Once you’ve crossed the chasm of product-market fit, the majority of your customers and prospects will expect your product to operate effortlessly, and that includes how it fits within the rest of their tech stack.
On average, organizations use 371 SaaS applications. It’s no wonder then that today’s highly successful B2B SaaS companies have prioritized integrating their product with the rest of their customers’ application ecosystem.
While the advantages are obvious, the reality of integrating platforms is a lot trickier. It’s time consuming, expensive, and often comes at the expense of other priorities to your core product – or added to your ever growing backlog, to your customers’ dismay.
An embedded integration platform provides a simple solution to the complex problem of integrations: it can reduce the pressure on engineering teams, bring in new business opportunities, and can even empower your customers to build integrations on their own.
Embedded integrations are worth implementing when at least one of the following scenarios are true:
- You need to take your integrations to market quickly.
- You need engineers focused on building out your product’s core features.
- You’re experiencing a high volume of integration requests.
- You don’t have the budget to hire engineers who focus on integrations.
When it’s time to invest
You’ve likely determined that integrations are (or will be) a key part of your product strategy. But the volume of integrations you need to build and maintain is sizable and only predicted to grow.
A few market trends indicate that there has never been a better time to invest in an embedded integration solution. These include:
Connectivity is no longer an option, it’s essential. The proliferation of SaaS means that companies are using more and more apps to run their businesses. Customers expect that any new software will connect easily to their larger tech ecosystem. More and more, integrations are viewed as a product requirement – directly impacting sales, onboarding and retention.
Automation is accelerating. Businesses hoping to boost productivity are increasingly investing in automating processes and workflows. In fact, 41% of businesses are currently using automation extensively across multiple functions and over 50% of the business leaders say that they are planning to increase automation investments.
It is the perfect moment to invest in digital transformation. Businesses are re-evaluating investments, prioritizing revenue and profitability. There has never been a better time to invest in tools that allow your business to scale quickly with fewer resources.
What this means for leaders
If organizations are using 371 SaaS applications on average, that means your customers are too. It also means they’re likely looking to connect a few of those to your product.
Empowering your customers to integrate with the applications they already use gives you several advantages: integrating seamlessly into their tech stack gives you a leg up on competition; you become more sticky for your customers; and you free up engineering resources to focus on making your own product bigger and better.
How automation creates differentiation for your product
Leveraging your connections to other applications, you can provide users of your product with workflow automations that centralize their key business processes within your product.
This simple extension of the capabilities you’ve unlocked can fundamentally alter how clients and prospects view, use, and depend on your product. Moreover, it can give your product a competitive advantage, as just 10% of the product managers we’ve studied use integrations as the foundation for automations between their product and the others they’ve connected.
By merely thinking about your customers’ integration requests through the lens of a jobs-to-be-done framework, you can unlock a solid list of workflow automations to build.
Clients can now use your product to centralize process automations and save time, prevent costly mistakes, delight key stakeholders, convert leads at a higher rate, and much more. Automations also allow you to introduce new functionality that anticipates customers’ needs and daily challenges.
This goes beyond “checking the box” for integrations, and it leads to creating meaningful differentiation against competitors while also delighting customers.
Looking to build embedded integrations? Try Workato’s Embedded iPaaS
Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, offers Workato Embedded Platform, an embedded iPaaS that can provide the following (and much more):
- The ability to embed the platform into your UI with a configuration that works for you—users can initiate an automation with the click of a button or customize/build any automation without leaving your platform
- Pre-built connectors and automation templates (“recipes”) so that your clients can implement any integration and automation with minimal customization
- A centralized admin dashboard for monitoring permissions and usage
Want to learn more?
Schedule a demo with one of our automation experts to better understand how the Workato Embedded Platform can benefit your product.
