Leveraging Integrations for Growth in 2025

Updated on 9th October 2024 by Fraser Davidson

As your SaaS grows, you’re forced to build custom integrations for different customers and platforms, resulting in a fragmented system. Each integration works differently, creating a maintenance headache for your developers and support teams. Worse, a lack of standardisation leads to inconsistent user experiences and stagnating growth due to an inability to meet user integration demand. 

So, we will discuss how you can leverage integrations to transform not only your user experience and meet demand but grow at the same time. 

How are integrations tied to business growth?

Integrations are not only an acquisition channel but a lasting benefit for existing and prospective customers. They can keep customers closer and provide value-added services. As well as put your app at the heart of their data ecosystem. In short, you should incorporate them into your business growth strategy sooner rather than later. 

Through using integrations you’ll increase customer satisfaction and gain a competitive advantage in the market. As a result, it can increase paying customers and customer lifetime value. In other words, integrations positively affect revenue as well as other key SaaS metrics.

Integrations and Growing SaaS Revenue

A common question in any B2B SaaS sales process is “Does your application connect to ‘X’?”. Ideally, you want the answer to be either ‘yes’ or ‘it can do in short order’. Like it or not prospects and customers want your app to be part of a wider ecosystem and, if it doesn’t play nicely, it can be a barrier to sale.

Without an embedded integration platform (iPaaS) the sales integration request will most likely be added to a developer backlog. Integrations require continuous updates, support, and new feature development, all of which drain development resources that could otherwise be spent on core product innovation. As your customer base grows, the demand for new integrations increases exponentially, creating an ongoing strain on your dev team.

In other words, the integration is prioritised with every other integration and product development request. Only you know how long your backlog is or your sprint processes – however every day you don’t have the integration is a day you don’t have a paying SaaS customer. 

The faster you can connect, build and deploy integrations the quicker you’ll be able to sign up customers, grow your sales pipeline, close sales and expand your business.

Tackling Churn with Integrations

The management of churn is crucial to B2B SaaS businesses. Growth for SaaS businesses not only comes from new customer wins but your existing customer base. This means it is important to ensure this customer base is stable. For instance, as your product expands into new markets or adds new features, integrating with new tools and platforms becomes a bottleneck to growth. The more customers you acquire the more integration needs pile up, leading to slower product rollouts and frustrated new and existing users. 

Therefore, integrations can be a mitigant to churn. Embedded integration platforms allow you to simultaneously expand your core product and quickly scale your integration offering. It does so by automating the deployment and management of multiple integrations through a single platform. With multi-tenancy support, integration platforms make it easy to manage a growing portfolio of integrations across a diverse customer base. Therefore, ensuring that your growth isn’t hindered by technical bottlenecks. The more connections and integration functionality your product has the longer customers will stick with you.

Improving Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) with Integrations

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the measure of how much you spend and the effectiveness of sales and marketing to acquire new customers. The time it takes you to create new integrations to win new customers is arguably a contributor to the overall CAC.

Even if your SaaS offers powerful functionality, customers may be reluctant to adopt it if it doesn’t integrate with their current systems. A lack of easy, self-service integrations can cause friction in the user experience, leading to lost opportunities or even increased churn.

Adopting an Embedded iPaaS can help reduce your CAC as it will give users the ability to quickly and easily connect your SaaS to their other tools without needing extensive technical expertise. Providing users with self-service integration options reduces friction, accelerates adoption, and makes it easy for your product to become an integral part of their workflow.

A reduced CAC means more capital available and sales and marketing budgets can be stretched further. 

Increasing Net Promoter Score (NPS) with Integrations

The net promoter score (NPS) is a measure of customer experience with a product and can predict business growth. In today’s business environment, customers rely on a wide array of tools and platforms to manage their operations. If your SaaS doesn’t integrate well with these other tools, it risks being sidelined in favour of a more compatible solution.

This means integrations can have an impact on your NPS, especially if they are insufficient. This insufficiency could be the length of time it takes to satisfy integration requests or the customer having to make data connections themselves. For instance, if an integration causes your customer to find a manual workaround or third-party solution to solve their goals. 

Embedded iPaaS enables your SaaS to offer seamless, native integrations that allow your product to fit effortlessly into your customers’ workflows. Cyclr’s embedded iPaaS equips you with a library of pre-built connectors and a low-code builder to create and deploy new integrations quickly. This ensures your product works alongside other essential apps, making it a crucial part of your customers’ day-to-day operations. It will also improve the customer experience and your NPS score.

Integration and Time to Value

Time to value is considered a critical metric that measures the amount of time it takes a new customer to get value from your product. It can also be a measure of your onboarding and implementation process. 

Many SaaS companies build one-off integrations that work in the short term but lack long-term scalability. As customer demands evolve and new tools emerge, these piecemeal solutions become outdated and costly to maintain. These one-off manually delivered integrations can be complicated and slow. This can have a direct impact on your customer’s time to value. Therefore, a way to reduce this is to effectively deploy integrations that are simple to set up and align with your customer’s needs. 

Embedded iPaaS offers a future-proof integration strategy. Cyclr’s universal API and dynamic connector library allow your SaaS to easily adapt to new platforms and technologies as they emerge. This ensures that your integration suite is built to last, capable of scaling alongside your business and evolving customer needs.

As a result, the integrations can contribute to improved implementation. Not only does this reduce their time to value but also reduces the risk of a customer churning. 

Why should you bring an embedded iPaaS into your tech stack?

Don’t replace your existing integrations, whether you’ve built your own or use tools like Zapier. Instead, we suggest that you expand upon them and use them alongside an embedded integration platform. 

Cyclr CEO Fraser Davidson often says, “A SaaS should build its technically critical integrations.” 

This means it is technically critical for the product’s success that it integrates with x, y, and z applications. For instance, a SaaS company has developed a calendar application. It is technically critical for the product’s success that it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar. 

However, when integrations are commercially critical, a SaaS company could implement a third party, such as an embedded integration platform. 

The Tried and Tested 80:20 Integration Rule

We’ve spoken about this before and called it the 80:20 rule, “own the integration solution for 80% of your client’s integration needs and outsource for 20% of your client’s integration needs.” 

Types of integration solutions available:

• Outsource: deploy a ring-fenced solution that achieves the customer’s integration off-platform e.g. Zapier
• Build: start from scratch and write code to achieve each integration
• Design: design integrations using an iPaaS platform, such as Cyclr, that is embedded within your platform

An embedded integration platform can expand your integration capabilities because the APIs you need are already built, with template integrations you can copy your popular use cases and repeat them. 

As a result, you’ll improve efficiency and meet customer requests more quickly. As well as this you can build integrations at speed with low-code tools. This means that integrations can be achieved by anyone who knows where the data needs to be and deployed natively. 

The embedded iPaaS can simply slot into your existing tech stack, integrate with your existing applications and become a lever for growth. 

Talk to us at Cyclr about expanding your integration strategy and encouraging growth across your organisation.