4 Questions To Enhance Your Product Relationship With Customers

Much like a marriage proposal, when a SaaS product is being courted for a long-term partnership, you can expect a buyer to inevitably get down on one knee & ask:

Do you integrate with X?

Businesses can potentially lose millions if their software services don't talk to each other. This is why a single integration can sometime make or break high-value deals.

Moreover, integrations are also a popular go-to-market strategy. New products can expose themselves to a massive audience by simply jumping on an integration marketplace (e.g. Chrome webstore) & acquiring new users from there.

Hence, SaaS Product Managers (especially in B2B) simply cannot survive without sorting out their "Voltron" play - teaming up their product with others to create a bigger force.

How can integration help my product?

Integrations can help:

• Enable data to move through the customer's tech stack without manual efforts

Ex: Port user data captured via Google Form into Salesforce.

• Extend the functional value of your product

Ex: Pop-up open a #Canva editor within your email marketing app to craft headers.

• Enhance the context of one data point in the light of another

Ex: Surface Hubspot deal data to give better context behind a sales call recorded on Gong.

• Automate a business process

Ex: Once a payment is received via Quickbooks, move a signed contract to Dropbox.

• Perform a validation or check against another app before proceeding with an action

Ex: Check Google Calendar to generate availability time slots on #Calendly.

How do I decide which integration to build?

1. Always begin with customers

What problem will it solve for them? Have your users asked for it? Why?

Note: it's not necessary for your user to mention a particular app or brand they want to integrate with. Ex: They may say they just need a way to send out a SMS based on an event but not explicitly specify options like Twilio.

Check with sales/support to see if an integration request came up.

Want to see if your customer even uses a certain CRM or CMS? Open their site using #BuiltWith and inspect the stack.

2. Inspect the API

Check online communities to see how the API has fared for other developers. Does it have limitations or bugs? Is there a new version in the works?

3. Understand expenses

Not every API is free of cost (e.g. higher tiers of Google Maps). Be clear about the cost implications this will incur for you and whether your business will be able to sustain it.

How do I know an integration was worth it?

Track trends like:

• Adoption metrics

What percentage of your customer base has the integration enabled?

• Utilization metrics

How much do those customers use it? What's the volume of data transfer? Frequency?

If both show promising results, are there other integrations that can add value to your app?