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Freshdesk reported 80% less churn for customers with 5+ integrations compared to those without any integrations (Crossbeam)
In the current macro environment, every deal is undergoing more scrutiny ranging from fewer discretionary dollars to CFO approvals. Not only are companies thinking about maximizing every lead, but they’re also focused on growing existing customers and reducing churn more than ever. Native integrations are top of mind for every leader because they have been shown to unblock deals, increase net retention, and reduce churn.
Here’s how native integrations increase revenue and reduce churn by almost 80%:
Integrations are table stakes for any product and are often deal blockers for your customers. If your customer uses an app that a competitor integrates with, more often times than not, your deal is under pressure.
Think of a SaaS product you use that doesn’t have any integrations. If you exclude all of the tools that use Google for sign-in, you are probably struggling to think of one. Most organizations have 40-60 tools each, with 200+ apps at the company level. (Productiv). When SaaS buyers are evaluating your product, they’re looking for tools to amplify their existing tools. For example, if you bought an iPhone, you’re more likely to buy a Macbook given the seamless connectivity between the two products. The same applies to SaaS.
Here’s a diagram of our sales tech stack at Vessel. Our CRM is the system of record for sales data. When we were deciding on our tooling, we purposely chose tools that integrated with HubSpot because we wanted to give our team visibility over every lead and deal through a single pane of glass. As we’ve become more invested in these tools, we’re looking for complementary tools that create a more connected web of tools.
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The average percentage of engaged users across all apps is 45% (Productiv). Users do not have the time to use every app. If they aren’t using your app, they aren’t seeing value and your renewal is now at risk. Integrations allow you to continuously deliver value even when users are not in your product and direct users into your product.
Using Gong as an example. By connecting your HubSpot account, they are able to automatically log calls to your CRM. The Gong integration provides and reminds you of their value in three ways:
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By providing value in other tools, they increase their visibility to other stakeholders. Additionally, the link back to Gong drives users back to their product.
If Integrations can provide a superior product experience to their users, companies can capture this as an upsell. For example, imagine using a sales engagement platform (SEP) that doesn’t integrate with a CRM. For every lead in your CRM, you need to manually import them to your SEP before you can start personalizing your outbound messages. Additionally, every time your SEP sends out an email, it’s not automatically logged to your email. As a user, I’ve spent time manually exporting leads to my SEP and lost visibility on leads I’ve spoken to. If this pain is significant enough, it can be captured as value and priced as such as a part of your product.
Here are some examples of companies providing deeper integrations on their higher-tiered plans.
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Having a breadth of reliable integrations is crucial to building a superior product and earning customer love. At Vessel, we are building a developer-first native integration platform for sales and marketing tools. We help developers build deep native integrations quickly across CRMs, Chat, Sales Engagement, Dialers, and more. If you’re thinking about how native integrations fit into your roadmap and its potential impact on your product, happy to chat more at avery@vessel.dev!