Tips to Turn Client Feedback into Revenue with Donti Twine

Changes in technology, along with increasing market shifts and the pace of business, make it even more important to get closer to customers and obtain a deeper understanding of their needs has become critical for business actions and success.

Any organization can gather customer feedback, but turning that feedback into actionable plans that are impactful to your customer’s success will ultimately contribute to directly driving revenue for your organization.

In this session with Donti Twine, Director of Sales at Kaseya, you will learn:

• Data collection approaches
• How to improve customer satisfaction
• How to boost loyalty and revenue

[Transcript] Tips to Turn Client Feedback into Revenue

Although transcriptions are generally very accurate, just a friendly reminder that they could sometimes be incomplete or contain errors due to unclear audio or transcription inaccuracies.

Gary Amaral 

Hi everyone, welcome back, that was a short break, but we are super excited to be joined by Dante Twine, Director of Sales at Kaseya, who has a bunch of tips on how to turn client feedback into revenue. Is that is that accurate, Donti?

Donti Twine

That is.

Gary Amaral

We’re excited to have you here, so excited to learn more about this. I’m gonna throw it over to Donti, he’s got 10 minutes to wow us, and then hopefully, we have some awesome questions at the end. Feel free to jump in.

Donti Twine

All right, well again, my name is Donti Twine; I’m over with Kaseya. An interesting fact that I found very intriguing is that businesses that prioritize customer sat are 60% more profitable than those that don’t. 

Why that’s important is in driving your profits. If you lose sight of your customers, in essence, you start to have value leakage, and what that value leakage does is it starts to impact not only your brand but the way your company culture is, and impacts your end customers as well. So having this focus and prioritization on Customer Sat is very important.

So let’s dig in; how did I come up with this? When I started looking at all the different products and things that we work on in the sales org, I saw the same challenges from reps. That was converting unhappy customers into profitable customers, and they were dealing with issues about negative feedback, whether on social media, peer groups, or things like that. 

This affected the cross-sell and upsell activity; they had an inability to really capture, analyze and interpret the feedback that they were getting back from customers and create that into meaningful insights that could help drive the business forward.

Then finally, they just were unable to take that feedback after the analysis and then create an action plan based off of that. Make a decision and take action based off of that decision, and a lot of companies struggle with this.

So as we work through understanding how to understand the customer feedback and how to leverage it to address your upsells and cross-sell opportunities, this will help you to tailor your services based on your customer feedback. 

So in practice, there are a couple of different areas that we like to focus on.

The first one is to listen to your customers. Profit and customer satisfaction co-exist, and it’s very important that people understand that.

Another big part that a lot of people don’t really pay attention to is prioritizing your company culture. A business is like a three-legged stool; you’ve got your cash, your culture, and your customers. If one of those legs becomes weak, the entire business becomes weak. 

So as you start to look through going into practice on this, it’s leveraging the data collection strategies and really enhancing your customer experience. Enhancing overall experience results and higher revenue. 

So what does that mean? Well, that means you should continue to focus on customer acquisition. Remember that without customers, there are no profits, so when trying to drive profits, businesses should focus on customer acquisition.

It seems very simple, but a lot of people get very timid, or they think, ‘Hey, we got a good book.’ They don’t spend enough time in the market trying to draw value to their customers to help them ensure that there’s long-term success, and that comes back to fostering customer loyalty, improving retention, and having a positive impact on revenue.

Well, to me, this screams customer lifetime value. Most people don’t learn about the customer lifetime value and sync to maximize retention and long-term value over short-term profits. So yeah, this is great; we’re getting profits now, but what about the long term? What’s the strategy long term to create that loyalty?

Lastly, how and why are customers loyal to your business, and why are they not? Don’t let profit-seeking threaten the core reasons for them to shop around on you. Understand why they are loyal, and a lot of people miss that; they just think, ‘Oh yeah, they love us,’ but why? Why do they love us? Why do they love the service offering that you have? 

Let’s dig in a little bit more into some of the actual tips. So data collection and analysis, right?

The last time I was on Hot Takes, I was talking about data-driven sales strategies. I’m a big data guy, and I moved into sales probably ten years ago, but I came from a very technical spot where data was everything, and that data collection approach was multi-threaded. So you’ve got surveys, you’ve got social media monitoring, you’ve got sales analytics tools, you have closed won, and closed lost notes. 

Everything of this nature helps you to be more informed of the better decisions to improve that customer loyalty. Now once you get that, you want to identify trends in the data. 

So many times, you’ll spend all the time trying to tweak something for one customer that then impact the rest of your customers, and while you made that one customer happy, you’re losing the loyalty of all the other customers, resulting in lower levels of customer happiness, loyalty, and repeat business. 

So you want to focus on boosting loyalty, revenue, and sales by implementing strategies that you find by creating actionable steps and then tailoring your offering to increase the revenue through those expanded sales opportunities. Many times what people focus on is, we got the customer in, but why did you get the customer in? What makes it important to them to continue to move forward? 

So a key takeaway that I have is customer satisfaction is not just about meeting expectations; it’s about exceeding them and creating a more memorable experience. A lot of areas that I’ve seen, because I used to be the buyer before I moved into sales, is that businesses don’t really define their purpose. 

So to me, businesses have one primary reason, they should exist for the betterment of society. So one of the best ways to keep your business healthy is to ensure that the purpose of the business is well-defined and focuses on your customers and the longevity of the business profits, both for your customers and for your business. 

By defining a purpose and defining a well-balanced strategic strategy, you’ll go a long way. 

Next is always building a partnership with your customers; they’re more than just customers, they are virtually working through you to adhere to some of the things they need, but you need that partnership to create that happiness. Then when you get more highly satisfied customers, you just generate more revenue.

The last piece is to stay focused on your ‘why.’ Why are you creating this service or this product? Stay focused on those core business purpose that allows you to deliver that product and service in a way that customers can adapt and makes things easy for them.

And then, lastly, think about sustainable profits over the lifetime of the customer. What’s the lifetime value of the customer, and how do I create sustainable profits over the lifetime of that customer by either offering new services, tweaking services based off of the feedback that you have, and the trends that you’re seeing from the data, and the data allows you to make changes relatively quickly so that you can keep up with market trends and things of that nature.

So organizations that typically are in a downmarket when they have customer loyalty those customers typically will support those businesses during the downmarket because there has been so much focus on that customer sat, ensuring that those customers and partners are successful in your business. 

I’ll open up for any questions.

Gary Amaral

Thanks so much; super, super insightful. I have a couple of questions. I guess my biggest one is based on a preconceived notion, which is, to me, historically, the best and the worst source of customer feedback or prospect feedback are the sales org and the CS org. 

Both of those are predisposed to collection challenges and all kinds of biases, but most notably, recency vibes, like a big deal, you know, features missing or whatever, and that becomes the focus.

One, do you agree with that, and two, how do you overcome some of those challenges?

Donti Twine

I think a lot of that is culture. When you build your company into a culture of constant data collection and giving them a caveat to where you can grab that data and build metrics to where you’re measuring daily, if you lost a deal or if you win to deal or you’re scheduling, here at Kaseya, what we do is we schedule ‘pulse checks.’ 

So all the executives of different products meet with customers to check their pulse and see what’s working, what’s not working, and things of that nature, and it’s a requirement for all the reps to schedule at least three or four a month. 

So you make things mandatory, you track it on the metrics every day and make sure that you’re getting this information, you build reports, and this has to be done daily. It can’t be done once a week, once a month, or anything like that because now you don’t know when you get the gap in the data. 

But when you build it into the culture that that feedback mechanism is so important and that you’re doing things for the masses. Yeah, you’re going to have those one-offs, but those ones else will derail the rest of your revenue that you can sync from the rest of the customer base because of that one deal, that yeah, while it’s a large deal, and to me I rather have ten deals that equal that one large deal because then I have ten customers that I can grow with versus that one.

Gary Amaral

Right, yeah, it’s super true. Obviously, the underlying thesis here is happy customers have a higher LTV, they’re stickier, they’re going to pay more, all that kind of stuff. Pragmatically though, even from just enticing the operators in the business to do the right thing, these ‘pulse checks,’ these conversations, these are like real-time revenue expansion opportunities.

Donti Twine

Right, because normally, what you’re hearing is not only feedback about the current product, but it also gives you a chance to understand what other problems and the impacts those problems make.

Where now, you can listen in, and you could potentially have other opportunities while they may be bad-mouthing or not happy about this one thing, but you find four or five other areas that they never knew about that you can expose to them and see if there’s a way to help there.

So it gives you some time to collect feedback, whether it’s improvements on a product or things of that nature, but it also gives you a chance to listen in into what else they’re dealing with, what other market trends are happening and pivoting quickly, instead of waiting six to nine months and then you’re behind a ball, and now they’re shopping.

Gary Amaral

So, you made the assertion that it’s got to be like part of the culture, it’s got to be org-wide, and for me, I’m just thinking about the practical elements of this and, for sure, product, sales, marketing, CS, everybody has to be on the same page for this feedback loop to kind of be a revenue driver. 

For companies that are maybe earlier on, or maybe they’re even bigger, more mature companies, but they haven’t necessarily done this well, what are some tips or tricks that you might have for getting people on this path?

Donti Twine

Yeah, the first thing is identifying the top metrics that you want to track on a daily basis, and it’s not to belittle anybody when the metrics aren’t hit.

It’s more about, “Hey, these are the metrics that we feel are important to draw the business forward, and after we review it, what does this data mean? Are we seeing something that’s happening over and over and over, a common theme that we need to really look at and say, ‘Oh, we’ve heard this from 25 customers out of the 50 we’ve talked to, this may be a common theme’.” 

It’s also about just understanding, ‘Well if we do this, how does it affect the rest of the group?’ So it’s really establishing just some core metrics, and even when starting at Kaseya, it was probably 200 people at the company, it’s probably over 5,000 now, but when we started at the organization, we did some very simple data collection that allowed us to understand what was going on. 

A lot of it was ‘Why did we win? Why did we lose?’ and then when we meet with a customer, what are they saying, and the reason why we did it at an executive level rather than at a rep level because a rep wants to do it to close the deal, the execs want to do it too to improve long-lasting profits for the org, as well as for their customers and partners.

The executive can affect some change, but they can also look at this as a strategy for when they’re talking to their investors or their board to make sure, ‘Hey, this is what we’re hearing,’ and ‘If this is our core responsibility to the marketplace, this is the purpose of why we’re here, then this is where we need to start shifting to.’ 

It allows you to make those decisions and say, ‘Well, no, is this part of our core purpose or not?’ but that core purpose and getting those metrics to understand how you measure back to that core purpose is important.

Gary Amaral

Awesome, thank you so much, Donti; that was really insightful. I assume if people want to learn more about Kaseya, Kaseya.com is the place to go. If folks want to get to know you a little bit better, pick your brain, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you? 

Donti Twine

They can always LinkedIn me, Donti Twine, on LinkedIn, and I’m always happy to talk to people. The company I worked for, Kaseya, you can look for me on LinkedIn or find Kaseya, and I’m always happy to help; any insights or anything I could provide, I’m always happy to help.

Gary Amaral

Perfect, thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for listening; thank you for being part of this session.