How Salesflare uses their integration marketplace to generate new leads.

The Company

Salesflare is the intelligent CRM startups and small businesses love to use. It's a zero-input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for its user, not the other way around. Salesflare works wherever you work and with whatever you are working with. Customers use it on desktop, mobile, or just from a sidebar in their email inbox.

The Story

When founders Jeroen Corthout and Lieven Janssen banded together in early 2014, it was with a clear mission: fix CRM for salespeople. Their focus on automating data input and communication flows instead of merely providing an interface on a customer database quickly reverberated with the market. The product started gaining traction with small businesses across the globe who felt the same pain the owners had successfully identified. Salesflare continued to iterate on their successful concept and delivered a strong mobile app experience as well as a deep integration with the email flow of sales teams.

The Idea

This is when it became obvious that integrations with third party software applications would become the second cornerstone of their fast-growing product. By tapping into the email flow of their customers, Salesflare didn't only make lives easier for its users, it also noticed a positive effect on churn and LTV for their customers.

After performing market research the team quickly started building more integrations that could benefit their customers, going from marketing automation, over file storage to calendar integrations. The approach proved to be a success, with customers quickly adopting the new integrations as they became available. Salesflare uses a hybrid approach when deciding which integrations to build next: the most core to their business get built natively, whereas the longtail is supported through an integration with Zapier.

The Solution

Not satisfied with the success, Corthout moved on to the next step when he wondered if these integrations could also help generate leads. "If these integrations are so successful in retaining customers, it only makes sense they can help generate new customers as well," recalls Corthout. "I figured if we can generate a dedicated landing page for each integration, we'd start ranking on Google and increase organic traffic."

With their hands full building Salesflare and the surrounding integrations, Corthout set out to look for a partner to help build an integration marketplace, and he knew where to look. Corthout and Apideck co-founder GJ De Wilde had shared an office at a startup accelerator years ago. Apideck's Ecosystem product was just coming out of beta and seemed to meet the requirements Salesflare set out. "We were super excited to have Salesflare on board as our launching customer," recalls De Wilde.

The Results

Two years into the collaboration, Salesflare's marketplace keeps generating results. With over 200 integrations in the marketplace and 16.000 unique landing pages the marketplace generates over 150,000 search impressions per month through Google alone. Not only Salesflare's native integrations are showcased, individual Zaps are listed as well, generating extra organic traffic at scale. "It's important for us to keep control over our messaging when customers search for an integration," says Corthout, "thanks to the marketplace Salesflare ranks on the first page for all integrations searches for our product."

Never content with the status quo, Corthout is already looking ahead: "Integrations are such a central part of our strategy that we want to bring them closer in our product. That's why we'll be taking a closer look at Apideck's unified APIs next."

Tips for Growing a CRM Through Integrations

Tip 1 — Showcase every available connector in a single, browsable marketplace: CRM buyers evaluate products based on how well they fit into their existing stack. Listing all available integrations in a centralized marketplace, each with its own dedicated page, gives prospects the confidence that your CRM works with the tools they already rely on and lets them confirm compatibility on their own terms.

Tip 2 — Treat integrations as a retention lever, not just a feature checkbox: CRM users who connect their email, calendar, and file storage tools to your platform are significantly harder to churn. Each active integration increases switching costs and makes your CRM more embedded in the daily workflow of your customers.

Tip 3 — Let your integration catalog do double duty as a growth channel: A marketplace that generates a dedicated, discoverable page for every connector turns your integration catalog into a customer acquisition engine. Prospects searching for how your CRM connects to their existing tools find your marketplace directly, giving you control over the messaging and shortening the path from discovery to signup.