In August, I had the privilege of being named the first-ever Chief Experience Officer at Pax8. My focus is on enhancing and maintaining the best-in-class experience our partners have come to expect, alongside improving the experience of our vendor partners and the small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who rely on MSPs and the vendor solutions they offer to build their businesses.
I recently wrote about the importance of building a positive experience within our ecosystem for partners, vendors, and SMBs. As I said in that piece, we don’t always have one type of customer in the channel, and many of us interact with entities who aren’t necessarily direct customers at all.
Pax8 built itself on disrupting traditional distribution to bring much-needed support to MSPs transacting with cloud technology vendors. As we continue to grow globally, we are focusing on the broader ecosystem of partners, vendors, and SMBs. Our new Marketplace will be the only three-pronged Marketplace equally dedicated to vendors, SMBs, and partners.
While this is a new position for me and a new chapter in the story of Pax8, we are no less committed to our partner base. In fact, I think we are more focused than ever on our mission to help our partners grow their businesses.
If we want to provide an exceptional partner experience, it’s critical for us to understand their end customers. As we move towards the future of our cloud Marketplace and my team and I begin elevating the experience of every ecosystem component, I want to highlight some ways our work will directly benefit the partners who transact with us.
Customer acquisition, not competition
Our partner Marketplace will be the total business solution for MSPs worldwide. One of the most significant pain points we’ve heard from our partners is customer acquisition and its associated costs. My team now includes Simon Lee-Smith, VP of Customer Experience, who will focus on understanding the customer journey to best match SMBs with the MSP partners they need to thrive.
Our partners will gain access to new customers through our matchmaking process and can then sell to them with individualized storefronts for MSPs within our Marketplace. This, coupled with the best-in-class support and enablement for which we’re already known, will empower Pax8 partners to grow their businesses while reducing client risk and increasing efficiencies. This new Pax8 Marketplace is the next iteration of our goal to support partners above all else, and we will not be going direct-to-customer at all.
Data-driven insights
The currency of our collective future in the channel will be data. Vendors want data on the adoption of their solutions, partners want data on their customers, and Pax8 wants to collect all the available data points on each member of our ecosystem to best empower everyone involved. This focus on data is also a key pillar of my understanding of the experience throughout the Pax8 ecosystem.
My team and I will also utilize data from our partners, vendors, and customers to measure our success in creating and maintaining the best-in-class experience the members of our ecosystem deserve. Let me also make clear here that our top priority is the safety and security of any data within our systems. We will have clear opt-in procedures and adhere to the strictest standards possible to ensure that this data is safeguarded.
Feedback and support
Connected to the discussion of data above is my focus on constantly learning directly from our partners. One of the primary objectives I have tasked myself and my team with is to garner better, more focused feedback from our partners and also our vendors. My earliest days at Pax8 included meeting partners where they were (with pizza and beverages, of course) to figure out what they needed to be successful. Those discovery sessions proved invaluable when it came to building our PSA tool integrations properly and have guided me in every role I’ve held at Pax8 since.
Now, I am digging back into those roots and establishing new processes and programs to ensure we are taking in feedback efficiently and making that feedback germane to our internal teams. Part of any great experience is feeling valued, and Pax8 is focused on ensuring we understand what our different stakeholders need and want to build a scalable, sustainable experience for years to come.
None of this work will take its complete form overnight. Many of our initiatives will be built over the next few months and even years. I view my role as Chief Experience Officer as a commitment by Pax8 to ensuring the long-term success not just of our Marketplace but of every partner, vendor, and customer that works with us.
