Whether you’re engineering APIs or integrations, heading up your ISV partner program, or looking for high-impact ways to drive revenue as a CRO this year, pay attention. These stats show how an effective integration strategy can drive incredible, evergreen value for your business.
Integrations can increase sales close rates
Having an integrated tech stack is extremely important to B2B SaaS buyers. People are used to their technology connecting, and are unwilling to purchase software that will force them to copy-and-paste (or worse, have two sources of truth) in 2024.
You can see proof of this in the 2024 State of SaaS Integrations Report.
On average, integrations are brought up in approximately 60% of all sales cycles.
Your support and product teams likely know this, as they’re being asked constantly for new integrations from your sales team.
In fact, only 1% of companies surveyed said integrations were “not important” to their customers.
84% said integrations were a dealbreaker (very important or a key requirement) to customers.
Let this be the prompt to get you to survey your customers and analyze integration requests on sales calls. Then start to determine how to adjust your strategy to give prospects the integrations they need.
And, yes, this is true across B2B SaaS categories:
Customers with integrations are less likely to churn
You often hear integrated software churn described as “ripping out an application from their stack”. Meaning a tool that already has integrations set up is way harder to stop using, since you’ll have to presumably set up new integrations and processes, and/or go without for a period of time.
But what do the stats say?
92% of companies reported lower churn for customers with integrations installed.
This stat comes from the 2024 State of SaaS Integrations Report, which shows lower churn rates in the companies tracking this. But a surprising 30% don’t track how integrations affect churn at all.
Is this you? Could you set up some reporting to show the effectiveness of integrations on churn for your company?
Let’s dive even further. A few case studies (for Freshworks and Typeform) show retention to more than double between customers having 1 and 5 integrations. Freshworks says customers with 5+ integrations can be up to 80% less likely to churn!
So 1 integration connected is a good starting point. 5+ is ideal.
Integrations drive 35% of upsell revenue on average
Let’s talk about expansions.
According to the 2024 State of SaaS Integrations Report, “The best SaaS companies achieve net revenue retention (NRR) upwards of 140%, which means for every 100 dollars their customers pay them today, a year from now, those same customers will be paying them $140.”
So where does that 40% come from?
A few options include product expansions, additional users, and general price increases. But, on average, 35% comes from integrations!
On average, 35% of upsell revenue comes from integrations.
This could mean charging for integration installation and usage, gating them behind pricing tiers, or tying their use to high-value products.
Take a look at your integration strategy and see if you can leverage integrations to provide additional value and upsell opportunities for your current customers.
Add new product use cases in ~3 months with integrations
Let's look at a product example: A marketing automation tool is unlikely to include webinar software. But marketers use automation and webinar software – almost always together.
So to better serve their customers, it only makes sense for the webinar software to build an integration with that marketing automation tool (and all the others).
It'll take them infinitely less time than building their own similar automation functionality.
The majority of companies say it takes 3-6 months to build an integration.
Although that may seem like a long time, it’s a lot less than the years it would take to build, say, an entirely new webinar software. Yet it solves a legitimate use case for your customers and prospects.
With the right integration strategy, you can solve multiple use cases and requests by customers, covering their needs quickly and with relatively low engineering time.
Integrations make your product scalable
According to the 2024 State of Platforms Report, the average number of apps in the 50 largest software companies’ marketplaces is 1,498. This shows that integrations correlate with SaaS growth.
But let’s look at another stat from the 2024 State of SaaS Integrations Report.
Over 50% of enterprise companies have more than 51 integrations.
There are a lot of assumptions that can be made about why larger companies have more integrations. But from a product perspective, it’s clear that they’re providing a growing number of apps for their customers to build their tech stacks.
But even mid-market and enterprise companies don’t have the engineering resources to create 100s or 1000s of integrations. So how are they doing it?
For the majority of enterprise companies, more than 50% of their integrations are built by their partners.
With a platform strategy, that’s how. They’re building and promoting APIs, plus incentivizing external developers and platforms to build onto them.
This is the ideal state in scaling product solutions (plus gaining previously-mentioned benefits like higher retention and sales).
Get access to a new audience
When you build an integration with another company, you provide additional use cases to your customers. But you can also offer that use case to the customers from the other company.
If you built the integration based on a customer request (or a few), there are likely many users of the other software who could benefit from your integrated solution.
Connect with the other organization and put together a co-marketing plan.
This is something product, marketing, and partnerships teams alike overlook. You could have a built-in high-trust campaign to your new partner’s audience available for every integration – driving trackable leads into your funnel.
SEO value
I’ve got a secret to share: Partner Fleet ranks for searches including HubSpot, Calendly, and PartnerStack – all due to our integrations with them.
The pages that rank come from our ecosystem marketplace (integration & partner directory). But you could also easily rank for blog posts or YouTube videos you create to promote
Any valuable content that comes from your integration with a well-known, and well searched, brand can drive traffic and leads into your funnel.
In fact, one Partner Fleet customer gets about 3 demo clicks on their marketplace – PER DAY!
This is often overlooked or considered a cherry on the top of your integration strategy, but it shouldn’t be. Integrations can be the first step in a high-value long-tail content marketing play.
Prove the value of integrations to your C-Suite
Want the proof behind these claims? Download the 2024 State of SaaS Integrations Report, and send it to your executives. They may find it worth another look at tracking value and dedicating resources to your integrations strategy.
