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A 101 in Partner Integrations. Learn how to increase your customer retention, improve your customer experience, and increase revenue all by choosing the right integration partners.
- Business-to-business integration (B2Bi) is essential for companies to remain competitive and solve customer problems.
- B2B can improve user experience, increase brand stickiness, and provide more value to customers by identifying complementary products and services.
- To identify the "right" integration partners and avoid missing integration opportunities, you need an Account mapping tool like Reveal.
Revenue builders know the value of integration Sales, Marketing, and Partnership Managers—just mention the word, "integration" and they jump at the opportunity if it’s with the right partner. And they should. Why? Because tech integrations are made of gold. Integrations allow tech companies to fill voids, increase retention, expand their audience, and have many more benefits. All that impacts revenue, many of which we cover in this article.
All good things have caveats; integration partners are no different. Perhaps you caught it already. Tech companies worldwide are constantly faced with finding who or what is right. Perhaps beyond finding the "right" partner is not missing the one’s right in front of your face. What if you don’t know that a partner of yours shares 80% of your customer base? How could you if you’re not using a tool that gives you that visibility?
Great news. In this article, we’ll further explain B2B integrations, unravel their benefits, and explain how you can identify the right partners for your company.
What is an integration partnership?
B2B integration is the automation of business processes and communication between two or more businesses. It allows them to effectively work with their customers, suppliers, service providers, and business partners by automating key business processes. B2B integration technologies provide the infrastructure needed to digitize information and quickly route it throughout a company. They bring together the various tools and technologies used within companies, which don’t inherently communicate with each other, to exchange business-critical information.
In laymen’s terms: when companies share an Ideal Customer Persona (ICP), have overlapping accounts / customer base, and have complimentary products they integrate to provide further value to their customers.
How can a company know which companies to partner with and to integrate with? It depends on your company’s current processes, target audience, and long-term goals. Choosing the right integration partner is essential in ensuring successful B2B integration that delivers value to a company for years to come. Integration partnerships involve offering another company’s product or service that integrates with and complements your products.
Why are integration partners valuable?
User experience
Tech companies shouldn’t operate in silos. A customer is rarely ever using just one product or platform, which means there’s always an opportunity for companies to do more. By integrating with the right partners, companies expand their reach. They can remain focused on what they do well and piggyback off of their partners’ strengths to serve their customers.
By leveraging their partnership, companies can provide comprehensive solutions to their customers. Ultimately, by solving the customers’ problems through one solution, businesses make themselves invaluable to customers’ day-to-day lives, thereby creating an enhanced customer experience.
Complimentary services
Integration partnerships also present opportunities to provide complementary services. By offering integrations with partners, customers are incentivized to continue using products they currently use, increase their use, and adopt new products.
These partnerships present bundled solutions to generate interest and improve the overall value for a customer. Integration partnerships remove friction and create a solution for many customers who don’t know they have.
Stickiness
Removing friction and creating cohesiveness between products does more than meets the eye regarding client retention and stickiness. By integrating products, companies increase their visibility to the customer base initially shared with the integration partner. Further, by removing the friction of moving between products, use increases.
Related: How SmartRecruiters Increase stickiness and retention using Reveal.
How to identify the right integration partners
With thousands of partners across hundreds of markets, choosing the right integration partners can quickly become a daunting and expensive task. The research and integration can take hours, large amounts of marketing efforts, endless support to help customers onboard, and ongoing investment into the partner relationships. Here are some suggestions for taking on the monumental task. Be warned, there is a much easier way than getting lost in spreadsheets and VLOOKUP.
But, in case you like the hard way, you can do things manually.
Related: How Quantum Metric Uses Reveal To Identify Integration Partners
So, how do you identify the right integration partners to ensure your partnership will yield promising returns? Here are a few suggestions:
Evaluate the value it will bring
Does the integration bring value to your customers? With so many integrations to choose from, it’s important to choose one that your customers will benefit from. Will they use it? Will it make their lives easier? Will they be able to solve two problems at once? These are some of the questions you want to ask yourself when choosing an integration partner.
Identify if you share an ideal customer persona and target audience
For integration to bring value to your customers, it needs to be relevant to your customers. One of the key indicators of successful integration is the number of shared customers that each product has. Account mapping is a valuable exercise in identifying partners that have overlapping or mutual "accounts." A large number of shared accounts is a good indication of the potential value you and this partner could bring to a shared customer group and each other.
Account mapping tools are commonly used by many companies, especially in tech. Reveal allows you to streamline your account mapping process by delivering data right into your CRM. It offers a goldmine of data to prioritize your customers and identify potential integration partners based on shared accounts. Just look at how our industry behaves (B2B SaaS), in 2022, integrations are one of the most important criteria when buying martech.
