Vendors love to brag about integrations; essentially the “easy button” of getting two products connected. But in a world of near endless combinations of technologies it is impossible to create an integration for everything. And because of this, we often avoid the topic of integrations anytime we do a demo because “what if” the buyer asks to see that one integration we don’t support!

Instead of dreading the integrations question, let’s unpack why integrations are so critical for customers (particularly those in the enterprise). As an organization matures, there is a lot of time spent on building out processes and workflows. These act as guardrails so that people can get work done within the confines of the business. But that also means any new solution that is brought into the mix also needs to fit within those same guardrails.

As much as we would like to believe that every customer who buys our product is going to sign into the UI and consume our data, this just isn’t true. In fact, the larger the organization the more likely they are to consume your product via an API or integration into another existing tool in their existing tech stack. No one wants yet another tool to login to and manage (nor do they have the time).

So how can we address the dreaded “integration question” during a demo?

Find the Quick Wins

The easiest way to close the integration gap is talk directly to your existing customers. Let’s say you have 12 existing integrations that have a clean data exchange. Interview enough customers to get a good sample size and focus on what their internal workflows look like (not your product). Once you have some solid data, you’ll have a better understanding of which integrations to add and where (to make the biggest impact). This could be a quick win to addressing the majority of your customer base. It also has an added bonus of delivering value to them based on their workflows vs requiring them to directly use your solution.

If you discover any new integrations that are a common ask among your customer base, you’ll also now have data to take to the product team on why they should build a net new integration into the product. A win-win for everyone involved.

Handling Custom Integrations

We’ve seen that existing integrations are easy, but what about the custom ones? Let’s split this question into two parts; is this truly a one-off custom integration that we will never use again or is this a custom integration that might have value to a wider customer base? In a truly one-off scenario, it probably doesn’t make sense to develop something as this can quickly become unmanageable (especially if you are doing a one-off for multiple customers). However, if your answer is the latter and you can derive value across multiple customers (or buyers) then building a custom integration probably makes sense.

Even if you need to stand up some additional infrastructure or third-party products to get the integration going, you’ll have multiple customers that can reap the benefits. The concern is who’s going to maintain this setup over the long term.

Demo Automation to the Rescue

If you’ve ever built or stitched together multiple technologies you know that at some point one of them is going to change, breaking the whole chain. If you are in pre-sales, that moment is most likely to occur five minutes before you are about to give a customer demo (seriously, happens every time). So instead of putting in the effort to build a custom integration that still has the possibility of breaking…let’s get smarter about how to demo it.

You aren’t going to get away from the initial time, and possibly cost, to set up the integration. However, once it’s complete you can use demo automation software to capture everything into a demo library. This will allow you to both demo the integration and allow your customer see the “look and feel” of what the user experience will look like. Now if the integration needs to be taken down, either due to cost or complexity, you still have a setup where you can demo this capability. This can apply to one-click integrations too where you don’t want to be 100% reliant on other systems during a demo.

With your integrations added to your library and ready to be demoed to your customers…this myth is officially busted!