I know you don’t want to dwell on the New York Times ad itself, but were you surprised by the reaction it got?
Scott: We’re not talking about the ad – no comment [laugh].
What we do is is fairly different than what you’ll find in the rest of the industry.
Pax8 was born to disrupt. We largely helped pioneer the MSP 2.0 managed services category. We are committed to the success of our partners. The disruption we’re known for continues to this day.
So I would just say that, while there certainly was a lot of attention from our perspective, there’s nothing new there.
Nick: The differentiator is the fact we are a marketplace. There are lots of people who like to be fast adopters of the language when we use it first, but then lack the proof points behind how [they are] different.
You’re both coming up to a year in your respective roles as CEO and Chief Commerce Officer. What would you see as your or Pax8’s biggest achievement in that time?
Nick: Launching Storefronts and Opportunity Explorer is probably the proudest moment, and then seeing the adoption and starting to get signals that we were right. Some of those signals are partners who are adopting Storefront instead of sending quotes to their customers. Those partners are growing 35% faster than benchmark data we have across the rest of our customers.
It’s no surprise that B2C behaviour is moving into the B2B world. The signals and data [we’re getting] that we were right and that this is actually how B2B wants to adopt technology – that feels good, that feels galvanising, and that is definitely a data point that proves we are in fact different.
That’s going to be a lot of our call to action this year. We are now showing that when you give the information, the technology, the different user interface to your customers, they’re going to adopt technology faster. [There are] 28 steps in the journey of a customer buying experience, and we believe that the first 11 steps of it can be all digital and don’t need a human interaction. You definitely need a human action at step 12 [but] you can turn those first eleven steps into a streamlined digital journey. Those are differentiators, and we speak about it differently than anyone else in the industry does.
Scott: We don’t spend much time looking in the rear view. There’s way too much coming at us in terms of the industry, in terms of the what’s next. That’s where we spend the majority of our time – building the foundations of our partners’ success.
At the end of the day, I would say that other people sell stuff, [whereas] we enable businesses. And that is the the marketplace of the future.
One of our responsibilities is to bring the future forward and that’s what we do day in and day out at Pax8. We do that largely for our ecosystem of managed service providers around the world. It is all about their success.
Interview continues on following page…
