Your sales and marketing in the API economy should center on staying change-resistant and future-proof. To sell effectively, you need a solid platform that will bolt onto your existing infrastructure and leverage the marketing and sales SaaS services you currently use. You need your digital factory floor and supply chain to instantly respond to your customers. Then you can turn your relationship with them into a real-time engine for understanding what they need and meeting their demands as quickly as possible. Being API-first ensures that the feedback loop you have established with consumers provides the input to inform future sales and marketing campaigns. In other words, your marketing and resulting sales will inform the road map for your future APIs, as well as improving sales and customer experiences today. So the sale isn’t just about what currently exists—it is also about perpetually delivering consumers value. It can be easy to see your APIs in terms of the applications they power, but the real API- first opportunities lie in speaking to the business needs of the enterprise.
While there are many directions possible once you have begun your enterprise API journey, here are the top level areas to consider:
- Industry - Consider what would happen if you expose your digital resources, capabilities, and experiences to external partners or even competitors, or how these APIs might be applied in industries that you do not already directly engage with.
- Aggregation - The aggregation of data in finance, healthcare, and other top industries has proved to be a hot area of investment. These industries are leveraging APis to sell access to industry-wide global or regional data, making markets more visible and actionable.
- Opportunities - Being API-first means that you can respond to new opportunities to sell your product in the moment, often before your competitors are able to respond.
- Reduce Costs - A successful way to position your API products is to show how they help companies reduce operating costs by transcending legacy technology and improving their business processes.
- Switching Costs - Positioning your APIs to help reduce the friction of switching services and systems is a strong way to ensure that your APIs will speak to enterprise business goals.
- **Rigid Systems ** - Make it easy for consumers to integrate your APIs. You should demonstrate how your APIs help make consumers’ operations more flexible, composable, and less rigid and immovable.
- Modernization - Your APIs should reflect what is coming next for consumers, speaking to the future, but also mapping to existing realities. Consumers need you to help them modernize the way they do business and respond to challenges.
- Innovation - APIs should be used to reduce team workloads, helping carve out more time for innovation. They provide micro opportunities for teams to do new things on top of their existing work in a worry-free environment.
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