Pax8 debuted its new Marketplace at its second annual Pax8 Beyond conference this week in Denver. The AI-powered Marketplace boasts two new major features: Opportunity Explorer and Storefronts. First introduced at last year’s inaugural conference, The Marketplace is designed to modernize the commerce experience and drive growth for the distributor’s 30,000 MSP partners across the globe.
Marketplace’s Major New Features
Opportunity Explorer. Libby McIlhany (pictured above), who was promoted to Pax8’s chief product officer in January, explained how this AI-powered tool “uses rich data to provide actual insights with searching, filtering and sorting capabilities. It also allows for precise customization to reflect your customer’s actuaries.” This recommendation tool doesn’t just merely recommend similar products; instead, it searches for gaps in your stack that you may have missed and suggests appropriate solutions.
Additionally, Opportunity Explorer prioritizes vendors you’re already working with. In an interview with MSP Success, McIlhany said, “There’s a lot of friction for our partners when they have to bring on a new vendor. They have to learn how to sell it; they have to learn how to support it. The jump from something they’re already selling to something that they’re not selling yet can be significant. We really wanted to focus first on upsell—let’s farm the land that you’re currently cultivating.”
Customized Storefronts for MSPs. When it comes to sending quotes to clients, you can still do it via email, or “you can publish it directly into your very own branded customer storefront,” said McIlhany. This storefront option both streamlines the entire process and allows customer self-service, if you have clients who are interested in that option. The Storefront also comes with toggleable controls on the MSP’s side, so that you can approve any orders clients make, for example.
Other features include:
The Solutions Library. Once you’ve selected the products you want to offer from the catalog, you can assemble them into a single package, branded for your MSP—even if the package includes products from several different vendors. Once assembled, MSPs can send the package to clients with just a few clicks, saving you time.
Multicarts: The new multicart catalog feature also allows you to have multiple carts open at once. That means no more abandoning one client’s order to purchase something for another.
The Quoting system. The new quoting tool is embedded directly in the Marketplace and can be branded for your MSP. McIlhany mentioned one of their main goals with this revamped quoting system was to make the process as seamless as possible for MSPs.
The Marketplace will be globally available to Pax8 partners on June 17.
In addition, three new vendors have joined the Marketplace: Kalibr8, provider of a multitenant cloud management platform; MSPbots, which delivers business intelligence and robotic process automation (RPA) solutions to streamline MSPs’ daily tasks, and SuperOps.ai, a PSA-RMM tool.
Responses From MSPs
The response to the Marketplace has been generally positive. McIlhany and her team worked with a small group of variously sized partners during development, whose response was “pretty positive. They’re pretty excited,” she said.
MSP Success also spoke with Pax8 Beyond attendees to get their response to the announcement. Natalia Scheidegger, CEO of Sydney, Australia-based MSP 3rdmill, was excited to see Pax8 deliver on their promise from last year’s Beyond. “I’m really excited to see and get my hands on the Marketplace,” she said. “I think that Marketplace is going to help differentiate Pax8 MSPs from the rest of the market, to be able to offer that to our customers. It’s where the market’s going. I see their vision around self-service and to see them help enable partners to deliver that for our customers is so exciting.”
Brian Weiss, CEO of West Central Technology, located in Willmar, Minnesota, was particularly interested in the integrations available. “If I have my entire stack that’s available within Pax8, my customers can now go in there and add an additional stack. And then I can generate a kickoff ticket over to the onboarding team, and they can start that process instantaneously, instead of waiting for a team member to catch up with the email or a phone call of a customer calling in. It just starts that process quicker.”
Tucker Sukraw, network architect at the same MSP, expressed interest in possibly incorporating their Storefront into West Central’s website, making the entire experience more streamlined and impressive for customers.
Future Marketplace Developments
Future updates for the next year include additional vendors being added to the Marketplace. McIlhany mentioned her goal to allow partners to add their own data into the Marketplace as well. “Then we can take that data, run it through Opportunity Explorer, and create recommendations that are informed by all of the products that they’re selling, not just the products that they’re buying through the Pax8 Marketplace.”
Image courtesy of Pax8
