Product Integrations Pros and Cons

The fastest-growing SaaS businesses likely have a variety of factors influencing their momentum.

They have a strong product-market fit. They have high-performing sales reps. And, as it turns out, they offer a multitude of product integrations that enable clients to seamlessly use their apps in conjunction with other tools.

According to research by Pandium, the 1,000 fastest-growing SaaS businesses have, on average, 98 product integrations built out; and several of these organizations have taken in excess of 500 integrations to market. 

The approach you choose for implementing these integrations can significantly impact both your business and your clients.

To help you evaluate your options, we’ll explore common approaches that operate outside of your product and explain why an embedded platform might be the best solution for your business.

1. Customer success 

This approach involves customer success managers (CSMs) implementing ad hoc integration and automation solutions using a tool with basic functionality. 

Pros:

• It can be a cost-effective solution, as the tool is typically inexpensive and the CSMs can operate independently.
• It may be easy to persuade customers to invest in this solution if it’s a one-off and comes at a low additional cost.
• Your customers’ unique integration needs can be addressed quickly, leading to high customer satisfaction with your CSM team.

Cons:

• This approach is not scalable, as CSMs handle individual integration requests from each customer.
• CSMs are diverted from their core responsibilities and value-added activities, which are more likely to foster meaningful partnerships. Over time, this can impact customer retention and reduce opportunities for upsells and cross-sells.

2. Professional service

In this approach, customers hire your in-house professional services (PS) team to implement and maintain integrations and automations involving your product. Your PS team may charge by the hour or on a project-by-project basis.

Pros:

• Your professional services team can customize integrations and automations to meet the specific use cases of clients, maximizing the value they derive from your product.
• The team’s deep knowledge of your product ensures efficient implementation of integrations and automations. Their expertise also enables them to assist clients effectively.

Cons:

• Scaling the PS team to meet growing client demand for integrations and automations can be challenging and may not be sustainable for your organization.
• Sales representatives will need training to sell your professional services. Additionally, your PS team will need to familiarize themselves with the various systems that customers want to integrate with your product.

3. Partners

These are third-party companies that can implement integrations and automations on behalf of the client. Similar to professional services, they can bill the client either by the hour or based on the number of projects they complete.

Pros:

• They possess a comprehensive understanding of the software landscape and may effectively utilize specific integration platforms.
• Their experience with integrating a wide range of apps allows them to offer an independent perspective on best practices for connecting your app to other tools and creating automations.

Cons:

• They may lack in-depth knowledge of your product and the specific market problems it addresses, which can hinder their efficiency in providing effective solutions.
• The client is forced to deal with another vendor—and all of the work that entails.

4. Integration referrals

In this approach, your business development team identifies a third-party integration solution to refer to clients.

Pros:

• Minimal effort is required from your team, as the third-party vendor and your customer collaborate directly after the introduction.
• There are no additional sales ops, finance, and enablement considerations to be managed long-term.

Cons:

• Similar to working with partners, clients must engage with and manage another vendor.
• Clients miss out on your team’s unique insights and approach to solving the market problems your software addresses.
• Clients may need to learn how to use the third-party tool independently.

Related: What is an embedded integration platform? And why is it worth investing in?

Common drawbacks to these approaches

Despite each of these options having their own set of pros and cons, they fail to answer a common set of issues:

1. Product gap: Customers must work outside of your app to meet their integration and automation needs. This means your product team misses the opportunity to solve a common customer pain point in-product that could provide immense value, impact, and satisfaction.

2. Difficult to scale:  Clients need to integrate your app with numerous others to ensure seamless workflows. However, each of the approaches above makes this demand unnecessarily difficult to manage, both in terms of cost and resources.

3. Missing Data: Out-of-product integrations and automations prevent your team from tracking which integrations are used and by whom. This compromises your product team’s ability to analyze usage data, thereby limiting their capacity to prioritize new features and functionalities.

4. Uncaptured Revenue: Except for professional services, these approaches leave potential untapped revenue, as clients implement integrations and automations elsewhere.

Fortunately, Workato’s Embedded Platform—which allows you to embed our iPaaS directly into your product—addresses these issues entirely, driving product-led growth.

You can learn more about our Embedded Platform and the benefits it can provide to your business by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.