When building the business case for initial or continued investment in your SaaS integrations or technology partnerships, you must demonstrate its potential to bring in revenue, keep revenue, or contribute to upsells.
Before analyzing how integrations contribute to revenue generating activities, you should set up a system that monitors integration usage & analytics. If you’re a technology partnerships leader, you will likely have to coordinate with your product team to make this happen.
Creating a method to monitor app installations and how they are used is one part of this. This will help you understand your integration adoption and how customers are using them.
If the integration you want to analyze is partner-built, you might need to ask your partners for the specific metrics you need.
There are integration infrastructure platforms that have many of these monitoring capabilities baked in. Giving product and technology partnership teams access to this data. They enable SaaS organizations to off-load work and easily integrate data on integration usage with data warehouses like Coralogix, AppInsights, DataDog, Splunk, Logic Monitor, and New Relic.
This data is collected through sales and marketing efforts. Gathering this kind of data requires setting up systems and tools to capture how integrations and technology partnerships are influencing direct deals and helping prospects move through the sales cycle.
Tools and processes for capturing partner influence on sales include:
Your SaaS organization is probably already tracking this data in some capacity. However, it is important that you filter it as it relates to integrations and technology partnerships. To do this, create a process your customer support team can follow that captures user feedback on existing integrations and new integration requests.
If your SaaS organization has a public or in-app marketplace or catalog, looking at its analytics can help you discover where users are spending the most time. This can help you figure out what customers are most interested in.
Implementing lead capture forms in your catalog allows prospects and customers to submit requests for new integrations they’d like you to build. This data helps with making a solid business case for building more integrations and deciding which ones to build first.
After you’ve implemented the infrastructure, tech stack, and processes to collect data on integration interest, usage, and activity, it’s time to move on. Shift your thinking to revenue and how integrations impact it.
Use these metrics to tie SaaS integrations directly back to revenue:
If you want to make a case for building an integration as part of a technology partnership, and want to show the potential impact on your company’s revenue, gather this information first:
Then, use our Revenue Calculator to calculate the revenue opportunity of building that integration.
There are two different ways you can do this:
To track the impact of integrations on sales cycles, you will need to have a large enough sample size, and you will need to have implemented a tech stack or process to tag mentions of partners or integrations during sales. Once that’s done, you can look into the following:
Similar to point 2 above, you can compare the renewal rate of customers using business critical integrations vs. those who are not.
Once your customers start using your integrations, you can start digging into how these integrations relate to keeping them interested in your product.
There's no fixed number of integrations that every SaaS company should start with to understand how integrations impact customer retention.
This varies based on the type of market you're in. So, it's important to aim to understand your B2B customers' tech stack and how many integrations they usually need to make the most of your platform.
Once you have this information, you can compare how well customers who don't use any integrations stick around compared to those who do.
Pro Tip: Depending on the industry and expertise of each B2B SaaS company, there's a certain number of integrations that, once reached, doesn't significantly change customer retention.
Figuring out this magic number helps you set goals for how many integrations you want customers to adopt. This way, you can keep them happy and ensure they keep relying on your platform for their business needs.
ShipBob, a 3PL worth well over a billion dollars, chose to standardize and centralize their integrations into one platform that gave them metrics to do the analysis on retention, churn and upsells to show the impact of developer work.
With more visibility to this data, they were able to identify that customers who were integrated with more than two systems had a lower churn and a higher ACV, and the NPS for customers with more than 5 apps installed was 10 points higher than those with less than 4.
CSAT surveys for integrations
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys that include questions specifically focused on integrations can not only provide insight on how to improve the integrations you offer, but it also allows you to collect data on how important they are to your customers’ experience.
You can create surveys or schedule interviews with users who have installed and used integrations after a specific period of time, for example, after one month of usage and then again six months later.
After setting up those processes you can report on a comparison of Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and CSAT scores for customers that are integrated vs those that are not (or not as integrated).
