There are over 11,000 SaaS companies with more companies cropping up every year. With tens of thousands of applications to choose from, even the smallest companies are using an average of 40 applications.

Larger companies are using an average of 203 applications.

These applications are used and purchased by all departments, from sales, marketing, customer support, IT, human resources, to business operations.

In marketing alone, for example, there are over 7,000 marketing tech products, and one of marketers biggest pain points is the lack of software integration.

Toggling amongst all these applications makes for a terrible user experience, with many hours being wasted manually transferring data or waiting for in-house developers to build integrations that often fail to meet business needs.

As a SaaS company, you can solve this problem for your users by building an in-app marketplace that empowers your users to simply click and install the integrations they need.

An in-app marketplace allows you to provide your users with access to an entire ecosystem of best-in-breed tech products without leaving your app.

While this is expensive to build in-house, if you use an integration platform specifically designed for in-app marketplaces, you can build an integration marketplace with minimal engineering resources and a reasonable budget.

An in-app marketplace will benefit your startup in a number of key ways: increase leads, close more deals and decrease customer churn.

Increase Leads

Building an in-app marketplace allows you to leverage your tech partners’ marketing and sales teams. Your SaaS product will be listed on your partners’ websites and social accounts and mentioned in their marketing and sales endeavors. Often, your tech partners will directly refer you leads.

An in-app marketplace page can also be a strong marketing tool, giving your marketing team an important asset by which to attract new people to your product. When leads are searching for integrations with your particular product category or for integrations with your tech partners’ products, your marketplace page will appear in the search results.

Close More Deals

An in app-marketplace can also drive revenue by closing more deals in the sales funnel.

In many product categories where there are a number of similar products, offering seamless integrations at scale can be the sole reason for why one product is chosen. Slack, for example, has seen growing competition for users from Microsoft’s Teams platform and has decided to invest in expanding its in-app marketplace as a way to attract more users and differentiate itself from Microsoft Teams.

Depending on the product category, many leads will only purchase software that integrates with the other applications they are already using — so having or not having integrations can make the difference between a prospect choosing one company’s product or their competition’s. For example, many organizations using Salesforce and Hubspot would only choose an email automation platform that integrates with both.

In addition, offering a number of integrations greatly increases the functionality of a product, making it a more compelling offering that solves additional pain points for leads and prospects.

Reduce Customer Churn

One of the biggest drivers in building an in-app marketplace is that current customers are requesting them. Properly configured integrations will increase customer engagement with an app as it opens up new functionality and reduces friction in their business processes. Engaged customers are much less likely to churn.

Integrations also embed an application more deeply in customers’ workflows and tech stack, making it harder for them to remove the product from their organization’s operations as it becomes interdependent on other tech products and platforms they are utilizing.

Well-designed integrations that are easily accessed from within software also enhance the customer experience, which makes customers less likely to churn.

In an era of thousands of SaaS apps, offering in-app integrations can provide a significant competitive advantage. In many product categories, leading B2B companies already offer hundreds or even thousands of integrations, and not offering them can make it impossible to attract customers.

By utilizing an integration platform designed specifically for building in-app marketplaces, you no longer have to possess the resources of Salesforce to build your own native integrations. After your core product is built out and you know it is meeting an important customer need, investing in an integration marketplace is key to the next stage of growth.

This article was originally published by Kelly sarabyn on medium.