By Zoe Kelly

January 18, 2022

This post is part of the “Tech Ecosystem Maturity” series, exploring the 30+ criteria of Crossbeam’s Tech Ecosystem Maturity Diagnostic. The diagnostic helps you understand how your partner program stacks up against others in the B2B SaaS industry, what you’re doing well, and how you can advance to the next level of maturity. To learn more and take the tech ecosystem maturity diagnostic, click here. Read the rest of the Tech Ecosystem Maturity series here.

For tech partnership professionals, an increased budget and higher headcount can mean unlocked career growth and more influence on the business. Most importantly, a monetary investment into partnerships validates the significant impact your work has on company growth.

Unlocking the next phase of your career and your partner ecosystem depends on your ability to get more resources. The results of our Tech Ecosystem Maturity Diagnostic show that only 26% of respondents had a budget, dedicated hours, and input into business strategy. 

So how can you get your program to that level and get the salary, headcount, and budget you need to thrive? Our diagnostic indicated that those who could measure the impact of their integrations on churn were three times more likely to get the highest level of budget and headcount. 

In this article: 

• A quick look at our Tech Ecosystem Maturity Diagnostic

• A breakdown of resource availability for tech partners

• A look at how integrations and churn reduction correlate

• What you need to show that your integrations impact churn 

A quick look at our Tech Ecosystem Maturity Diagnostic

Our Tech Ecosystem Maturity Diagnostic helps tech partnership professionals assess how “mature” various aspects of their partner program are in comparison to those of their peers. As of publication, 148 people from 136 unique organizations completed the diagnostic. You can take the diagnostic yourself here. 

A breakdown of resource availability for tech partners

We asked diagnostic takers: Do you have a dedicated product and dev resources/budget for integrations?

If you’re having a hard time getting dedicated resources for your integrations, you’re not alone, with more than half (55%) of respondents answered: “No” or “Yes there is a process” — which fall are our two least mature answers to this question. This indicates big potential for growth within the partnership world: More resources mean the ability to build more integrations and expand your ecosystem.

Additionally, the drop off between the first two answers and the second two answers could indicate two things: 

• Getting the initial buy-in for consistent hours and resources for integrations is the most challenging step 

• The resources it brings make getting input on roadmap/product choices (and getting to the top level of maturity) easier

In other words, once you break into the top two levels of maturity and have dedicated hours and resources at your disposal, our diagnostic results could indicate a snowball effect: the pace at which you’re getting resources for your integrations might become more rapid. 

So how can you increase your integration budget? 

A look at how integrations and churn reduction correlate

According to our diagnostic results, those who measure the impact that integrations have on churn are three times more likely to have both a budget and dedicated hours for integrations and input into business strategy. However, the responses also indicate that this tactic is being drastically underutilized.

71% of respondents believe that integrations have a measurable impact on reducing churn (therefore retaining revenue for their company), yet only 25% have a tangible way to prove this to their higher-ups. That’s over a third of respondents who are missing out on straightforward, highly valuable data proving their program’s worthwhile asking for more integrations-specific resources. 

Even the remaining 29% of respondents (at the earliest level of maturity) include those who don’t think this is the case or that it’s too early to tell. 

The big discrepancies between these numbers reveal a big opportunity for growth: 

• If you’re looking for a place to invest some extra time in the hopes that it gets you more money down the line, tracking integrations’ impact on churn is a great place to start.

What you need to show that your integrations impact churn 

In order to successfully track the impact of your integrations on churn, you need to: 

• Get your partner data into a tool that can track subscription status: Tracking your partners’ data (or second-party data) will let you measure churn through visibility into who’s paying for your product, who stops, when they stop and why.

• Track how many integrations your customers have: Knowing how many integrations each partner has will set you up to analyze whether or not those with higher numbers of integrations have a lower rate of churn. 

• Segment your partners by integration installations: Segmenting your partners into cohorts based on their integration numbers presents a wide range of data for each segmentation, giving you a more accurate look (and a data-based case for your program’s impact) at a potential integration and churn correlation.