
• Personalization Boosts Conversion: Reports in 2025 link hyper-personalization directly to higher conversion and larger basket sizes in B2B commerce; catalogs that support dynamic pricing, customer-specific SKUs, and contextual content convert better.

These aren’t theoretical trends – they change procurement workflows. Buyers prefer vendors who publish accurate pricing tiers, availability, spec sheets, compliance docs, and rich media (datasheets, 3D models, certifications) directly in catalog feeds.

Common Catalog Gaps That Kill Deals

• Missing or inconsistent attributes across SKUs (dimensions, materials, certifications)
• Low-quality images and no configurable product visuals
• Inaccurate lead times or stock visibility (costly for just-in-time buyers)
• Non-standardized identifiers (poor integration with marketplaces and eProcurement)
• Content that’s human-readable but not machine-readable (bad for AI and automation)

If your ERP spits out raw SKUs that nobody can trust, that’s a lost opportunity on every channel.

Practical Steps To Make Your Catalog Sale-Ready

• Centralize Product Data In A PIM — consolidate attributes, assets, and taxonomy so every channel consumes the same authoritative records. (Gartner’s 2025 PIM guidance emphasizes PIM as the backbone for PXM and multichannel syndication.)
• Adopt Standardized Identifiers And Schemas — (GS1, UNSPSC, industry-specific taxonomies) so buyers and marketplaces consume your data without transformation.
• Enrich For People And Machines — add short and long descriptions, use structured specs, attach regulatory documents, and tag assets for AI indexing.
• Enable Dynamic, Customer-Specific Catalogs — present negotiated pricing, contract terms, and preferred assortments per account.
• Automate Syndication And Monitoring — push validated feeds to marketplaces, distributors, and eProcurement systems, and continuously monitor quality scores.

Recent Advancements To Leverage

AI-assisted enrichment (auto-tagging images, generating spec summaries), PXM overlays for tailored experiences, and real-time inventory integration with marketplaces are now mainstream reducing time to market and improving discovery. Leading vendors and analyst guides in 2025 emphasize PIM + PXM + DAM interoperability as the architecture that unlocks buyer trust and conversion.

EnFuse Solutions – Make Your Catalog Buyer-Ready

EnFuse Solutions specializes in building enterprise PIM and catalog ecosystems that combine data governance, AI enrichment, and omnichannel syndication. A few ways EnFuse can help:

• Rapid PIM implementation and migration with minimal disruption
• Taxonomy engineering and GS1/standard mapping for marketplace readiness
• AI-driven content enrichment and automated image tagging
• Real-time integration with ERP, WMS, and eProcurement systems

If you want a catalog that converts, EnFuse helps bridge the gap between messy product data and buyer-ready experiences.

Conclusion — Your Catalog Is More Than Content; It’s Sales Enablement

B2B buyers in 2025 are informed, impatient, and increasingly self-sufficient. A catalog that’s complete, machine-readable, and personalized isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a competitive requirement. Invest in PIM, enrich content for both humans and AI, and automate syndication. Need help turning your catalog into a revenue engine? EnFuse Solutions can audit, migrate, and optimize your product data to win more deals. Contact EnFuse Solutions today to start your catalog transformation.