January 17, 2025

Episode 58: Walk Like a Duck

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Erick and Rich discuss Ingram Micro’s platform-based strategy for driving growth and winning partner loyalty, as well as three proven techniques MSPs can use to build credibility with sales prospects. Then they’re joined by Nick Heddy, president and chief commerce officer of Pax8, for an insider’s look at why online marketplaces matter and how MSPs should pick the right one to go deep with. And finally, one last thing: Proof, courtesy of a Waymo ride with a comically bad ending, that autonomous vehicle tech isn’t ready for prime time just yet.

 

Discussed in this episode:

Platform is the Plan at Ingram Micro

LA tech entrepreneur nearly misses flight after getting trapped in robotaxi

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one, blast off! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads. Talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m the chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this show.

I am joined side by side as I am every week by your other cohost, our chief strategist at Channel Mastered, Erick Simpson, Erick, how you doing? Doing great,

Erick: Rich. I’m ready for, you know, a great. 2025, we’re recording this in January now, so there’s a lot of a lot of news that we’ll be covering this year and a lot of change.

In the industry that I’m, you know, you and I have been talking about kind of, you know behind the scenes here, but it’s going to be, I think a pretty exciting year.

Rich: And speaking of new years, the funny thing is I just said before, we’re a side by side as we are every week. Well, you and I were like physically side by side for about half of this week.

I I was with Erick and other members of the leadership team at Channel Mastered in Southern California. Thankfully Not in Los Angeles Orange County, but near enough, I suppose, to Los Angeles. But we were gathered down there this week for 2025 planning. So we, we were side by side.

Now we are digitally side by side.

Erick: Yep. And you know what? It was a great experience and I think it kind of as every organization should highly recommend, you know, having an annual planning meeting and then quarterly meetings. You know, we really get a lot out of it and, you know, we analyzed a lot of data and decided we shouldn’t be doing a couple of things that we were doing in, in 2024 but we should be doing a couple of things differently.

So it was a really, I think, productive. A couple of days together and I’m, I’m raring to, you know, to, to put into place some new change this year.

Rich: It was, it was very productive and it was a little extra productive for me because we were meeting in Orange County, not far from Irvine, which is where Ingram micro is headquartered.

And so this is our perfect segue. into our story of the week here. You know, Ingram micro does the big conference called one every fall. Last year it took place on exactly the same dates as I. T. Nation connect the connect wide show. So I was unable to attend for the first time in some years and it just occurred to me I’m going to be right up the street meeting with Erick and the channel mastered folks this particular week.

Why don’t I see if anyone over there would be willing to Catch me up on the stuff we couldn’t discuss last November. And sure enough I wound up in I dunno, five, six hours of meetings over there, Erick, it was a very interesting day. And it, it gave me an opportunity to speak directly face to face with Paul Bay, the CEO of the company about their strategy going forward.

And it’s a really. Interesting one. In terms of multiple trends happening in the I. T. World right about now. So folks who do business with Ingram micro folks who keep track of this kind of thing might be familiar with X Vantage X Vantage. Is this next generation platform that Ingram micro first rolled out about a year and a half coming up on, on two years ago officially in, in the U S and some other countries.

And it, it’s really designed to bring sort of a, a business. to consumer self serve mobile friendly point and click kind of experience to an Ingram micro reseller partner or vendor partner. The idea is instead of having to dial an 800 number or call an account manager and get order status information, for example, or pricing on a quote or complete a quote or something like that, why can’t that be as easy as it is literally to to order a pizza and have it delivered to your front door.

And so that’s the kind of experience that Ingram has been investing very heavily in through the advantage platform based on this idea that this is kind of what younger people in the channel particularly are used to in the rest of their life and are as they Assume leadership positions more and more in the MSP world in the vendor world, this it’s going to be the standard they hold their distribution partners to what was kind of interesting to me, though, is that from an Ingram standpoint, the advantage is kind of a one to strategic punch because on the one hand, it allows the company to streamline these manual processes is Save itself a lot of time, money, and effort you know, on things like order status calls and [00:05:00] emails and stuff like that.

Save its partners a lot of time and, and money on quoting and order checking and so on and so forth. But from the Ingram standpoint all that time and labor that they are freeing up via Xvantage is now time and labor that they can put to other uses. And they are in the process of training, upskilling a lot of these people who would otherwise just be fielding order status calls to have strategic go to market conversations with Ingram partners about new business opportunities, new outcome based solutions, new ways.

To provide end users what they really want from an MSP from a solution provider from a vendor from a distributor. So in an interesting way, Erick, what Ingram is doing is betting big on technology, AI powered technology. To automate and digitize parts of the relationship with its partners so that the more strategic human parts of that relation relationship can actually get deeper and more productive and more profitable for both sides.

It’s a very interesting approach to a very competitive market right now.

Erick: Well, Rich, if you replaced the term Ingram micro with kind of MSPs, I think that’s kind of the ideal that. MSPs are always striving for where their end customers, right. Is how do we, you know, streamline, how do we uh, deliver services more efficiently?

How do we see AI and it’s you know, it’s promise in our platforms to help us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively, we’ve had this conversation. Several, more than several times, I think on the podcast is how do we take advantage of this? And how do MSPs look to simplify and streamline their day to day operations, the noise that gets in the way of them being able to be more strategic to their clients.

So it kind of, it’s, it’s, it’s it’s a ripple effect, right? It’s rolling down. Ingram is now adopting this internally with Xvantage, Ingram partners, a lot of them that are MSPs now can, you know, even take better advantage of that. Because it allows them to, you know, have a little bit more efficiency and consistency, and probably data visualization where in the past they weren’t able to get that as easily as before.

So now it’s not only reducing the cost of labor and operation for Ingram. But I would say it’s also doing that for their MSP partners as well.

Rich: That is absolutely correct Erick. I agree completely. And you know, it, it occurs to me as you’re, you’re talking about what, one of the things that Xvantage does includes marketplace functionality.

So there’s a lot of self serve functionality for the MSP and for vendors, but some of that you can kind of pass along as an MSP, you can pass along to your end users. But before you do that, you’re going to want to know that you can trust the people who operate that platform to get things right and deliver a good experience to your customers.

And trust is pretty closely related to your topic of the week. Yes, absolutely.

Erick: Nice segue, Rich. So yeah, I want to talk a little bit about three things that MSPs can do to build trust with prospects, right? Because. Before we’re able to build a relationship or close a sale and then and deliver on the promise of, you know, being all that we can be for our clients as an MSP, we first have to close that opportunity.

And so, you know, during the very first step of the seven step sales process, where it’s prospecting and lead gen. So how do we build trust with prospects? During that first or second conversation, a lot of MSPs are doing sales virtually now working with a lot more MSPs, rich, they’re having the first appointment, really that qualifying that kind of get to know me conversation, kind of early qualifying, early exploration virtually.

Before deciding that, okay, it makes sense for us to invest some time and energy and effort and have a in person meeting, maybe gathered the information that’s needed do some. Assessments, security assessment, infrastructure assessments remotely, then come in and kind of deliver the results in person and, and, and present the solution and ask for the business.

So that early conversation where it’s like, well, how do I distinguish myself from my competitors when I’m trying to do some lead gen, some prospecting, maybe I’m doing this through, you know, social media, LinkedIn sales navigator is really coming to fruition and helping with that. Microsoft co pilot is also building in some of this functionality to help us in that messaging.

Well, Number one, there’s establishing differentiation between us and our competitors, but number [00:10:00] two, it’s kind of, you know, being considered to be, to, to have a seat at the table. So, what are the things that every one of our competitors is probably doing that we should also be doing first? Rich and that is we need to, you know, if we want to be considered a duck in this very simple analogy, we need to walk like a duck and quack like a duck for our, for our prospects to say, Oh yeah, they’re a, an MSP that I want to have a conversation with.

Well, we’ve got to showcase our capabilities first in our marketing messaging. And our website and things like that. And I’m talking about certifications and accreditations awards, things like that, we see a lot of marketing that goes out that says, Hey, we’ve got these certifications, we’ve got these accreditations, we’ve been recognized by the industry and gotten these accolades and awards.

So we want to make sure rich that we are making sure that that is being promoted on every type of communication that we send out, that’s on our website. That’s, that’s in our email signatures and things like that. Right. So that when we’re communicating with prospects, they’re like, Oh, these guys, they look like they check all these boxes.

Right. Cause our competitors, the ones that aren’t doing that will, you know, and we’ll, that’ll create an immediate distinction and differentiation, but for the ones that are, you know, our usual suspects that as an MSP, we know who our competitors are and we know that sometimes we’re in a competitive situation with them.

So we have to be considered at least. to be equal at that stage in order to jockey for a conversation. Number two, Rich, have case studies, testimonials, video testimonials you know testimonials on Google, right? Those also add additional value. Now, again, these are things that a client is looking at before they accept.

A first appointment or a virtual meeting with us, like they’re going to check out our website. They’re going to check out our social media pages. They’re going to check out our Google reviews. So we want to make sure that we have testimonials. Video testimonials are great. Case studies are great. Google reviews are great.

And then as we move forward in the conversation, Rich, the first thing that we sell to a client may not be a managed service agreement. It may be something that addresses an immediate pain that they have. It’s, you know, it could be a small project, something like that. So make it easy for our clients to do business with us.

That first time we talked recently on a, on another episode of the podcast, rich about giving a client the ability to pay us in the way that, that makes the most sense for them. So if we have financing options, if we’re able to take. Payments over time or phase a project in over time. It makes it easier for them.

Give them choices. How do we receive payment, credit card, ACH, make it easy for someone to say yes. Then ultimately, if it’s a large project that they’re interested in, think like enterprise level sales teams do and offer them a pilot or a proof of concept, right? Let us, you pay us for doing for rolling this out to a small segment of your users or to a business unit.

And then if, if we deliver on what we promise that solution will deliver, you agree to say yes to our larger. Proposal to do, you know, to roll in the entire organization.

Rich: Yeah, you know, and, and what all of that kind of boils down to, Erick, is this idea of don’t take my word for it, essentially, right? Like you can say in a meeting, you can say on your website, we are, you know, the number one provider of managed services in the fill in the blank area, but don’t take my word for it.

Basically, look at. The certifications and accreditation that this company has earned. Read these case studies from businesses you may have heard of nearby, validating that we’re very good at what we do, and watch us in action with a proof of concept and see how we deliver value for customers.

All that stuff. Really does kind of prove, confirm, validate your marketing messages so that folks know it’s not just marketing.

Erick: Yeah. That third party proof that social proof super valuable. And again, being more flexible potentially than some of your competitors and how you engage with clients. All these things will, will give you a competitive edge and higher probability of closing business.

With these prospects that you’re chasing after that, you know, you’re competing with others to win that business from,

Rich: well, Erick, we we spoke about platforms, we spoke about marketplaces in the context of Ingram micro just a little bit earlier on the show, [00:15:00] let’s do some more of that. But this time let’s do it with the president and chief commerce officer of PAX eight.

Nick Hedy, he is our interview guest this week. He is going to join us when we come back on the other side of this break. So hang on just a second. We’re going to take a quick break. Erick and I will be right back.

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment. And our guest this week is the president and chief commerce officer of Pax 8. He also happens to be the first person I ever interviewed about Pax 8, a good eight, nine years ago when it was a very young company and I was absolutely brand new to it.

His name is Nick Hetty. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick: Thank you very much. Rich. Great to see you, Erick. Nice to be on the show.

Rich: Great to have you, Nick. So, Nick, obviously as I just kind of indicated, I have been following PAX 8 closely for a long while, and you too, but for folks in our audience who have not met you before and for the very, very few MSPs out there who are unfamiliar with PAX 8 just tell folks a little bit about you and about PAX 8.

Nick: Yeah. So I’m Nick Hetty, the President Chief Commerce Officer. I’m coming up on 12 years with PAX A, and I was actually employee number eight. So it has been a wild ride alongside our MSPs who have been believing in us for a long time. But Pax8 is a marketplace that makes it very easy to buy, manage, sell all of the cloud and SaaS services that are out there.

And we’re also a platform. And what we do is extend that marketplace through storefront capabilities, meeting your customers where they’re at, making it easier for you to take advantage of these B2C buying behaviors, even though we’re operating in a B2B world. So we’re, we take it as our very serious and personal job that we’re passionate about to help protect our partners, protect their business, and make sure that they’re taking advantage of all the trends that are happening on all around us, like, like AI and co pilot.

Make sure they’re at the forefront when their customers ask for it. We’re, we’re right there as a resource to help them deliver it.

Rich: Well, marketplaces is exactly the topic we want to dive into with you, Nick. It’s you know, obviously a huge, huge phenomenon really just in the IT world and the channel generally, you know, beyond the world of managed service providers.

June before last, you guys at PAX 8 made a big splash unveiling this next generation platform slash marketplace that you really have bet your future on at this point. And when you did that the context, part of the context that you gave folks like myself and the media about that was that this was kind of your answer to this phenomenon that is very, very familiar in the software as a service world, maybe less so for MSPs in our audience called product led growth.

Which is this idea that if you make a, a SaaS product theoretically, if you make it right you can just sell that straight to the end user self serve, they download, it’s so intuitive, they figure it all out on themselves. And it sort of cut the channel out of that loop. So talk a little bit about the threat that, that product led growth potentially poses for MSPs.

And then also I’d be really curious to know if, if you see any change, any improvement in the SaaS world in the the two years or so since you unveiled this platform. Are they starting to figure out, this product led growth thing might not work as well as they thought?

Nick: Yeah, I, I think I am passionate about MSPs and the segment that we serve, which is the SMB segment.

And what SAS providers will, will say is it, it is hard because customer acquisition costs is so high. For these SAS vendors to go directly after these customers. Now, there is the promise with AI that it will become much easier to deliver and in an agentic future that that agent can provide support and pre sales and post sales and anything you need.

We haven’t quite seen that yet. And I think if you look at the trends in the data. When somebody is, we, we call it tethered and untethered, when a SMB customer goes direct to a SAS vendor in an untethered motion even the best companies in the world, I won’t name any of them but they’re, they’re still in the 30 percent range churns, which, which means as a SAS vendor, if I’m going direct to that customer and it’s expensive to acquire that customer that every three years I’m churning my entire base.

So that is, is, is not a great investment for anybody, I think. And we see in our base when it is tethered somewhere of a 3 percent annualized churn rate. So that would mean that it’s a 19 plus lifetime value. Of those customers when they are tethered to an MSP, who’s given the care, attention, support that somebody needs.

I mean, if you think about the statistics about SMB in the stack and how many vendors are being [00:20:00] consumed there, it continues to grow. I think the latest data I saw was 10 to 11 products in the average standard stack that’s being consumed by an SMB customer. And so if you think about the integration work that has to happen for all those things to be set up correctly, integrated so that the, the features and functions are, are optimized, whether it’s Microsoft at the foundation and choose your four or five security vendors, choose your backup and continuity, choose some of your operational pieces.

So I think you’re seeing. Marketplace platform, product-led growth strategies emerge and if your customer goes to a, a company like that where they are dripping through the product to upgrade upsell capabilities right within it, there is a risk there, especially as as AI is coming out. And if you were at a bar in June, you heard Scott Chase talk about the protection from product-led growth is partnering with PAX A so that you can tap into MLG.

Marketplace led growth. And we, we did launch storefronts, which is the ability for you as a partner to extend a marketplace or a storefront that is custom to your customer base. And we’ve been seeing great adoption there. So the two features that we did roll out were storefront capabilities and opportunity explore.

Opportunity Explorer is the ability to look at your entire base and suggest the next logical product. And then storefront was instead of. Sending somebody a quote, which is how, how things may have been done in the past. Instead of that, why don’t you give them an interactive experience where they can click around, shop, learn, build their own stack.

And we’ve seen about 50 percent of our base adopt the opportunity explore in a smaller amount, only 500 partners have published storefronts to their customers. And I will say those partners are growing 35 percent faster. Then the rest of our partner base, if you benchmark

Erick: Nick as a former MSP, and I’m talking former in the before four times, like before, you know, all of this new opportunity emerged you know, and kind of thinking from the legacy perspective before there were marketplaces and things like that.

And for our audience members that. You know, are, are really, you know, interested in growing their businesses through marketplaces. What is a marketplace from your point of view? Yeah. And why is it becoming such a huge part of how your MSP partners and their end users are transacting these days?

Nick: Yeah. So the, the oldest definition of a marketplace I can find Has been around for probably tens of thousands of years is a place where people gather to exchange goods and goods and services.

And so I think the marketplaces is exactly that it is not a physical place, but it is a virtual place where buyers and sellers can come together and exchange goods and services. And I believe what is unique about the pack state marketplace and how we think about it is. We have three stakeholders that are represented in our marketplace.

There are vendors like, like Microsoft there are partners like the partners we have around the world North 30, 000 now, and we have customers who can all come to that marketplace. And it’s really about how does Pax8 help to. Orchestrate the relationships between vendors, partners and customers.

So that everybody is getting that equitable distribution of, of value. And so I think what’s unique is we, we think about all the stakeholders. I believe that extending marketplaces, which again, to, to boil it down to the, the most simplest version. It’s a UI. If you don’t have a UI for, for customers, then how do you have a marketplace for customers?

If you don’t have a UI for partners to curate that marketplace for, for customers then that I would contest that you’re not thinking about the stakeholders in the ecosystem in, in the right way. If you are not delivering a UI for, for a vendor to manage a partner relationship, for a partner to manage a customer relationship, and for a customer to manage the relationships with the.

The services that they’re consuming. Then, then I would say that you’re, you’re not thinking about it in a, in a futuristic way.

Rich: You know, I, I write a lot about marketplaces. You know, I would argue, I think a lot of people who think about marketplaces would argue that MSPs really should be taking marketplaces very seriously, thinking about marketplaces themselves.

I guess, two part question here, I mean, from your perspective, from a Pax8 perspective, why should MSPs be taking the marketplace topics so seriously, and then what, what percentage of them, I mean, if you were to guesstimate, Are actually really thinking [00:25:00] strategically about marketplaces.

Speaker 4: Yeah,

sorry. Give me the first part of that question one more time.

Rich: So, I mean, from a PAX 8 standpoint, why should MSPs be thinking very seriously about marketplaces?

Nick: Yeah, I think MSPs should be thinking seriously about marketplaces because This is what your customers want. Customers and decision makers are getting younger and younger.

They’re, they’re used to ordering things on their phone, on their laptop, setting it up for an auto renewal. I think the days of submitting statements of work or going out and shopping for many SKUs for many providers, I think people are valuing convenience over Some of the other things that they, they might have valued in the past.

So number one, people want easy, they want fast, they, they want it to be integrated into the other things that they’re consuming, using tool sets that, that they’re probably leveraging in order to run the rest of their business. Whether that’s a PSA, you know, an EFP. A service now I think they, they want something to sit in the middle to not create complex or, or new processes, but to streamline the processes and the tool sets that they have today.

So to gain efficiency and to meet their customers where they’re at and to help them acquire new customers and serve existing better would be the advantages and why I would say. You really should have a marketplace at the center of your strategy to make commerce easier. We, we rolled out storefronts which is a managed service provider’s capability to extend that marketplace experience that is custom to their customers.

And we have 500 people who have adopted and who have been pushing out that feature to their customers. We give a very deep bench of tools where you can see, did this customer log in, how long were they in, what did they look at? So it, it gives you that ability to Shopify your, your customer experience.

And if you don’t think your customers want to consume this way. I would say you, you should ask them and, and talk to them about it because I, I, I would bet that they do.

Erick: So Nick, you, you know, you’re doing a, a really good job of positioning this argument as kind of the future of how business is, is going to be done. And you’re really planting the steak and the ground around. Taxaid being a marketplace, not a distributor. Distributor, no. Marketplace, yes. So, two questions.

The first one is, do you see how, how easy is it for kind of the traditional distributors that MSPs kind of think about to move in this direction, and are they moving in this direction? First question. Number two, how does this change the sales motion or an MSP now that, you know, let that are leveraging like a storefront that you provide?

Nick: Yeah. As a late entrant into the Microsoft game, as you can imagine I had to migrate a lot of partners and a lot of partners, customers. Two packs, eight to my marketplace for them to then use it going forward. So I would say that we, we’ve got this down pretty well. Now we’ve built an advanced set of migration capabilities.

We call it our marketplace migration tools, and it, it comes in and assesses. Many, many components of your SAS offering, and then it automates the migration from where you’re at. If it’s a legacy DynoDISC D, it will make it very easy for you to migrate to PAX 8 in our modern marketplace platform. And so we, we do believe that we, we have made that component of it easy, and we used to get a.

A lot of heat from some of our vendors about, Hey, you do a lot of change of channel. And we had to say, well, look, we were late entrance to this game. Yes. That’s, that’s the first step that tell us about the frequency at which a partner grew where they were. And then once we had a little operating history, tell us about the frequency at which those customers and partners grow once they made a move to Pax8.

And after we, we got about a year under our, our bell. SAS vendors came back and said, Hey, we’re happy for you to migrate it all to you because you grow two and a half times faster than, than some of the other places that we, we have partnered with. So we make that migration easy. And then what we’re seeing is that partners, customers grow, grow two and a half times faster.

Once they get here.[00:30:00]

Rich: So you guys have a marketplace. Companies out there that still call themselves distributors. Most of them have a marketplace. The hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft. There are a lot of marketplaces out there. And so if you are an MSP who appreciates the strategic value of a marketplace, you’ve got a lot of choices to make about which which one of these you’re going to place your bets on.

What advice would you give on To MSPs in terms of what to look for, what to evaluate, how to decide.

Nick: A marketplace it’s simplest definition of place for people come to buy, sell, exchange goods and services boil it down even easier. A modern marketplace. It’s just a UI. Many people have a marketplace that serves one segment of an ecosystem.

So yes, there are legacy distributors out there who have a marketplace that is partner facing. I haven’t come across many that allow a partner to interact with the vendor, extend their own custom marketplace capabilities down to their customers. Where it’s not just the ability to buy now if someone else is SaaS, but it is the capability to wrap your own services, come up with your own offering and allow a customer of yours or a potential prospect of yours to shop the services that you have that make you unique, that are your own IP and to learn about potential vendors that could come in or out of that stack of technology that you want to consume.

And then in a self service way. Buy, sell, build, manage in, in an automated fashion. So when I say marketplace, I mean, a three sided marketplace with a user interface for ISPs, vendors, partners, customers that allow you to Shopify your MSP offering and I haven’t come across any of the Dynodisties who are doing that yet.

Erick: So Nick as you know, working with lots and lots of MSPs MSPs are And the vendor sprawl, platform sprawl, right? Looking to, to consolidate, to streamline things so they could be more efficient and more profitable. So, you know, what would you say to MSPs in terms of how many marketplaces are the right number of marketplaces?

Does it make sense, for instance, to, you know, transact through a marketplace like yours and then have another relationship with like a hyperscaler marketplace? Things like that.

Nick: Yeah I would describe hyperscaler marketplaces as an amazing place for Enterprise companies to burn down some of their large commits and purchase other things when they perhaps got ahead of that big commit or behind on, on that big commit.

PAX eight is a marketplace. Yes. And a platform, which means it is managing the relationship between you and other marketplaces. So by choosing apex eight. You can leverage a AWS Marketplace, a Microsoft Marketplace. All of the vendors that are on our line car, we’re managing the relationship between those marketplaces.

So, and then giving you the extensibility to, to push that downstream to your customer. Giving you and your customer if you would like the ability to interact with the vendors that you’re consuming, that your customers are consuming. And so it’s more of a, more than just the ability to pay money in an e-commerce style.

It is more about orchestrating the relationships between all the players in the ecosystem.

Rich: You know, it’s interesting. I mean, if we were to rewind the clock by a few years, one could make the argument that the hyperscaler marketplaces and therefore the hyperscalers are competitors of Pax 8 because, you know, essentially it’s like you’re going to order there.

You’re going to order through us. But like you said, you guys, you have relationships Certainly with Microsoft and AWS, you’re kind of brokering some of these transactions with the hyperscalers. How, how do you kind of think about that somewhat complicated relationship right now between Pax8 and the hyperscalers?

Are you competitors, collaborators? Are you in a, in one of those classic coopetition kind of relationships?

Nick: Yeah, I think Microsoft. Is, is one of the best in the world that at making amazing technology and making it consumable and I do not view them as a competitor. I absolutely view them as a very collaborative partner and we deliver value where value is needed.

And if you have a very sophisticated small business who. Knows Microsoft very well. Perhaps they don’t need a pack. Say perhaps they don’t need an MSP and perhaps we don’t add any value into that business relationship. But if you think about the 100 million plus SMBs around the [00:35:00] world where technology isn’t their strong suit or Microsoft or AWS is not their strong suit, they need the value, they need the care and attention.

They need the onboarding help in the integration work. They need someone to manage the I. T. So that you can focus on delivering the value that your small business needs to deliver to the market. So I think it is a giant pie. It’s a giant total addressable market. And especially very small business, which, which many people talk about is 1 to 25 employee count.

We’re, we’re seeing less than 10 percent penetration there. So I think it’s just wide open. Lots of green field and Microsoft, many of the vendors on our line card don’t have the resources to go after those customers direct. And so they need managed service providers to help extend and aggregate that, that customer base that we can serve them and provide a great customer experience.

But yeah, if a customer doesn’t need that value, then they’re not a good fit and they should go buy it online. But there’s lots of people who need that help and need that value.

Erick: So, Nick, putting my MSP hat on for a second, right? Some MSPs might worry that allowing clients to purchase through, you know, a storefront or a marketplace dilutes that consultative, white glove experience and relationship that they have. Or worst case, might. You know, allow their clients to do what we always were trying to prevent them from doing back in the day when they went direct somewhere else to buy stuff is buying kind of unsupported products or things that, you know, didn’t align with the infrastructure or the, you know, the security that we want to do maintain and things like that.

What would you say to MSP thinking that way? As you know, the, the market shifts toward kind of the marketplace opportunity.

Nick: Yeah. If you, if you believe in a lot of the research that is being done about there’s 28 moments on a buying journey and that 75 percent of buyers aren’t reaching out to a managed service provider, even their managed service provider, until they’ve already gotten to the point of making a buying decision.

I’m saying that allow PAX 8 to help you to streamline those first 12 steps that they’re doing before they’re reaching out to you and asking for your, your consults. Our marketplace allows you to curate the products that are in the marketplace, your storefront that is custom to that customer. So that you can make sure that everything will fit, will tick and tie into the stack of products that are being consumed by that customer right now.

An Opportunity Explorer is that exact capability. It is based on what this customer is consuming. Here is the next logical product that we suggest you deliver to this customer. And if you want to invite them to this marketplace to do their own research ahead of, of talking to you so that they can have intelligent questions when they do get to speak to you.

To me, it’s streamlining the buying journey, meeting customers where they’re at and how they want to consume. To help you protect yourself from product led growth. And create that moat around your set of customers with marketplace that growth.

Rich: You know, I’ve, I’ve got one last question for you, Nick, cause it’s really kind of interesting earlier on the show, Erick and I were talking about Ingram micro.

I spent some time at their. their headquarters this week, and obviously they are betting huge on platform as their differentiator and and what’s going to help them compete going forward. At multiple points in this conversation, you made clear that Pax 8 is both a marketplace and a platform. And you know, the The platform concept is huge in the industry right now.

You know, Kaseya is a platform, ConnectWise is a platform Palo Alto is a platform, Ingram Micro, you guys. So we, we talk about your definition of marketplace. Just give us your definition of platform, what that means for PAX 8 and why that’s important to your, your MSP partners.

Nick: Yeah, to me, again, I try, anybody can explain something complex.

I try and just make it as simple of a definition as I can. Platform is extensibility. It is, whether it’s APIs, whether you have a dev team in house at your managed service provider or your ISV. And you need all of the marketplace capabilities to create commerce for yourself, for your partners. It is that extensibility.

So some of the work that Pax8 is doing with ConnectWise to embed our marketplace into their platform, I think that’s a great example of what we mean when we say platform. It’s extensibility of our marketplace into vendors and [00:40:00] partners and customers to streamline the digital journey gathering data from every interaction that is happening to better curate that journey for customers, partners and vendors.

Rich: All right. Very good, Nick. We really appreciate you taking time out of what I know is a very busy day to join us and discuss this really interesting topic with us. For folks in the audience who might like to get in touch with you, learn more about you, learn more about PAX 8, where, where should they go?

Nick: Yeah, pax8. com. We’ve got lots of information on Marketplace and the new features and capabilities that we’re rolling out. We just. Voyager Alliance, which helps us to meet the unique needs of all the 30, 000 plus partners that we have. I’m on LinkedIn, Nick Hattie. Drop me a line. I’d love to chat with anybody out there.

Rich: Fantastic. Nick, thank you very much again. Well folks Erick and I are going to take a quick break now. When we come back on the other side, we’re going to share some final thoughts about this interesting conversation we just had with Nick Hedy from PAX 8. Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around.

We. We’re going to be right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. So, you know, we, we’re, we’re interested in platforms, Erick, we’re interested in marketplaces. We went straight to the source, the president and chief commerce officer of a marketplace platform operator packs, a. Very interesting conversation.

There are a lot of things that I could follow up on what he was talking about there, but I think the key point for me is just this idea that if you are an MSP, you want to be where your customers are and want to be, and you want to be serving them the way that they want to be served. So you, you know, you asked a really good and essential question towards the end there about.

Storefronts and, and MSPs who might be worried about losing that white glove, high touch kind of experience. If if, if my clients are doing self serve work on a storefront, ultimately that’s not really up to you anywhere. This is how companies increasingly want to do business and for you to serve them well and remain relevant to them, you, you’ve got to meet them where they are.

And so to me. The question isn’t, you know, do I have a storefront or not? Do I work with a marketplace or not? It’s, it’s which one and how I just, I just don’t think it’s an optional topic anymore.

Erick: Yes. Richard, you know, I, I really wanted to get a little bit you know, if we had more time to get really deeper into some guidance for MSPs around kind of that whole, you know relationship and sales motion.

I mean, we know that. As MSPs grow and become more mature, they build out their, their, their account management team, their sales team, their VCIO function, and, you know, it would be great to maybe have a follow on conversation at some point around the future. You know, how do we address that motion? So a sales hunter will go out and hunt big game.

We want to bring in those net new clients. Then there’s kind of a handoff in a mature or larger sales organization to kind of a a client success manager and account manager kind of a role, which then kind of works with the existing clients on their day to day week to week needs, not strategically really, but.

They need, you know, new user setups, laptops, desktops, something like that. That can really be served, I think, really effectively and efficiency through a storefront. And again, I just want to get feedback or confirmation that, Hey, you, the MSP get to decide what you offer in the storefront, like you could have you know, a basic let’s say you’re hiring folks, your clients are hiring new folks, right?

You can have a power user kind of a setup the stuff that they buy all the time, or you can have kind of a basic setup, like what, what are the different things that you support in your client environments, the right type of, you know, the right version of the operating system, right? The right hardware that you support the, the essential stack of applications that goes on that device.

So again, I’m just using that as kind of a common one because, you know, it seems to me that MSPs are, are setting up users as companies grow. That’s kind of an ongoing thing. It’s not really a project. Because you don’t really have to manage risk or phase it out or things like that. It’s something that the client says, yes, set, set up a new user and I want this package.

Well, they can do that themselves and then create a workflow that then creates a ticket on the PSA that then says, Oh, you’ve got a new user to set up, go ahead and schedule that. So I think that that simplifies a lot. I look forward, rich to the time when AI really you know, strengthens that process and allows [00:45:00] maybe more of that customization to feel more like a real human is involved with some of the messaging back and forth and asking specific questions.

You know, you could think about it, like, how do we improve that customer journey or that client journey. Allowing the MSP again to consolidate and simplify. Their sales and scheduling and deployment processes. And, you know, like we heard today folks want to buy from platforms and marketplaces.

Heck, you know, I am probably, you know one of the biggest marketplaces starting with a capital a consumer of anybody that I know. I get stuff delivered all the time. So I like that convenience and why not? Provide that to your clients and maintain your strategic value and the time that you spend from a, from a labor perspective, much more strategically on some of these VCIO VCSO type services that at the end of the day, where it’s like, we’ve talked about on the podcast many times, we want these business outcomes for the client.

So no longer should we be perceived by how quickly we respond to, you know, an, a, an order for a laptop. It’s. How do we help drive that business forward?

Rich: And I just want to quickly follow up because you were talking about customizing storefronts. And it, it reminded me, I mean the first time that Pax8 talked about this storefront feature and its next generation marketplace was June before last when they were first kind of introducing the world to that marketplace, which was really still under development at the time.

MSP. Basically that storefront feature was sort of a one size fits all kind of thing. thing. And there were a lot of MSPs who said, well, you know, I, I don’t want my client to be able to go out and buy stuff from vendors. I don’t do business with, I want to be involved more and have more of a high touch feel and PAX 8 listened.

And when they actually introduced the feature, put it into production this June or last June, excuse me, 2024 they introduced some customization functionality, so it’s up to you whether you do this or not, but you can actually Limit which vendors, a client has access to through their particular storefront and you can kind of configure and customize workflows so that if, for example, You want to give a client the ability to research products and, and put an order together, but you don’t want them to actually place the order without you first taking a look at it.

You can do that too. You know, they’ll click buy. And what will actually happen then is you’ll get a notification and you can go in and look at the order and if you see something that you don’t like, you can go talk to the client. So, and these are two examples. So yeah, you, you, you don’t necessarily have to completely build your workflows around a marketplace like Pax8.

The people who, at least the more sophisticated operators of marketplaces understand what matters to to an MSP and, and are looking to accommodate that. Well, folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing on this episode of the show, and you know, we’re, we’re in January Erick, this is prediction season I’m getting inundated with 2025 predictions from vendors and experts and so on and autonomous vehicles, particularly in the analyst world are showing up on a lot of these lists.

I think there’s a lot of expectation that 2025 will be a very big year for the autonomous vehicle market. And our our final story here this week indicates that we’ve made a lot of progress on that front, but maybe these things aren’t a hundred percent ready for prime time. And I take you now, Erick, to Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, where a tech entrepreneur from Los Angeles named Mike Johns had arrived in a self driving Waymo vehicle.

He was on his way to catch a flight, fly back home to Los Angeles. And the vehicle got him to the airport safely, all right, and then it just circled, and circled, and circled in the parking lot. It did not pull over and let him get out of the car, and he’s sitting in the back of the car, stuck, getting a little dizzy, apparently, as they’re circling around there on the parking lot.

He’s calling support. What do we do here, guys? Thankfully, somehow or another, either the car figured it out on its own, or the Waymo folks were able to resolve the issue, and Mr. Johns was able to catch his flight, apparently just barely, but you know, there are still some hiccups in the autonomous vehicle software out there.

Erick: Yeah, just a couple I, yeah, that story is, is very interesting. And, you know, of course, if I take it to the absurd, I could say, Oh, well, you know, it’s, it, hackers will begin taking over these cars and then requesting ransoms to let people off at the airport, just, just my mind going somewhere else today, rich.

Rich: Interesting thought, interesting thought, thinking like like a criminal. I like it. Well folks that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you so much for joining us. We’ll see you in a week’s time with another [00:50:00] episode of the show. Until then I will remind you this is both a video and an audio podcast.

Which means that if you’re listening to us on audio, but you’d like to check us out on video, we are on YouTube. Look up MSP chat. You’ll find us there. If you’re watching YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, you go to Google, Spotify, Apple, wherever it is. You get your audio podcast. You’re going to find us there too.

And however you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other people find and enjoy the show. As much as you do. This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are part of the team of Erick and me. At channel mastered podcasts are just a tiny, tiny thing or part of what we do for our clients at channel mastered.

If you want to learn more about that, but really you want to learn more about all of the many services we provide to our clients, you should go to www dot channel mastered. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Master. That’s Erick working directly with MSPs to grow and optimize their business.

You can learn more about that venture at www. mspmastered. com. So once again, we thank you for joining us folks. We’re going to see in a week until then, please always remember you can’t spell channel without M S P.