[Podcast] How and why of integrations strategy for the Partnerships team

We’re all in agreement on these facts:

1. All departments have an integration wish list for their own reasons.
2. For many of our partnerships teams, their integration needs are low on the priority list – behind sales/marketing/CS.
3. Integrations are tough – deciding on them, prioritizing them, getting them coded up and into the UI…

In steps Nash and Integry to help Partner teams become the explosive force inside SaaS teams that they damn-well should be.

Nash is a 4x tech founder originally from Pakistan where he built the country’s largest mobile social network before being acquired. He splits his time between San Francisco and Lahore. He’s currently the cofounder and CEO of Integry which helps B2B SaaS companies implement beautiful, native integrations that users love.Integry is an Integrations Experience platform that handles everything around integrations for B2B SaaS. Whether it’s in-app, app directory, marketplace, workflow driven etc. We handle all of it end-to-end.

Hyperion: we’re helping both platforms and new SaaS startups by providing integrations between them. If you’re a SaaS startup you can sign up sign up on Integry’s Hyperion Project: https://integry.io/hyperion/Links:https://integry.io/hyperion/https://integry.io/Nash: @nash

What? Why does the newer vertical of IPAAS (companies like Integry) exist?

Up until around 2010, integrations were all built in house. Then, third parties like Mulesoft came out to support the engineers and speed up and co-manage the integration. Today, there are native-seeming integration portal solutions called IPAAS (integration partner as a service) who can power all of your integrations and allow you to add new one’s to your user dashboards almost instantly.So today, there are 3 options for getting integrations done: Native, Powered and Managed integrations.What happens when CEO’s ask their product/engineering team about leveraging a 3rd party IPAAS or Integration Experience solution?

Why?

If you can reduce the cost and time of rolling out integrations – taking time from months to days – the burden it takes off product alone is worth the conversation.But as a partnerships team, what it allows you to do is move quickly to hit your goals from a strategic partnerships and co-marketing.

How?

How to prioritize integrations?

Partnerships-based prioritization:

• Strategic alignments co-marketing
• Audience overlap
• Audience volume

Product based prioritization:

• Competition: import and sync
• Adjacent categories, sync and automate

Sales or CS based

• Strategic accounts

When does the company start developing the need for marketing-focused integrations (vs CS/Sales-focused)?

You want the lowest hanging fruit first where you can target a large audience. The order for that: product, market, cs/sales is how I would look at it.

When and how does the partnerships team start influencing the integrations backlog?

• By bringing insights to the product team. “Hey we’re seeing this as a popular usecase”
• By demonstrating what the integration unlocks: cosell, marketing, user acquisitions, revenue etc
• There has to be a mental shift from integrations are cost centers to these are revenue centers.

How to personalize your integrations directory? How to ensure the IX is on point?

We deeply care about UX and we’ve created the concept of IX. A good IX on integrations gets you 30x more customers implementing integrations. Which is really important as integrated users:

• Generate upto 2x revenue vs non
• Have significantly lower churn from 40-100% vs non-integrated users

Is there a happy medium for native + IPAAS?

• I don’t like the term iPaaS because its too broad and generic. How can Zapier, Mulesoft, TIBCO can all be in the same category?
• We heavily push for native integrations because the IX has been shown to

How do I bring all of this up to my developers or product team?

• Integrations are hard
• Your best developers don’t work on integrations
• Your developers don’t wake up every morning excited about “I’m going to work on the 5th integration today!”
• So, if a platform can make it such that it takes the heavy lifting out, follows your product guidelines and complies with your engineering expectations, you can unlock this fairly quickly

Questions for the accelerator-only:

“How can you best ensure all parties have some “skin in the game” when it comes to integrations? At what point should this be best discussed? How best to memorialize it?

, and scale by opening your app up to all relevant APIs?”

• Scott Rogerson, CEO, UpContent