You’ll likely come across complementary solutions that target the same set of organizations. 

When you find yourself in this scenario, it might make sense to form an integration partnership with the vendor. 

We’ll walk through what this entails, the benefits of forming these partnerships, the best practices for building them, and more. 

Definition of an integration partner

It’s a 3rd-party SaaS solution that’s allowed you to build an integration with their product. Since the solution shares the same ideal customer profile (ICP) as you, you’re likely to expand the partnership to co-marketing and co-selling activities.

Related: What outsourcing integrations means?

Benefits of forming integration partnerships

Here are just a few of the top benefits:

Helps you reach a large and relevant audience

Once you’ve formed an integration partnership, the vendor may be willing to promote your joint integration on their social channels, in emails, on sales calls, in press releases, among other places. In many cases, these vendors have large audiences across these channels (e.g. 500k followers on Linkedin), so their promotional activities offer you the chance to not only increase awareness of your integration but also your product.

For instance, Causal, a financial planning startup, was able to get Xero (a widely-used accounting software) to amplify their integration on X (formerly Twitter)—giving their business a significant boost in top-of-funnel awareness. 

Enables your team to close deals at a higher rate

As prospects evaluate your solution against your rivals, they’re likely heavily considering—among other things—the integrations you and your competitors offer. In other words, if you can, through your integration partnerships, offer more in-demand integrations, you’re likely to close more deals.

We’ve seen this idea play out in the real-world. 

When surveying hundreds of product managers and engineers as part of our 2024 State of Product Integrations report, “improved closed rates for new business” was the top benefit organizations cited:   

This leads us to the other top benefits of forming integration partnerships.

Higher customer retention

Your product integrations likely allow clients to automate a variety of workflows within your platform, and enable them to no longer have to manually add or edit specific types of information in your product over time.

Taken together, your clients should see significantly more value from your product, motivating them to not only stay on longer but also increase their level of spending with you.

Helps you expand to new markets 

Through your integration partner, you can start to get prospects from different regions, industries, and sizes aware of your solution and added to your pipeline.

This initial help might be all you need. Once you win a few deals in a given market and establish your value, the success is likely to cascade, leading you to close more deals and become a proven vendor in the space.

In addition, assuming the integrations you offer are relevant to your target market, they should be influential in helping you get traction.

Provides you with an opportunity to get advice and insights 

Your partnership also serves as an opportunity to trade insights on what’s working for your business—from your pricing model to your support operations to your marketing efforts—and what isn’t. This can, hopefully, help you avoid costly long-term mistakes, while helping you make decisions that prove pivotal.

Best practices for building an integration partnership

Once your team is fully committed to seeking out and establishing integration partners, you’ll need to keep the following best practices top of mind.

Prioritize your partnership opportunities 

Since it’ll take your team time to form the partnership, build the integration, and engage in other activities together, you’ll want to make sure that the investment is well worth your team’s time.

To help you prioritize your opportunities, you can score them across a variety of areas and then compare their total ratings. 

Here are just a few areas to consider grading them on (it’s worth noting that some of them offer more flexibility in how they can be scored): 

• The degree of customer and prospect overlap 
• Reputation in the market (e.g. overall rating on software review sites like G2)
• Online presence (e.g. followers on social channels)
• Compatibility with your preferred type of API (e.g. REST)
• Quality of their API documentation

Enable and motivate your partners to engage in co-marketing and co-selling activities

Many of your integration partners likely have talented go-to-market teams that can help sell and market your product. But that doesn’t mean they will (after all, they have their own product to worry about!).

Motivating your partners and ensuring their success requires delivering all of the following (and more): a generous revenue sharing plan; marketing materials, like a one-pager, that explain the value propositions of your joint integration and your product; a demo environment of your product for their reps to use on calls with prospects; and a direct line of access to your support team so that their reps can get any questions or concerns about your product answered quickly and easily.   

Related: Best practices for logging API integrations

Use 3rd-party tooling for building the integration

You’re more than likely going to build the integration through the partner’s API, and while they might provide useful documentation and a sandbox account to help you develop and test the integration, the process will still likely be extremely time and resource intensive for your developers. 

With that in mind, you can use a 3rd-party integration tool to simplify and expedite your integration build. For example, using a universal API solution (also referred to as a unified API solution), you can not only build to one partner’s API but to hundreds of other 3rd-party APIs—all through a single integration build.

Build integrations to your product at scale through Merge

You likely only have time to form and manage a handful of integration partnerships successfully, but you need to provide many integrations to meet your clients’ needs and address your prospects’ demands. 

Merge, which offers a single API to add hundreds of integrations to your product, lets you address the latter effectively. 

Learn how Merge can help you scale your integrations across key software categories—from HRIS to CRM to file storage—and provide reliable and performant integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.