So you're building (or have built) a new integration offering.
But now you need to actually market and sell it. That's why we created this guide.
But now you need to actually market and sell it. That's why we created this guide.
An effective and collaborative GTM (go-to-market) strategy is key to aligning how a product solves its users’ pain points and how the company positions the offering and markets it to the current and prospective customer base.
In this guide we’ll cover how to develop a integration GTM strategy (with Cloud Elements’ help as a business partner) to:
Whether you’re productizing a few key integrations, selling bespoke services to enterprise customers, or selling workflow & integration tooling as a product line, this guide will help you align P&E with Marketing, Sales/CS, and Services teams. We’ll go in-depth on the following use cases:
Customers increasingly demand connected, seamless experiences. With enterprises using 1,500+ apps (according to Symantec’s 2018 Shadow Data Report) and APIs growing by ~30% between 2015-2019, customer evaluations are increasingly skewed toward integration capabilities, meaning interconnectivity is essential to product viability and customer retention. This is the reason 80% of the IT budget goes toward performance maintenance activities such as integration and maintenance while just 20% goes to innovation.
As a Product/Engineering leader at your company, you clearly know the criticality of integrations, but there’s often an internal disconnect. Your field teams might ask why so much engineering time is devoted to integrations, while in the meantime sales and CS teams are acutely aware that customers are thwarted by lack of seamless data transfer into systems of record such as highly-customized ERP, CRM, or HRIS applications.
It’s challenging to convince internal stakeholders to dedicate a chunk of their already-full plates with marketing or selling integrations, especially considering they don’t behave like your other features so teams might not know quite what to say about them or how to use them to their strategic benefit.
That’s why we’ve created this guide - to help teach internal stakeholders about the importance of an integration GTM strategy along with key considerations for creating effective methodologies.
For digital product teams, integrations are fundamentally a question of solving user needs, strategy, and market-fit. But as any P&E leader knows, ‘Build it and they will come…’ rarely works. As seamless integrations across the user’s app ecosystem become more and more important to customers, use this guide to align across BizDev, Sales, Marketing, CS, and PS to ensure everyone knows, a) why you’re building an integration experience, b) what problem that experience solves for users, and c) how to position it for customers.
Integrations communicate to prospects a mature solution to their problems and help buyers realize value faster. Sales and BizDev leaders can refer to this guide to help shift teams from a mindset of pushing features and functions to a more consultative sales approach. Learn how to empower prospects with the idea of a connected, seamless experience - where is their industry headed, and what do your customers’ customers demand?
Integrations enhance core value messaging by showing your products “play nice” with other tools customers use. Also, with the right set of integrations, you can enable high-level objectives such as penetrating new markets and customer segments. This guide helps marketing leaders both prepare for the launch of new functionality (developing a promotional strategy & core message) while also reflecting on the core value prop vs. supporting features. Discover the difference between marketing a strict value-add and communicating a more robust value prop that hinges upon connectivity and meeting customers where they’re at.
Integrations help customers see value faster, drive usage of your product, and reduce churn. CS and PS teams can use this guide to develop and set realistic expectations for customers to help them see the value of enhanced integration offerings faster. Learn what exactly GTM means for your existing customers and how to communicate the value of these offerings to them effectively without over- or under-promising.
Integrations don’t just help sellers close or help customers see value faster, they communicate to the market where your company wants to focus and can deepen relationships with key partners. BizDev and Partners leaders can leverage this GTM guide to position the integration work from Product and Engineering as evidence your company is serious about investing in key sectors and/or partners. Further, leverage this guide to ensure your internal integration goals and strategies are clearly communicated to, and inclusive of, key partners.
What do most engineering leaders need with a go-to-market guide? Fair question. We won’t blame you if you forward this on to colleagues now and get back to serious work. In a nutshell, we know engineering leaders have to make hard prioritization choices everyday. Integrations often come at the cost of other features that are differentiating, at least in the short term. So use this guide to ensure that your teams a) build what customers need and b) customers use what your teams build.
Perhaps you offer an API customers integrate with. It’s likely P&E has built an integration or two and that someone in PS has done custom integration work as a part of onboarding new customers. In fact, this is the challenge: we don’t get a clean start, we find ourselves in the messy middle.
But that’s the reality. As a product leader, you can muddle through the complexity, or you can have everyone take a step back and ask “where are we going?” We’ve structured this guide in six steps to serve the latter case; for the former, you should still find helpful tidbits to help guide your regular cross-team meetings to better align with your sales and marketing colleagues.
Most people are familiar with what integrations are in general, but aligning on how your company is specifically using new integrations as either a part of your core value prop or a new revenue stream/retention strategy is essential to presenting the offering in a consistent, unified manner.
When we discuss integrations, we’re not talking about sales orders in your instance of Salesforce flowing into your instance of NetSuite to bill customers. Nor are we referring to job candidate records from Greenhouse syncing with Workday and JIRA to smooth new hire onboarding at your company.
To put it plainly, we aren’t discussing internal integrations, which you and your team are likely intimately familiar with, but are instead communicating how to facilitate essential integrations that your customers need to further their operations and to realize full and “sticky” value from your product.
If your response to this customer need is “we offer a public API and they figure it out on their own” or anything else in the vein of “we build it and they come,” then stop reading this guide and go here.
Company leaders have multiple integration experiences to choose from when selecting a customer offering. First and foremost, you need to decide if you solution will be user-driven or product-driven:
USER-DRIVEN tooling that enables your customers to integrate applications on their own
PRODUCT-DRIVEN integration that’s productized as a service or feature
An additional consideration to mull over is where to invest your resources: time (people hours) or technology (development platform)? In the decision-matrix below, we make recommendations for the experience you can provide your customers given the focus of your solution and your primary resource investment.
Some of the revenue models that our other customers utilize (and which you might pull from when deciding your GTM strategy) include:
Rather than getting actual dollars in your pocket by offering a new product line or a premium add-on to your existing customers, an indirect revenue strategy offers integrations free-of-charge to all customers in an effort to gain more competitive wins (differentiation), reduce churn (customer success), drive customer’s usage of your platform (revenue growth), and offer faster time-to-value (via ease and flexibility).
Pro tip: As there’s no direct revenue tied to this monetization strategy, the P&E investment is justified indirectly. Going through some “competitive takedowns” with other key stakeholders, (say-over drinks in the late afternoon?), can bridge the gap between a new feature to espouse and product evangelism.
With this strategy, customers pay extra money to access the premium integration offering. In this case, the integration pricing can cover all (or only some) of the upfront P&E investment or can be used as a new profit generation tool. We’ve seen it all, from companies that charge an additional 25% of the subscription fee for one integration (props to them) to those who include integrations with other features in premium tiers. Regardless of the nitty-gritty financial details, in all cases, Marketing, Sales, CS, and PS need to be able to explain the value of the features in the premium tier(s).
Pro tip: Many product companies that price integrations start by summing up the investment and dividing that total by the projected usage. We always recommend starting with some assessment of customer value to set prices (rather than using your costs as the baseline), meaning if integrations add $100 in value, the price is how much of that $100 goes to the company vs the customer.
This scenario is typically only applicable to large enterprises (think: the SAPs, Oracles, and Microsofts of the world). With this scenario, the integration experience may be offered as a new product line and typically complements the enterprise’s other technological offerings. As with any product line, leadership is honed in on profitability and self-sufficiency (at least after enough time has passed after the hiccups of initial release).
Pro tip: Companies that go this route shouldn’t think of integration as a feature. With this route, the enterprise is getting into the integration business. With this, your offering might now overlap with resellers, partners, and system integrators in the ecosystem—make sure to align with them early on if that’s the case
Because of the internal differences in teams, constraints, customers, etc., there’s no cut-and-dry template for having this conversation, but there are a few key questions that your leadership should off-handedly know the answers to:
Integrations could be table stakes in your niche, tied to strategic moves up- or down-market, key to expansion into new verticals or regions, or they could be blockers for customer growth that take too long to implement (PS) or too much time to maintain (engineering). Regardless, getting aligned on the why is critical to cross-departmental understanding and advocacy.
Two key options for offering integrations via the Cloud Elements platform include either a drop-in iPaaS (aka white-label) where you own the UX or an embedded integration platform that’s accessible via API call. What’s best for your company depends on several factors, including revenue strategy (direct vs. indirect), need for additional control over the UX, etc.
Productized integrations offer thoughtfully-designed solutions for a few repeated use cases, whereas integration tooling helps thousands of users solve thousands of unique problems. We’re clearly biased, but asking users to learn a third-party integration tool to build integrations seems dismissive of customers’ demands for a seamless experience that improves time-to-value.
What support resources are available, and when should customers engage the PS team?No matter what integration experience you offer, it’s essential to align on who will be the point-of-contact for various types of customer support as users adopt your offering. These needs can range from non-technical users who need simple tutorials, to customers who need customization but are unable to complete it internally due to competing IT priorities, to users who want formal trainings and certifications. What’s your game plan for insulating your customers from hindrances throughout adoption, whether it be initial learning/justification or more comprehensive technical requests?
We know you’re going to be asked by internal stakeholders from Sales, Marketing, BizDev, and other customer-facing teams how you plan to position your integration offering. Unfortunately, this is another area that doesn’t have a cut-and-dry template, but don’t scroll past this section, because we do have some base recommendations (separated by monetization strategy) to work off of given what we’ve seen from other customers.
Most often, we see these customers position integrations as an enhancement to the core value prop that recognizes your customers’ use of a bunch of different applications to sew together business processes like procure-to-pay. In this sense, integrations communicate product maturity (reliability), expertise (“users like you typically integrate with X in order to…”), and a focus on customer value, quickly (“If you had to build this integration yourself, it’d likely take 6-8 weeks after IT prioritizes it…”). Clear customer stories and/or user scenarios (“If a customer has recently adopted X product, our integration to X allows them to achieve Y...”) are an efficient way to communicate value and encourage prospects to move along the sales funnel.
Customers typically position these integrations as a part of their ‘enterprise-grade’ offering (still an enhancement to the core value prop) and sellers should be able to clearly articulate why the customer will reap more additional value from the integrations than what they pay for them upfront. This increases the level of training and enablement sellers need to quantify added value, and CS teams need to proactively suggest the higher tier to customers ahead of renewals. This, in turn, ups the level of engagement needed from product marketing and how directly customer adoption is tied to seller incentives.
In most cases the standalone product route gets you into the business of integration (vs just enhancing your value prop), so you should treat it as such.
This means your company should dedicate sufficient marketing and/or product marketing resources and plan to enable and incentivize sellers through assets such as competitive battle cards, sales decks, leave-behind collateral, etc. Additionally, analysts like Gartner and Forrester need to be notified of your entry into the integration space by your analyst relations (AR) team and you need to recognize the new set of competitors that your product marketing or competitive intel teams need to add to their lists. Finally, think about dedicating engineering time to help jumpstart early adopters—for example, with purpose-built integration templates.
In terms of positioning, in some cases the new product line still complements the core value prop of the product suite (in the case of SugarCRM, Sugar Integrate is the glue that makes their vision of ‘the first time-aware CX platform’ possible). In other cases, the integration product extends the core value prop into new territory (look at SAP CEO Christian Klein’s recent post for an example: “Integration in the Cloud: SAP’s Way Forward”).
After all, if you’re offering a premium integration but your sales & marketing teams don’t know how to promote it to prospects and your CS team doesn’t see the value-add for existing customers, how can you expect positive ROI? Read on for communication tips to create advocates within various essential leadership roles.
Something to consider: If you’ve never worked in a sales role firsthand, it can be difficult to empathize with having a large portion of your personal income dependent on performance. With this in mind, many sellers have developed a necessary “spider sense” for new features/partners/etc., and whether they will be “good” and simplify sales or “bad” by making deals more complicated. Effective integrations can simplify the sales process, meaning when speaking with sales leadership about the path forward, this is the point you should underline.
Special consideration: Sales Engineering usually require marketing material with a technical focus such as a deeper dive into capabilities, corner cases and gotchas. They will also be looking for ways to visualize integrations to customers such as demos and test data.
Find out what the Business Development team's strategic focus is. Hopefully your integrations/roadmap align with that initiative.
Be sure to make their customer support & SEs aware that these integrations now exist.
Something to consider: If channel partners make money doing integration work around your software, think hard about pricing models that don’t dramatically impact their revenue and consider the added training cost that comes with switching from the status quo.
After all, if you’re offering a premium integration but your sales & marketing teams don’t know how to promote it to prospects and your CS team doesn’t see the value-add for existing customers, how can you expect positive ROI? Read on for communication tips to create advocates within various essential leadership roles.
The key takeaway: marketing and selling integrations (whether new features or pushing for greater adoption) is a cross-functional effort. Aligning on the checklist and dates early will save confusion and frustration later.
Click here to access our Integrations GTM Execution and KPI Tracking Checklist
Here are some other companies that have launched integration products with Cloud Elements (and how they did so successfully).
Gainsight partnered with Cloud Elements in December 2019. To build anticipation for their suite of new integrations, they announced the offering publicly at their annual user conference in May 2020. In the first half of 2020, Gainsight quickly built and tested eight new integrations, which were launched to users in July with a fully-integrated GTM. They published limited press releases or announcements and instead used a heavy focus on customer marketing via beta user stories; sales & SE training and enablement; end-user content and training videos for self-service learning; and CS team promotions to target customers.
SugarCRM launched Sugar Integrate, a white-labeled version of the Cloud Elements platform in April 2020 (in just 90 days!). With this quick turnaround, alignment was key - early in the product development cycle, SugarCRM held executive- and director-level meetings among Product, Sales, & Marketing to strategize launch and GTM activities. To help explain and promote Sugar Integrate, SugarCRM repurposed and rebranded existing Cloud Elements collateral to educate their sellers, SEs, and partner network (with SI and VAR partners getting involved early in the cycle). Additionally, the team included Cloud Elements in early deal review calls to help position the new offering and create developer advocacy plans and collaborate on user training events.
At this point, it’s important to measure how exactly your GTM efforts have paid off - have you closed more deals? Has customer churn lessened? Have customer implementations of the integrations gotten quicker and quicker? Are you making in-hand money off the integrations you offer? How much user adoption are you seeing? Of course, the metrics that you analyze to determine “success” depend on your revenue strategy. Once these key determiners have been measured and deemed “successful” or “unsuccessful,” you can take one of two paths.
If you’ve launched your integration offering successfully, it might be time to look into building even more integrations to boost the customer experience and keep a steady flow of product improvement within your roadmap. What other integrations have your customers continually mentioned? How are they using the current integrations you offer? Use these data points as a start to target your next round of integration offerings.
If your integration GTM was deemed unsuccessful, it’s time to analyze what exactly went wrong. Consider these potential contributors:
Did your company strategy shift? (i.e. Did you build a bunch of integrations for healthcare but then decide to walk away from healthcare?) — if so, refocus your integration targets.
Do integrations solve user needs? (i.e. You may have tried to productize a self-serve integration only to find you still needed a lot of professional services.) If this is the case, pivot design requirements to fix the actual customer pain (maybe instead of providing fully self-serve integrations, you can look to reduce the PS hours 10x like our customer Mindbridge.ai did).
Are users aware your integrations exist? (i.e. Are you still getting mediocre NPS scores that complain about connecting with an application you’ve built an integration for?) If so, reconnect with your marketing and CS teams to understand the communication disconnect; perhaps the CS team checks in regularly with an exec sponsor who doesn’t pass information along to your users.
Are sellers/SEs even talking about integrations with customers? (i.e. Are you still closing business and getting referrals, but no new customers take advantage of the integrations?). If this is the case, reconnect with sales leadership on the following points:
Is Product/Marketing/Sales just stretched too thin? (i.e. In spite of your best intentions, did you build integrations but not the enablement content, forget to coordinate with Marketing ahead of the release and just launched anyways, etc…?) In this case, it’s critical to ask leadership for the resources you need to drive adoption and customer success—pound tables, raise your voice (respectfully)—after all, you’ve invested this much so far…(and if they don’t come back to you about sunk costs, use that to your advantage).
Where do you go from here? Now that you’ve launched your integration offering, it’s critical to keep the motor running - sure, you’ve integrated to many of the apps that are critical to your customers’ ecosystems, but in the rapidly transforming technology world, new apps pop up every year, month, week, day.
To keep the critical value of customer experience and seamless connectivity at top of mind, developing and iterating upon a roadmap for your integration strategy is something to come back to every month or so and have a fluid communication plan in place with key stakeholders (customer success, sales, professional services). Ask yourself:
