Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Craig Donovan - Pax8 on Building Partner Experiences That Drive Growth
Live from Pax8 Beyond with Craig Donovan on Partner Experience, AI Enablement, and the Future of MSP Growth
In this energizing live session from Pax8 Beyond, we sit down with Craig Donovan, Chief Experience Officer at Pax8, to explore what it really takes to deliver next-level partner success in today’s rapidly evolving channel landscape.
Craig shares how Pax8 is supporting partners through the biggest transition yet, from managed services to managed intelligence. We unpack the rise of the “Chief Workflow Officer,” Pax8’s ambitious 100+ course Guided Growth program, and why SMBs are now uniquely positioned to lead the AI-driven future of the channel.
In this episode, we dive into:
- How Pax8’s Guided Growth, Academy, and Voyager Alliance are helping MSPs scale smarter
- Why SMBs - not enterprises will be the first to capitalize on agentic AI solutions
- The role of community, coaching, and constant feedback in building partner-led innovation
From real-time partner insights to rewards programs and peer-powered enablement, this conversation is packed with practical strategies for any MSP ready to unlock their next stage of growth.
Connect with Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-donovan-621b585/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, Craig. How are you doing so good?
Speaker 2:Alex, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'm excited to have you on. We are live at PAX 8 Beyond, where I've just seen two and a half thousand MSPs receive new information about where the market's headed. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I'm Craig Donovan. I'm the Chief Experience Officer at PAX 8. Great title, by the way. Totally, I think it's clearly the best job in all of PAX 8. It's clearly the best job in all of PAX 8. Nice. What it really means is I get to obsess about all things partner and really everything that impacts them. I get to work with the teams that are building out that experience, stewarding that, things like technical support and education and professional services. Our charter is pretty simple Whatever it takes to make a partner succeed, that's what we do.
Speaker 1:Which I one. Not only is it a good title, it's an awesome remit. I think it's so easy to sort of index on the big brands and the names because there's just this great bucket of partner but actually the partners are the heroes right. Making them successful is the goal.
Speaker 2:They are, and this is one of the things I've always loved, particularly with the partners, and even the SMB space is. It's so personal. This is not working with giant companies, and so when we can do something transformative, when we help a partner, we're helping. You know, suzanne or Jim, where?
Speaker 1:real people have families and it's really exciting. Yeah, I always really like the. They use it a lot in American politics where they sort of say the backbone of the economy, right, and I sort of think of that. You know, when I think about the SMB partner, I think that is the backbone of the channel economy. That's, that's who this runs on. So you spend your life obsessing on how to make partners successful. There's been a massive change to how you're doing that, or an evolution, let's say, um, talk to me about what, uh, what that looks like yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think you know, when you look at this this shift into managed intelligence, this a agentic future that scott outlined earlier today this is both an incredible opportunity, but it is a big shift for our partners. You know, the entire way they're working is going to start to change, where it's less about the individual technology, it's less about even, in some cases, specific SaaS products or even services. Now they're moving into almost becoming the chief workflow officer right, because agents are going to start to bring down some of that technical lift and increase this need for them to become transform business coaches, investing in understanding those partners. And the great thing is, ai is bringing with it opportunity and challenge, and so that challenge is going to require a lot of governance and a lot of trust and a lot of relationship All things that MSPs are world-class at, and so they're ripe and ready for this.
Speaker 2:The challenge for them is how do they move into this new way of thinking?
Speaker 2:Because it's not just a new skill like picking up a different security product, it's a whole new way of running a business, and so we've really wanted to invest in them and help them not only move, but tailor the conversation to them, and so we've created this new guided growth program around AI and specifically, the transition into managed intelligence.
Speaker 2:It's right now over 105 courses across three major tracks, and we're adding to it every day.
Speaker 2:Now, as you'd expect, there are technology-centered courses like how do you create an agent, how do you connect to an MCP server, but a lot of partners are probably already starting to head down that route and those that have have already discovered, frankly, that that's the first part of the problem. Then you get into all the commercials how do you run the business and how do you create the strategy and so we have courses on the sales and the operations, courses on the transformation itself, and then a really innovative assessment that partners take that then we start to curate and prescribe a journey specifically to their ability, to their interest, where they're at right now, and so no two partners are going to take the same course and the same journey through the guy griff program I'll be honest, I've spent uh, I've spent 10 years working in distribution in vendor land, um, and I've spent my life obsessing around how do we make partners successful that what you just described is so far ahead of what I think everyone else is thinking about.
Speaker 1:I'd love to understand a bit of nuance as to why that's true of Pax8. Why are you guys so different when it comes to really wrapping value around a partner so prescriptively? You?
Speaker 2:know. I think some of it starts with our origin and you know many of the leaderships, myself included. We started out in the early days with partners and you know realized it was a partnership from the beginning and I think a lot of you know distributors and this is why you know we draw such a hard line between distribution and marketplace. I think a marketplace is fundamentally different and it starts with a belief in the power of the partner as a true and again I keep using the word, but it's a partnership.
Speaker 2:We share Pax8 with all of our partners here. They're not just something for us to sell through, and one of the things that I love is they're really the controlling factor here and if they are successful, we don't actually have to sell anything, we don't have to push anything, they're just going to grow, they're going to get more customers, they're going to grow more business and we get to come along for the ride. And so that has really been our obsession and it's in our DNA from the beginning, is thinking through them first, whether that is that's why we built the academy with the coaching and the courses and the peer groups, that's why we have professional services or support or any of those other motions.
Speaker 1:So the thing I'm sort of fascinated when it comes to because I'm a tech nerd at heart and I run a channel podcast I'm obviously a channel nerd. One of the things I think is amazing about what's about to happen to the channel economy is, if I'm an end user, I'm an SMB business, I can implement AI myself. I can go and work out how to do it, but I'm just learning from how I've done it. I think the channel is so uniquely placed, which is, if I'm a partner and I sell to legal firms, that's my ICP. I can take the learning from one legal firm and apply it to the next, and apply it to the next, and apply it to the next, and what that allows the MSP to do is be uniquely placed to understand that data and that value. To me, that means you've got to be extremely bullish that I think MSPs are about to grow.
Speaker 2:Oh, unquestionably, they are perfectly positioned here, and you know, there's a couple things you hit on there too, where this technological revolution is different than everything we've seen before, because historically, technology was expensive, it took a lot of people, it took a lot of servers, took all this, this power, and so it always started at the enterprise, and they would get a 10-year head start and then eventually would trickle down to the smb. In this case, we flipped the model because ai is emerging so quickly and the cost burden is no longer there. So now it's about innovation and it's about ideas, and nobody is more innovative than small business, and so it's actually going to start at the bottom and push its way up. Enterprise is going to be the laggards in this move.
Speaker 1:And well, I think it's for a couple of reasons. Not only is there no cost prohibit, it's not cost prohibitive. Smbs are agile. They are. We have singular people who can make decisions for the whole business. You can be the most agile possible enterprise company. You can't turn an oil tanker around in a second If an SMB goes. I've put 20 minutes of research in. We're going full agentics let's work out how to do it. That's a decision I can make today, exactly.
Speaker 2:And you think the last time that something was close to this was, I think, maybe the app revolution with the app store and things like that. But even then you had to have a developer or two to go create that app. Now, with things like Cursor and some of the other AI technology, you don't even need a developer. It truly is the spark, the idea of economy. Come with that first, and then everything else flows after that.
Speaker 1:So part of being in your position, obsessing about partner performance and partner value, is incentivizing and driving the right behavior. Sometimes I feel in the channel. You're almost a bit of a parent. You've got to tell your child what they should do and shouldn't do and in the long run that will work out why you are, hopefully, ultimately correct. I'm six months into fatherhood, so I'm not quite at that stage yet. Um, talk to me. Talk me through what you're doing from a program perspective to help guide partners forward yes, we launched the voyager alliance last year and so you know it's fun.
Speaker 2:We've won best partner program I think just about every show I've ever been at in the last eight years and voyager alliance was really the first time we launched an official one and what it really was designed to do was to start to map out and sort of tier education, enablement and service levels so that we were delivering the right lever for each stage of the growth for the partner. Now, that's just kind of what we launched last year, and so this year we've already been busy, which is a really cool program where now we're helping our partners broker marketing relationships with professional sports teams and entertainment companies so they can get their brand on stadium walls and on jumbotrons and help them elevate their brand, find new customers, expand their reach. We then you know the academies we've talked through is just so important that we launch tiered pricing to make it even easier for all of our partners to engage in academy and develop their business and grow through that. We've got some amazing stuff coming for support later this year. And then the big announcement this week is I'm super excited we're launching our first rewards program as an extension of Voyager Alliance.
Speaker 2:And so with Voyager Alliance rewards, we're going to start to reward partners every single month with new points based both on their tier and also based on adding licenses. And then we've got this really exciting rewards catalog we're building out where they can exchange those points for rebates and discounts and other sorts of exclusive offers. So think of things like discounts off of new vendors or professional services, discounts off Academy, and I think part of the reason for this is, again, everything about us is about helping our partners grow and develop, but one of the challenges at Pax8 is we offer so much there's just so many things that not everything is right for every partner, and so these rewards points actually give the partners the ability to start to customize their own Pax8 experience by driving the investment from us into the areas that are most meaningful to them.
Speaker 1:This feels like a really big swing to take. Again, I think I'm sort of fascinated. Pax8, is, I feel, so unique, where you're doing things that vendors very often won't do, let alone someone who's not in the vendor space? How did you come to that decision to be like, oh, we're going to go and do something that no one else has ever done? How did?
Speaker 2:you come to that decision to be like, oh, we're going to go and do something that no one else has ever done. You know, I think that one of our powers is, we've never asked ourselves a whole lot what everybody else is doing, so we're never sort of caught up and worried about what precedent has been set. It starts by just asking partners what they like, and when we look at them, they find things like credit card points compelling. They love to use those sort of things, they love to invest in their business, and so then let's meet them where they're at and start to connect with them in a way that is familiar but also incentivizing to them.
Speaker 1:I had Rob Ray on the podcast a few months ago. It was an excellent episode and he was talking about the amount of partner feedback that he gets and I think I want to get this right. I think he said in the last 12 months he's probably met about 3,500 partners, which to me is mind-blowing. How does that partner feedback? Why is partner feedback one so important? And two, how do you consistently take action to really use and take that?
Speaker 2:feedback Great question. So I think that there's sort of the how do we get it, how do we use it, and then how do we provide the feedback back? So you know it's important for us to be able to reach all of our partners, and so this is what's been important to us. You know, the large partners are important, but so are our smaller partners. They all fit in this ecosystem and paint this tapestry that is so important to Pax8. So important to Pax8. And so we have a number of ways. One certainly is Rob Ray and his team. Nobody is.
Speaker 2:We have the biggest channel team and the biggest outreach of anybody out there. They're on the road. We have somebody on the road probably every day, going someplace globally, connecting with partners, having those conversations. And you know much like Rob, you know, and the rest of his team. Our channel team is not just about going up there and presenting and then going and hiding in the room. They are with partners, they are engaging, they're asking conversations and think how they support.
Speaker 2:We have an amazing group of account managers that build relationships with their partners and we have direct feeds and ways for them to submit all that feedback. And I track all of that all the way up into my team where we can start to action around that. I have the partner advisory councils, and now I've got about 15 of these running globally where we're talking to our partners on a regular basis, soliciting feedback, sharing our ideas, and it's pretty direct. That's exactly what we like. And then we also have the partner voice community, which I'm inviting everybody at Beyond to sign up for, which is more of an ad hoc survey and a way for everybody to participate, and so all that feedback starts to get pulled in. We start to look for trends, we start to look for commonalities. It influences the product roadmap, the vendors we're going to sell, and it influences the features that we build inside the marketplace, as well as how I build enablement.
Speaker 1:No, it's so funny, both as my job as VP of revenue at Chanix, but also on this podcast. I speak to lots of program leaders and I I sometimes laugh because I'd be like when's the last time you spoke to a partner, or how often, and they'll be like oh yeah, four months ago. Or we have a biannual partner advisory council and I'm like that's such slow rate of change. Right like it's, it's an awful mechanism.
Speaker 2:I speak to at least one, if not two to three, partners a week yeah, and based on that feedback, I imagine.
Speaker 1:Can you give me an example of where a partner gave a feedback and you're like oh, how did we miss this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it actually can go back to the PSA integrations and sort of how those things are interacting and how we're working through those. I think that one of the earliest that was actually my first role at PacState was building out some PSA feedback, and I sort of assumed that they wanted me to push all of our pricing over into their system, only to realize that they actually want to be much more selective about that, and so that was something we could pull back and really kind of tailor and customize that. You know it was the other big one that came from the academy, where we were teaching a ton of technical content. All of our educational events were technology focused, and partners continued to come to us and tell us that they needed more. They needed help on the business before they could even get to the technology question, and so that's when we went and we acquired C-Level Operations, who, rex Frank and team basically wrote the book on managed services in the Americas, and so we brought them in. That's why we built the academy.
Speaker 1:And sometimes business is overcomplicated. I sort of hate the word strategy because I think strategies are a very overblown concept, like getting feedback from the people that you serve and then actioning. The feedback seems so simple and yet so many people really struggle to take action. How do you build a process or a culture that forces the team to go and ask the tough questions and and really find whether the sore spots and the bruises are and then take action against it?
Speaker 2:well, I think you know part of that is, you know, just structurally, the fact that we have an questions and really find where the sore spots and the bruises are and then take action against it. Well, I think you know part of that is you know, just structurally, the fact that we have an experienced organization, that is our primary accountability is to be the voice of the partners within. You know and this is one of the other big announcements for this week that I'm very excited about Rob Ray, who has been our CVP of community and ecosystems for the last several years, has just accepted the additional responsibility to lead my partner experience organization and there's simply nobody better no, rob.
Speaker 1:I was blown away when I both had the prep call with rob ahead of the podcast and and and then on the podcast himself. You could just see the passion for one driving smb, I think as a as an institution, but also just a proper channel evangelist really wanted to understand how to make partners successful.
Speaker 2:Right, and so now we've shrunk the gap where now Rob has clearly been the expert on what partners need and he is the voice of the channel and he has the best instincts out there and talks to, to your point, thousands of partners a year. He now owns the accountability to steer all of our enablement programs, and so that's all flowing together and I'm really excited to see what Rob can build.
Speaker 1:And maybe one last one on enablement, where I'm sort of fascinated by MSPs. I think it's very I think the word is funny that there is billions and billions of dollars rolling through businesses that have sometimes no salesperson, no marketing person, a couple of engineers who are really driving a lot of value, but that really puts them in a complicated position to understand how to scale. We very often see MSPs hit a sort of revenue ceiling where they're not able to break through. If you were to talk to the community, to the MSPs, to say what's your piece of advice that would allow them to sort of break through that threshold and continue to scale?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think I mean actually, in the risk of being topical, I think artificial intelligence is going to have some meaningful impact here. I mean, certainly optimizing the time they're spending operationally with their engineers is going to allow them to focus in those other areas. I saw some amazing agents right now that are handling lead gen in some of the responses so they can start to elevate their game. So I think some of it is also just recognizing the skill set. But I think the biggest piece of advice would be to talk to experts and recognize, be comfortable reaching out for some help, and this is actually one of the areas that we help a lot of partners through the academy and the one-on-one coaching. So we've got over 30 coaches that are doing one-on-one courses. In fact, we have weekly coaching sessions. We have two or three of them that are specialized in sales and not just general sales. They were actually head of sales at MSPs large MSPs. They know the market, they know the channel. They can help walk through that entire process.
Speaker 1:So AI is both going to be the revenue opportunity to allow partners to get to the next level. However, there is also there that we can broaden the sort of base in terms of their experience, and those two things together, you feel that's going to drive 100% awesome. Craig, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been awesome today Amazing. Thank you, alex, appreciate you.