Making the case for adding customer-facing integrations can prove extremely difficult.

The potential benefits can take various forms—from acquiring additional revenue to lowering costs—so pinpointing the best ones for a given integration and the extent to which you can realize these benefits is hard to suss out.

Equally important, you’ll need to weigh these benefits against the wide range of resource and infrastructure investments necessary for building and maintaining the integrations, which can prove difficult to estimate.

To help you build a ROI case for product integrations more easily, our team broke down several best practices.

You can read on to see what they shared!

Take a comprehensive look at the potential returns

As a product manager or engineer, you likely have certain benefits in mind from building product integrations. But they can also benefit other teams in significant ways. For example, you can survey customer success to see if a certain product integration could impact customer retention, to what extent, and how quickly the return could begin to take effect.

Taking the time to sync with other teams on the potential impact they might realize from the integrations—from the estimated return on certain KPIs to the time-to-value on that return— can help you build a pitch to executives that’s more credible and persuasive. 

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Continually measure the returns across several areas

Say you’ve already taken a few integrations live and you want to make the case for building more. 

A critical way to do this successfully is by measuring the current returns across several dimensions. 

This can be how much faster it takes the customers that adopt your integrations to realize value; the average close rate when you offer integrations the prospect needs versus the average close rate when you don’t; the discrepancy in NPS® scores from customers that have adopted the integrations with those that haven’t, and so on.

Take several sources of costs into consideration

To make your ROI analysis fair and indisputable for executives, you need to incorporate the various types of integration costs that might crop up:

• Direct costs of assigning engineers to building and maintaining integrations
• Opportunity costs of having engineering perform this work instead of focusing on your core product 
• Expenses associated with using specific tooling
• Infrastructure costs of making countless more API requests 

Alexia Cohade, our VP of Finance and Operations, breaks down a few more costs to keep in mind:

Related: How to decide between building and buying integrations

Make your ROI case all the more compelling with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API platform, lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product through a single build. The platform also offers Integration Observability tooling to help your customer-facing team discover, diagnose, and resolve integration issues quickly and without having to involve developers.

Given how easy it is to build and maintain customer-facing integrations with Merge, making the ROI case for adding integrations through our platform is simple.

You can learn more about Merge, how it can support your product integration needs, and more by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.