Do you know how you rank in AI engines?

Find out what AI engines know about you with our AI brand monitor.

Audit AI Engines

The Overlooked Growth Lever in SaaS: Cross-Company Integration

When SaaS leaders talk about growth, the conversation usually revolves around:

  • Expanding into new markets.

  • Adding features to widen appeal.

  • Scaling sales and marketing.

But there’s a powerful — and often ignored — lever hiding in plain sight: making your product work seamlessly with your customers’ and partners’ existing systems.

That’s the mission behind Exalate, an integration platform connecting tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, and GitHub across company boundaries. While the product is designed for technical teams, the lessons from Exalate’s growth journey apply to any SaaS leader looking to accelerate adoption.

Why Cross-Company Integration Is a Growth Multiplier

Most SaaS platforms focus on improving collaboration within a company. But the reality is, most value chains span multiple organizations — partners, vendors, clients, agencies.

Without system-to-system integration:

  • Work gets passed over email and spreadsheets.

  • Updates are delayed or lost.

  • Duplicate entry and mismatched data create costly errors.

By integrating across company lines, you remove this friction, making your product stickier, expanding its use cases, and often making it mission-critical to customers’ daily operations.

Lesson 1: Sell the Problem, Not the Vision

Hilde Van Brempt and Francis Martens started with a big vision — a global network of connected companies — but quickly learned that customers don’t buy visions.

They buy solutions to immediate pain.

Instead of leading with “cross-company integration,” Exalate wins deals by solving specific integration headaches:

  • Jira to Salesforce for client issue tracking.

  • Zendesk to ServiceNow for managed service providers.

  • Azure DevOps to Jira for development/vendor collaboration.

SaaS takeaway: You can still have a transformative vision — but sell the quick win first. Earn the right to scale your story.

Lesson 2: Design for Independence and Control

A key differentiator for Exalate is its distributed architecture. Each organization keeps full control over its own environment, avoiding the “central hub” model that can create security and governance concerns.

For SaaS founders, this is a reminder: If your product lives in a sensitive or regulated space, giving customers control, privacy, and autonomy can be more compelling than adding shiny features.

Lesson 3: Build for Expansion Through Connectors

Exalate’s growth spiked each time they added support for a new platform. Starting with Jira-to-Jira, they expanded into Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more — each connector opening an entirely new market segment.

Consulting insight: Think of each integration as not just a feature, but as an acquisition channel. A well-chosen integration can drop you directly into a new buyer ecosystem.

Lesson 4: Onboarding Isn’t Just a Technical Process

One of their biggest scaling challenges wasn’t tech — it was people. As their team grew from a handful to 50+ across multiple time zones, onboarding became critical.

They implemented:

  • Buddy systems for new hires.

  • A growing internal knowledge base.

  • In-person training trips to bridge global teams.

For SaaS companies selling into enterprise, your customer onboarding needs the same intentional design. First impressions determine long-term adoption.

Lesson 5: Culture Scales Better When It’s Defined Early

Exalate eventually formalized its values:

  1. Diversified

  2. In Sync

  3. Take Action

  4. Enjoy the Journey

While these values existed informally before, articulating them helped align a growing global team.

For founders, even if you’re small today, defining values early creates a cultural backbone that survives growth spurts.

How SaaS Founders Can Apply This

If you’re building or scaling a SaaS product:

  1. Map external dependencies – Where do your customers’ workflows cross into other companies’ systems?

  2. Identify high-value integrations – Which ones could remove the most friction and unlock stickiness?

  3. Launch with the urgent pain – Lead with a use case that delivers quick ROI.

  4. Design for autonomy – Especially in B2B SaaS, control and privacy are selling points.

  5. Treat onboarding as a growth driver – Both for your team and for your customers.