Huntress makes customer truth part of every decision

Building a program people trust

Customer feedback only works if people believe it.

For Dustin Ray, head of competitive and market intelligence at Huntress, that meant finding a partner capable of conducting thoughtful interviews with cybersecurity buyers—and then delivering insights the business could trust.

"The worst thing that could happen is if I don't get good interviews back," Dustin said. "That would kill the program."

But interview quality wasn't the only challenge.

Before partnering with Clozd, Dustin had tried running win-loss programs internally. Recruiting interviewees, scheduling conversations, conducting interviews, and analyzing the results required significant time and resources. 

And because those efforts only happened once or twice a year, the findings were often outdated before the organization had a chance to act on them.

"It typically resulted in getting just a snapshot in time," Dustin said. "What I wanted was a program where we could establish a baseline and then measure ourselves against that baseline as we moved forward."

Running interviews internally also made it difficult to get candid feedback.

"It's really tough to call someone who turned you down and ask them to talk about it," he said.

Instead of chasing periodic snapshots, Huntress wanted a continuous stream of customer truth—one they could use to monitor trends and guide decisions across the business.

Just as important, they needed a partner who understood cybersecurity.

"Clozd has a deep bench of people who can do interviews for this industry," Dustin said. "Knowing there's knowledge throughout the company of the cybersecurity space makes a big difference."

That confidence extended well beyond the interviews themselves.

"The support is phenomenal," Dustin said. "It's that human element that goes a long way. I'm not just buying a SaaS tool. I'm buying something that's having a massive impact on decisions being made at a company that’s growing very quickly."

Turning continual feedback into better decisions

Collecting customer feedback was never the end goal.

Driving change was.

"If you do a snapshot in time, that information is already outdated by the time you get it back and it’s harder to understand exactly what you need to do," Dustin said. "But by capturing feedback continuously, we can understand how those decision drivers are changing, and we can proactively address problems—so we’re really able to drive change.”

That continuous feedback loop quickly began shaping decisions across Huntress.

On the product side, interviews uncovered a surprisingly simple issue: Prospects wanted Huntress to automate an approval process rather than requiring manual action.

"It was an easy thing to address one of our major loss reasons," Dustin said. "That really drove what our product team was doing."

Sales uncovered a different opportunity.

Many prospects didn't understand how Huntress’ personalized solutions stood out against popular off-the-shelf products. Armed with that feedback, the sales enablement team developed new messaging and coaching around those objections.

"We immediately saw a massive increase in our win rates coming from that," Dustin said.

And when interviews revealed that customers were confused by the name of a newly launched product, the marketing team went back and changed it.

"After that, the water wasn't nearly as muddy for our buyers," Dustin said.

Clozd interviews also revealed that customers wanted more ways to contact Huntress' security operations center during critical incidents. That feedback led directly to improvements in the customer experience.

“We realized that we needed to give them more ways to contact us,” Dustin said. “When they’re reaching out, it means that something bad happened and that their business might be having maybe one of its worst days.”

Different teams. Different challenges. One continuous source of customer truth.

Creating a culture of customer truth

As the program matured, customer feedback became part of Huntress' operating rhythm.

"It's completely built into our workflow," Dustin said.

Every week, Huntress shares the latest interview findings across the company through its competitive intelligence digest—giving teams a clear view of why customers are buying, why they're walking away, and where the company needs to improve.

Those insights don't stay in one report.

They flow into product roadmap discussions, business reviews, marketing campaigns, sales coaching, and executive planning.

"Our CEO just told everybody that we need to be reading these," Dustin said. "Our culture at Huntress is very open and transparent, and our leadership team is very keen on learning. They’re constantly quoting Clozd interviews."

Early success helped capture executive buy-in and build that momentum.

“The sales leadership team allowed us to interview any deal we wanted—no restrictions,” Dustin said. “Out of the first 10 lost deals we interviewed, we were able to bring back two of them into the pipeline to close deals that were significant. That really showed them a high level of value, and it helped establish trust for the program.”

Sales managers also discovered that they could use customer feedback to identify coaching opportunities—common reasons they’re losing and how to handle those objections—across individual reps and teams.

“When they combined Clozd insights with the Gong calls and CRM notes, those managers could help their teams succeed,” Dustin said. “It’s increased the effectiveness of our sales team, increased the average deal size, and shortened our deal cycle.”

For Dustin, the ability to give every team the information they need to make better decisions is what separates a successful win-loss program from a collection of interviews.

In one instance, Clozd interviews revealed that prospects were evaluating Huntress against competitors based on a single product rather than the company's broader platform—simply because of how the website directed them.

"I'd been fighting that change for a few weeks," Dustin said. "It was using the data from Clozd that sealed the deal."

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Get to know: Huntress

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, Huntress provides a managed cybersecurity platform that helps organizations detect, investigate, and stop cyber threats before they can cause damage. Built by former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) operators, its AI-assisted platform combines 24/7 human threat hunting with endpoint, identity, and security operations capabilities to protect more than 5 million endpoints and 13 million identities worldwide. Today, thousands of businesses and managed service providers rely on Huntress to strengthen their security posture without the complexity of traditional enterprise tools.

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