How Optimizely uses their integration marketplace to support their sales team.

The Company

Welcome brings marketing teams together in a single workspace to share plans, collaborate on assets, and flawlessly execute campaigns. It’s not some generalized task management software company, trying to appeal to marketers. Welcome is building a product specifically for marketers. That’s why it has been named a Leader in Gartners’ Magic Quadrant for CMPs for four consecutive years.

The Story

The company didn’t start out as a software company though, Welcome originally saw the light as an outsourced content agency that would license original content to their customer base. The company had developed a platform for themselves so customers could set up marketing campaigns and work with agencies. It didn’t take long for customers to ask if they could license the software next to the content they were already buying.

Welcome started licensing its software to customers and soon enough they were blowing their weekly active user targets out of the water. Prompting the company to exclusively focus on the software business. This success didn’t go unnoticed and culminated in an acquisition by Optimizely in late 2021.

The Idea

Being in martech the company was surrounded by boutique solutions and they soon realized that there would be a whole tier of customers in need of multiple integrations. Rather than building customized solutions for each of those customers the company focused on an API-first strategy for asset and work management.

This worked well since most customers didn’t have the staff or budget to build customized integrations. It also prompted Welcome to build integrations that would work for multiple customers at once instead of building bespoke solutions from the ground up.

The Solution

It didn’t take long for the company to realize that their approach to integrations would be core to their Go To Market strategy. Demand continued to grow and Welcome soon added a professional services team that would help customers integrate their existing products with Welcome.

This is when the team started looking for a way to showcase their integrations to prospective customers. Rather than assigning scarce development resources to building a proprietary marketplace, the company opted for Apideck’s Ecosystem product.

The Results

“When we started it was only one or two integrations. But as soon as we released an API we created all this demand. The sales team was unable to truly grasp all the integrations that were possible because of the API.” says Kathy Copeland, Director Product at Optimizely, “So our GTM switched from releasing an API to releasing integrations. It made a huge difference in the prospects cycle, just go to our catalog and watch the videos, and connect that to our product led growth approach with a free trial.”

Another heavily used feature at Welcome is the Voting Portal, this allows customers to vote on which integrations they think Welcome should build next. It can be used both by existing users as well as prospective customers and is an excellent source of information when building the product roadmap.

When asked which new Ecosystem functionality she’s mostly looking forward to, Copeland didn’t hesitate: “It has to be the REST API. We can’t wait to use Ecosystem as a single source of truth for all our integration data and pull integration information directly into our product, where it matters most for our customers.”