A unique feature of SaaS solutions is their tendency toward very specific functionality — trucking dispatch management, for example, or leveraging video messages. It’s common for SaaS solutions to be narrowly targeted, embracing limitations that can create a challenge for customer satisfaction and company growth.
Yet these limitations also present an exciting opportunity for creative partnerships. Joining forces with partner SaaS companies to offer software integrations with your service can have huge benefits, both to your customer’s user experience and to the growth of your business. This is particularly true in the B2B arena, where a good return on investment (ROI) on software integrations with partner companies can make this strategy particularly attractive.
“Having to use multiple pieces of software can slow and inhibit business – multiple logins, multiple amounts of data entry, and no access to dynamic data,” wrote the folks at Datamolino. “The solution is more connectivity, or in SaaS terms, integrations.”
Here are four reasons why SaaS startups should build software integrations with partner companies.
4 Ways Startups Benefit from Software Integrations
1. Improved customer satisfaction
Building a software integration with another company will ideally provide mutual benefit to both companies’ customers. Customers become “stickier” when integrations improve their experience of using a product. This is especially true if your product serves a niche market and the integrations you offer allow your customers to access a range of tools that serve that niche well and comprehensively.
2. Cross-marketing
Companies that are working together on an integration will be able to market to each other’s customers. Each company can commit to sending emails about the integration to their customers, doing a joint webinar with the other company, blogging about the partnership and the other company, and promoting the other company’s posts.
“Another company’s database is a whole set of potential people who you’ve never reached before,” says Ethan Beute, VP of marketing at BombBomb. Partnering with multiple companies in the real estate industry “gave us access to a lot of people who are potential good fit customers.”
3. Scale your startup faster
The improved customer satisfaction and marketing potential produced by successful integrations can help you scale your business more rapidly than you could otherwise. Customers who can get more of their needs met within your ecosystem are likely to remain more loyal and recommend your service more often. And accessing new customer segments by teaming up with other companies is a straightforward way to boost your marketing reach.
4. Deepen your industry relationships
The best way of serving your customers in a given niche effectively is to become intimately familiar with how that niche operates and what customers’ pain points are within that context. Partnering with other companies on integrations within a niche will deepen and broaden your network in that specific industry.
As BombBomb develops more integrations within the field of real estate, for example, the company’s developers, marketers, and other staff people get to know developers, marketers, and others at other companies in the field. The result is that BombBomb as a company is now “deeply informed in the real estate business,” says Beute. “Legit relationships play beyond the transactional prospects conversation. It makes you smarter about the industry.”
It’s clear that integrations are beneficial for reasons other than simply giving customers more features to choose from. Many SaaS companies will find that partnering with like-minded others is a boon to business in various ways.