The 15 largest SaaS companies each have hundreds of product integrations established, with the median being 347.
It’s no coincidence that SaaS leaders invest heavily in product integrations; on the contrary, these software providers have been successful, at least in part, because of the integrations they offer.
However, given the internal resources these SaaS leaders have at their disposal, their ability to integrate at scale is the anomaly—not the norm. The rest of us have to decide on the integrations we pursue today and the ones we invest in later. And like most decisions, this requires weighing our options carefully.
To help you navigate this exercise, we’ll walk through 5 inputs that can lead you towards identifying the most pressing integrations.
How to turn your product into a hub for automations
We’ll share real-world examples from Tango Card, CyCognito, and Unanet.
1. Your market intuition
As a product manager, you likely have a firm understanding of your business, whether it’s the needs and wants of clients, the strengths and weaknesses of your product relative to competitors, the gaps and greenspace in your market, or the future trends you see playing out in the industry.
Your in-depth knowledge of various areas can be, in and of itself, enough to build a list of integrations that’ll help your current and future customers.
Related: How an embedded integration platform can help any organization integrate at scale
2. Your competitors
Are rivals offering specific integrations? Doing the same can help close a feature gap, which, in turn, removes friction in sales cycles and helps you stay competitive. In addition, you might be able to assign a dollar value on the impact of a competitor’s integration. For example, assuming the competitor is a public company, they might announce how much revenue an integration drove during one of their earnings calls. If the figure is relatively lucrative, the integration is all the more worth prioritizing.
It’s also worth noting that the inverse of this situation—your competitors don’t offer certain integrations you’ve identified—can clue you in on integrations that behoove your business. Reason being, these integrations can give you a competitive edge and might even lead to clients switching over to your platform.
3. Your employees
Many of your employees—from your marketers to your sales reps to your support agents—actively use your platform.
Based on their unique experiences in using your product, they might have valuable ideas for integrations that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise, or that reaffirms your confidence in an option that’s already being considered.
Moreover, they likely have an acute sense of the impact an integration would bring—allowing you to prioritize your options more easily. These insights can range from the volume of clients who’d benefit to the degree at which it’d improve customer satisfaction.
4. Your customers
Customers are a seemingly obvious source for ideas. Less obvious, however, are all the places where you can find their requests or ideas.
It might involve combing through tickets created on their behalf, looking back at specific comments in a social channel, listening into calls with customer success managers, keeping abreast of the latest product reviews, etc.
While keeping a pulse on a variety of sources for customer feedback might seem overwhelming, the potential returns of identifying invaluable product integrations make it well worth the while.
5. Your available resources
The process of building to an app’s API can be incredibly time consuming for your engineers, especially when there are several capabilities you’re looking to gain from the integration. In addition, having them focus on this, versus other product and market challenges they’re uniquely qualified to solve, is costly. Therefore, you might need to focus on integrations that are relatively easier to implement and maintain.
Fortunately, there’s a way to build integrations without involving your developers and that also addresses the other considerations we’ve covered. You can read on to learn more about this solution.
Related: How to decide between building integrations and buying them
Build integrations cost-effectively with Workato’s Embedded Platform
Workato’s Embedded Platform allows organizations to add our low-code iPaaS into their UI. Once embedded, employees at your organization, as well as clients, can implement integrations and automations without having to write a single line of code—allowing you and your clients to integrate and automate at scale.
Here’s more on what you can expect from our Embedded Platform:
- Flexible configuration options, where users can customize their integrations and automations in your platform or simply use what you build
- A comprehensive library of pre-built connectors and automation templates (“recipes”), empowering your users to integrate and automate quickly and with little customization required
- The ability to monitor permissions and usage through a centralized dashboard, all but ensuring that your clients’ data is kept secure and that clients aren’t breaching your terms of engagement
