As the world becomes more and more digitized, enterprises of all sizes are creating technology platforms that help drive business forward. If your company provides technology solutions, you likely fit into an ecosystem of solutions that work together for your end customer’s benefit.
These technical integrations are a cornerstone of the software market and have become indispensable in many companies’ go-to-market strategies. No one company can do it all, so it often becomes essential that you can chain together multiple solutions to solve a technology problem.
Technology companies that primarily offer products (as opposed to services or broad platforms) are commonly called “independent software vendors” or “ISVs” for short. There is a common formula companies across the industry use to build an ISV ecosystem that they’ve formed over several decades. Understanding the formula will help you build a strategy, navigate the ecosystem faster and have clear expectations about the business impact.
Open Your Product To Integrations
The first step is to ensure that your technology product has integration points that are open and well-documented. It is common to publish the interfaces customers and partners can use to share data and work between applications. This is something you can discuss with your product team, and you can identify opportunities for integrations. Your product likely already has these, so this creates a business development opportunity: You can take a technical integration and turn it into a partnership.
Bring Engineers To The Table
If you begin a discussion with a potential partner about a collaboration, expect that you will need to invest engineering resources to make the collaboration successful. If the partner is smaller and therefore more motivated to work with you, they may still need help getting started and testing the solution. But if you want to be really strategic, you will likely have to work with bigger and more established players, which means you will have to invest in engineering expertise. The engineers will need to understand the use cases for your product’s integrations and the partner’s product so they can build a great solution that customers will want.
Build Great “How-To” Content
Regardless of what your marketing strategy looks like, partnerships with ISVs can become content for your stories, events, webinars, blogs and social media. Since you have a real working solution that joint customers can use, it’s pretty easy to tout the value of it and talk about how great you each are. This is a chance to focus on customer value and target your existing customers with content about how to take advantage of these integrations. The value of these solutions is really about being “better together.” While it may not spark someone to buy your product, integrating with multiple ISV products can make you “stickier” in their solutions.
Don’t Sell Together (Unless A Deal Falls In Your Lap)
This is a very counterintuitive point about ISV partnerships and one many people learn the hard way. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to build a sales program jointly with other ISVs. Many ISVs don’t have the ability to sell other people’s products, and unless you are in an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or marketplace-style arrangement, the deal structures and incentives can be too complicated to gain momentum as a joint program. Instead, handle joint deals opportunistically when they happen to come up. And focus your energy on making existing joint customers happy with high-quality integrations. Note that this is strongly in contrast to services, channels and reseller partnerships where the primary goal is increased sales.
Conclusion
To build an ISV ecosystem, you’ll want to open your product to third-party integrations, invest in engineering resources, tell a great story and focus on existing customers. The rewards for this can include more customer loyalty, increased user adoption, and enabling new and interesting workflows for your end customers.
