"The secret of getting ahead is getting started." — Mark Twain
Although the marketing tools you implement may cover most of your needs, there are almost always gaps. Your SaaS roadmap should plan for connecting third-party marketing tools, enabling them to communicate with each other, and filling those gaps before they become expensive mid-launch discoveries.
In 1999, our legislative tracking service entered the federal market with a significant brand problem: nobody in Washington had ever heard of us. What we did know was that once a prospect walked through a live demo, they converted at approximately one-in-three. The challenge was generating enough qualified demos.
We engaged a local marketing firm with a goal of 300 demos in six months. Their suggestion was to send each prospect their own login to the system. Experience told us this wouldn't work unless those accounts were loaded with a dashboard tailored specifically to that prospect's industry. So we adapted the SaaS platform to give the marketing team a simple interface for creating custom dashboards by vertical — and integrated it directly with the CRM. The result was a measurably shorter sales cycle and management metrics that hadn't existed before.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Native integrations — Built into the software or available in an app marketplace. Simplest to activate; limited to what the tool natively supports. ◆ Third-party API integrations — Some software provides its own API that allows direct connection to your platform. ◆ Third-party connectors — Tools like Zapier bridge apps that lack native or direct API integration. ◆ Custom API integrations — Built by your development team. Most expensive, most flexible, most tailored.