Building the FreshBooks partner integration strategy (George Kyriakis, Freshbooks)

In this episode of SaaS Connect by Cloud Software Association, George Kyriakis, Senior Director, Business Development & Partnerships at Freshbooks, who at the time boasted 12 million global users, gives a presentation about how to go about building an integration partner program, and why you should bother.

George explains why it’s hard convincing CEOs of the importance of partner integrations, and how providing numbers persuades them to buy in. Presenting metrics such as higher long-term value and cost of acquisition are very helpful, because they align with what’s important to the CEO.

After 30 years of “doing it wrong”, George offers 12 steps to building an integration program to “do it right”:

1. Define the need
2. Get executive buy-in
3. Define the categories
4. Building an API library
5. Website structure per amount of partners
6. Value propositions for developers
7. Target integrations and prioritising
8. Negotiate value with partner
9. Consider outsourcing development
10. Marketing
11. Tracking
12. Reporting

He also shares additional tips:

- Things that go wrong, and what to look out for
- Common questions and answers
- The next stages for FreshBooks, and ideas you can use in your next steps

Resources Mentioned:

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