No more slacking off — how we connected Slack to Pipedrive
Takeaways from a mission to find new customers by building integrations to our app.
Marketing engineering, growth engineering, or simply growth has been a hot topic lately, as the digitalizing world requires more and more engineering skills and resources to be successful in marketing.
After building Pipedrive integrations to Trello, Slack, Office, and several other marketplaces for the purpose of exposing Pipedrive, a sales management tool, to new audiences, here are my takeaways from an area that falls between marketing and engineering: getting your app visible in software marketplaces.
Getting an engineer to build “marketing stuff” is not easy. And it shouldn’t be. If you are a startup and have any free engineering resources, they are probably being allocated to the building of the product. From our experience, it pays off to make small investments in marketing engineering early on (Pipedrive got ⅓ of its early signups from Chrome listing). And I recommend giving it a full throttle when you have a solid product market fit and more marketing funds available.
It will be more risky than giving your money to Google or Facebook, but it might also have a higher return in the long term, as in most cases your traffic from ads and searches decreases significantly after you cut the budget. A well-crafted marketplace integration, though, will generate leads for years with minimal investments in updates.
New leads won’t be the only benefit. In most cases you will also improve the workflow of existing customers, and that leads to higher satisfaction with the product (and to less churn), as you will be part of the holistic ecosystem that customers use for their business.
And last but not least, eventually you want to end up in a situation where your software is used as a system of record. You want to have your own marketplace and other companies building integrations into you. This is actually one step toward that: understanding how your customers and integration partners work and the struggle that you need to undergo while building.
What to build
The first step is to find where it would make sense to be visible. There are lot of different ways to dig up that data, and here are a few suggestions on how to build yourself a backlog.
Browse Alexa and Similarweb
Check your competitors and other businesses working with your persona types. See who has a lot of traffic, is working in your domain or with your customers, and has a marketplace. Usually you will find a couple of those in top 500. From Similarweb, you can see where your competitors get their traffic.
Dig into your customers feedback
Browse through customer feedback, and look for people requesting integrations or automation. Talk to them. Ask how they do research or come to the decision that they need to find new software and how they actually find it.
See traffic sources from Google Analytics
Browse through the traffic that comes to your website and look for opportunities that would scale it. Some of the early adopters might have found you already and you just need to give them a nudge.
Google ‘“your app name” integration with..
If people have searched for it, they probably need it. And you might find that they already solved the problem, but it might be worked on to make it “special.”
Zapier
Look at what people have automated through Zapier (i.e. most recommended zaps) with your software, your competitors, and companies working with your audience. Small hint: they are listed in order of popularity.
Research your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn followers to understand where they hang out
Find common groups or interests, as they might all follow specific software companies or marketplaces.
Competitors
Browse competitors’ website, user communities, and blogs to understand which features are most used.
Prioritizing
This is the hardest part, so it pays off to spend some time on it. If you get it right, you’ll hit the sweet spot. We use ICE, which I wrote about earlier, but again, pick something and start to use it.
To raise confidence, try to reach out to a possible integration partner/marketplace. If you’re successful, it will be a large benefit; you might get valuable insights and eventually marketing support after you launch (i.e. mutual blog posts or any other credit that might help).
A good contact will also solve the issues that arise in the future stages (i.e. questions about design or implementation).
Design and Development
The Minimum Viable or Minimum Loveable Integration
Keep it simple and small. Use the same concepts as in the building of the product; go with MVP and give users some initial value. But keep in mind that you might need to meet some requirements of your integration/marketplace partner. So the question at this point might be whether to keep your own style or match your integration partner’s style. We’ve used the latter.
Definitely think about how this integration will solve a real problem and make your users’ lives easier. If you are copying an already-existing solution, try to do it better and add something unique. Automation usually goes a long way.
Be sure to go through the API with developers to find possible limitations early.
Set up extensive tracking.
Prepare your assets
Start preparing assets (blog posts, images, FAQs, user guides) right away. This will shorten the time it will take to get yourself visible. Do match every requirement from the partner side very carefully to avoid delays in launching. Research how the ranking algorithm works, and do your best to be in the top five. For example, CRM is an important keyword for Pipedrive:
Launch
To get the app visible, it’s better to have a launch plan in place that can be executed as soon as your integration is live to get that initial momentum.
Having a landing page for integration is common practice, remembering the research done earlier and optimizing SEO for that.
Adding a blog post explaining what you did and why you did it and asking for guest posts in your integration partner’s blog pays off well. Here is an example of our guest post with Trello: https://blog.trello.com/5-stages-of-sales-pipeline-pipedrive-trello
Going through any promotions inside the marketplace (i.e. “featured” or “new”) or just being on top of the list for a while will give you a nice boost.
Use Product Hunt. There are detailed tutorials available on how to get the best out of Product Hunt launch. Here is an example of our Slack integration at Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dealbot-by-pipedrive
Nurturing
A successful launch will only be the starting point of a future relationship with the marketplace, and sometimes it won’t go off with a big bang. We’ve set up regular monitoring to ensure that the listings are attractive and performing well in terms of position in catalogue and search terms (i.e. users are actively using it and/or it’s driving new users). We’re always looking for patterns and feedback for improvement.
Many users will look at the ratings and comments, so we try to keep them positive and up-to-date. Answer your customers’ questions fast. If there are technical issues and/or negative feedback, then solve it and always follow up. Tip: We collect regular reviews and ratings from users by contacting them directly and offering some kind of reward for their time spent (free months of your service subscription or gift cards for reviews). This is what our Chrome Webstore listing looks like:
Given all that, what would your tips be for building an awesome integration, or are you using one that you love? Leave it in the comments.
P.S. Pipedrive has open API and more than 50000 businesses eager to make their lives easier. Come and build your integration.
