The role of eCommerce connectivity for Your Sales Team - Part II

Last week, I wrote about the principal challenges organizations must overcome with their IT departments when it comes to eCommerce integrations. Integration has an impact on many departments though, so now, I’ll be writing about the main challenges Sales teams face.  

A recent THINKstrategies study focused on the impact of integration on SaaS and cloud vendors found that integration is the most common hurdle in the sales process for SaaS/Cloud providers. Almost 90% of respondents consider integration to be very important in winning new customers.  

The study identified integration as the most time-consuming element of the customer implementation process and nearly two-thirds of SaaS vendors acknowledge that integration needs to be a critical part of their solution. 

Clearly, SaaS vendors need to make integration part of their go-to-market strategy in order to succeed. Our research from our customers and the eCommerce market in general demonstrates this. One of the most common pain points we hear is regarding how many merchants vendors lose due to missing integrations with commerce platforms/marketplaces. This is one of their most common sales hurdles. The need for integrations is now the norm, not the exception or a secret sauce of an application anymore so most of our customers’ merchants require integrations. Integration is key to winning new customers. 

Customer expectations have shifted dramatically, and SaaS vendors are now coming to understand that integration is their responsibility, not their merchants. The way we see it, our customer’s concerns about integration represent not only a threat but also an opportunity.  

 Here are just a few ways that Sales teams can succeed with seamless integrations:  

• Improve sales conversion 

Increase revenue of your core product because the connectivity makes it more attractive and easier to sell for your Sales team. They will no longer miss sales opportunities due to missing integrations that your merchants request. 

• Easily Add New Markets of Prospects for your Sales team 

Expanding your merchant reach has clear upsides for your Sales team. Every commerce platform/marketplace that your solution is integrated with adds an entire market to be targeted by your Sales team. Targeting merchants with your Sales team based on what system they use is a very effective way to talk the customer’s language and increase conversion. 

• Offer Low-Code/No-Code Setup 

Most merchants are non-technical users, so offering a no-code way for them to connect your application to the ecosystem of customer data sources they already use is no longer a value-added but an expectation from your users. This allows your Sales team to easily answer any support related questions and increase their performance. Coordination with Development teams and getting added to a development roadmap can become a thing of the past. 

• Offer a Seamless Integration Experience 

Offer merchants your marketplace of integrations that allows them to connect each one of the commerce platforms/marketplaces they sell on. Making this a seamless user experience prevents forcing them to figure out how to sync data on their own. 

• Build a Partner Network 

A partner network can bring scalability and additional revenue to your organization. Partners can either integrate into your product or they can build custom tools and functionality on top of your product. The key advantage here is that partners will help you sell your product because they want to sell their products or services on top of it. By creating a partner network to leverage your connectivity, you can automatically create new sales channels and scale your Sales and Marketing teams in a way that otherwise might not be possible. 

• Decrease Time-to-market 

By offering your merchants the simplest onboarding flows you are creating a competitive advantage. Failing to offer such simple connectivity can blunt sales, create customer support issues and become a significant inhibitor to business. 

 Enhancing your connectivity can add value to your business in several ways. Broadly speaking, you can increase revenues, extend customer reach & value, support sales & marketing activities and ease integration of backend data & applications. At Itembase, we focus on helping our customers provide value to their merchants out of their products by making integration their solution’s competitive advantage. 

What are the greatest hurdles and conversion blockers for your sales team? Comment below and let’s connect further on how you can overcome them.