According to new study from Merge, B2B SaaS companies must adopt a growing number of product integrations to meet customer demands

Merge, a leading product integration platform, released its first-ever State of Product Integrations Report based on a survey of 260 product managers and engineers.

Organizations are increasingly demanding that their B2B SaaS vendors offer seamless integrations with their technologies, which include accounting, CRM, HR, payroll, project management, recruiting, ticketing, and file storage systems. These integrations (i.e. product integrations) allow organizations to see more value from their B2B SaaS vendor’s product, whether that’s by letting them automatically provision and deprovision users, perform more robust analysis, access up-to-date documents, and much more.

But product integrations don’t just benefit the organizations that use them. According to the report, B2B SaaS companies that provide integrations have found that they’ve helped their business capture revenue in a variety of ways. This includes closing new business (59%), retaining more clients (53%), and expanding into new markets (52%).

Given the benefits that product integrations provide to both consumers and providers, more than 4 in 5 organizations (83%) have identified product integrations as one of their top priorities for 2024—leading them to set ambitious integration targets. For instance, while most (68%) organizations have built less than 10 integrations to date, 50% of organizations want to build 15 or more integrations in 2024, and nearly a fifth (19%) want to build 30 or more integrations.

Organizations, however, may struggle to meet these integration targets. Seventy-one percent say that they take at least three weeks to bring a single integration to market. Based on this pace of development, the prospect of building upwards of 10 integrations in 2024 may fall out of reach—leading organizations to disappoint clients and their go-to-market teams.

“B2B SaaS companies are under increasing pressure to offer a diverse range of integrations to set themselves apart and stay ahead of competitors. But based on our own experience and what we’ve seen in the B2B SaaS market, building and maintaining these integrations in-house simply isn’t sustainable,” said Shensi Ding, Co-Founder and CEO of Merge. “Merge’s Unified APIs can help these organizations integrate at scale; they can simply build once to one of our unified APIs to offer a whole category of integrations. In addition, we handle all of the integration maintenance and provide the necessary management tooling for customer-facing teams—all but ensuring that our clients’ integrations are reliable and performant over time.”