CHANNEL PARTNERS EVOLUTION — Pax8 added four members to its new market development team amid its “convergence” initiative.

Pax8’s Samantha Nelson

The cloud distributor recently hired Samantha Nelson as vice president of channel development, Jessica Maria as vice president of market development, Danielle DeCosta as vendor success manager and Ryan Strouse as program manager. Nelson and Maria will report to Andrew Pryfogle, who is Pax8’s chief market development officer, and Maria will oversee Strouse and DeCosta.

Nelson has contact center experience, having worked at Talkdesk for the last four years.

Maria, DeCosta and Strouse worked with Intelisys alongside Andrew Pryfogle who joined Pax8 last month. Maria directed marketing for the master agent, while Strouse supervised marketing and DeCosta worked with suppliers.

Pax8’s Andrew Pryfogle

“The seven years that I was there with the most formative of my entire career,” Pryfogle told Channel Futures. “And I’m really proud of what we accomplished. Amazing company, amazing group of people, amazing partner community.”

Working for a successful master agent like Intelisys gave Pryfogle a solid baseline for his Pax8 job, where he aims to assist the convergence of the managed service provider (MSP) and telco agent channels. Maria said Intelisys went through the process of transitioning agents from the traditional telecom business model to adding cloud offerings

“We absolutely made that transition. We never ever have conversations with agents anymore asking why they should transition to cloud, or even how,” Maria said. “Now it’s all about, ‘We’ve convinced, and we’re doing it already. Now, we want to move up-market into larger and larger clients or want to be able to tackle new clients or new revenue streams.'”

Now Maria, Pryfogle and their co-workers are a planning to “disrupt and re-imagine the master agency world.”

Pax8’s Jessica Maria

“We think where convergence is happening is that both parties —  both agents and MSP, respectively — are leaving money on the table. We believe those services can cross and converge  between both parties increase bigger opportunities for either agents or MSPs,” Pryfogle said. “We’re committed to enabling partners to sell the way they want to sell in the way customers want to consume.”

Agents commonly hear that they need to become managed services providers, but Pryfogle said MSPs can learn a thing or two from agents. In fact, Pax8 isn’t holding tightly to “MSP” and “agent” labels.

“Partners are partners,” he said.

Trust is one of the biggest…… lessons for all partner types to learn.

“End customers don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I have this business problem. Man, I need to call an MSP to fix that problem, or I need to call a VAR, or  I need to call an agent.’ They’re not asking that question. They’re saying, ‘Who do I trust? Who do I trust to solve this problem for me.’ I think it’s proving that agents have absolutely earned that trust of a lot of customers. In fact, agents have proven they can go up-market even more effectively than many MSP and VARs have. They’re closing bigger and bigger deals,” Pryfogle said.

Pax8 is currently listening to partner and supplier councils to maximize feedback.Partner feedback helped Pax8 revamp its original platform for MSPs, and Pryfogle said feedback will once again play a huge role.

“We haven’t we haven’t yet figured everything out,” he said. “We have some big ideas. We think there’s a very unique opportunity to completely disrupt and reimagine the master agency world more than more than anybody else has done before. That’s very exciting to us.”

Pryfogle and Maria spoke to us at the Channel Partners Evolution conference, where suppliers, MSPs, VARs, agents, distributors and master agents have come to network and learn.

Pax8 landed 60th in the latest Inc. 5000 list. The company reported $42.4 million in revenue last year a 4,820% three-year growth.