How much time is spent thinking about the customer we didn’t even know we alienated, or the markets we didn’t know we missed out on?
In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat said that looking at unseen losses is essential to consider when making financial calculations.
"Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee." – Frédéric Bastiat
Bastiat was a master at thinking about opportunity costs. This insight applies to SaaS companies as much as economies.
For example, when we close a big customer, we celebrate! But do we celebrate the customers who didn’t churn with the same gusto? How much time is spent thinking about the customer we didn’t even know we alienated, or the markets we didn’t know we missed out on?
We don’t see those costs unless we really look. The best businesses think about the unseen impacts of their strategies – and as a result, they unlock revenue others didn’t even know was hiding in their ecosystem.
Integrations and the opportunity cost of lost customers
Your customers want integrations. It’s hard for any SaaS company to deny that.
In fact, customers care as much about how your solution connects to their stack as they do about how well it solves a problem in isolation. In other words, your integrations can be as valuable as your core product features.
Integrations are not only fundamental to a seamless product experience, but they also enable you to win deals with prospects who may be sitting on the fence, increase engagement and product adoption, and upsell customers with the additional value created from these integrations.
Superior product experience → wins deals
Customers demand an amazing experience from each product they use, and oftentimes they will pick the more integrated product, whether that’s in their regular lives or in the context of SaaS.
Consider why people pick the Apple Watch or Airpods over other smartwatches/headphones–it’s the integrated experience that keeps people in the Apple ecosystem.
This same idea applies to your product.
In most cases, integrations are there to make your customers’ lives easier and more efficient. Customers don’t want to hop between dozens of logins and tools and use them each in isolation, or patch data together manually with spreadsheets.
Think about the tech stack you use daily. Would you use Salesforce or HubSpot if they didn’t build, support, and maintain so many great integrations? Not likely.
In a survey conducted by Paragon, 96% of SaaS buyers indicated that they take integrations into consideration when making purchasing decisions, with 71% saying that integrations are often a deal breaker.
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