As your organization builds customer-facing integrations, it can be hard to determine if you’re building them effectively and if your experiences are “normal” or not.

To help you benchmark your efforts, determine whether to prioritize integrations going forward, and source ideas for building them more effectively, we’ll cover several key insights below. 

Note: Many of these findings come straight from our State of Product Integrations Report, but we’ve also included data points from Crossbeam’s State of the Partner Ecosystem, a report from Insightly, and Gartner’s Global Software Buying Trends report. 

1. 71% of organizations take at least 3 weeks to bring a single integration to market (source: Merge)

This finding supports the argument that implementing multiple integrations quickly through internal resources is all but impossible.

Related: The top integration trends in 2024

2. 50% of organizations cite an integrated application, or a feature within the app, getting discontinued as a challenge when maintaining integrations (source: Merge)

Once an integration gets built, your engineers aren’t off the hook. 

In addition to monitoring integrated applications and relevant features, your engineers will face broken integrations due to 3rd-party API changes; they'll need to communicate errors and remediation steps back to clients on time; and they'll need to keep up with integrated applications' version changes.

 3. 59% of organizations cite integrations as helping them improve their close rates (source: Merge)

Product integrations allow your solution to provide more value in a variety of ways, whether that’s storing more accurate data, automating more in-product workflows, or enhancing specific features (e.g. in-product analytics). 

Given all these benefits, your prospects are much more likely to buy your product if you can integrate with the 3rd-party applications they use. 

4. Integration users are 58% less likely to churn (source: Crossbeam)

Integrations aren’t just theoretically valuable; clients who’ve built at least 1 integration are significantly more likely to renew. 

5. 52% of organizations have been able to expand to new markets through integrations (source: Merge)

As you look to enter a new market, whether that’s a specific region, vertical, company size, etc. you’ll likely find that the organizations within it use a specific set of applications. 

Offering integrations with these applications can, according to our research, prove critical for getting traction in your target market.

6. 42% of organizations offer at least one integration with a CRM tool (source: Merge)

CRM software is, by and large, an organization’s system of record for client data. It’s little surprise then that many companies want to help clients access and work off of CRM data in their product. 

7. 25% of executives say that their CRM is missing or provides inadequate integrations (source: Insightly)

Unfortunately, many companies fail to offer robust CRM integrations. In addition, many don’t address the long-tail of CRM integrations; in other words, while they may offer integrations with the likes of Salesforce and HubSpot, they don’t integrate with lesser-known CRM software.

Related: A look at common SaaS integration challenges

8. 83% of organizations view product integrations as one of their biggest priorities (source: Merge)

This high percentage likely reflects the fact that many organizations’ prospects consider integrations during their evaluations, and clients explicitly ask their CSMs for them.

9. 39% of organizations cite integrations as the most important factor when selecting a software provider (Source: Gartner)

This reaffirms our earlier finding that integrations can help organizations improve their close rates. Moreover, unlike the previous stat, this one comes from the buyer's perspective—which lends even more credibility to the idea that integrations are key for sales.

Related: The benefits of SaaS integration

Want more actionable insights?

You can download our 2024 State of Product Integrations to learn more about the challenges companies face when building and maintaining integrations, the integrations they’ve currently built, their plans for building them in 2024, and more.