Q&A with Steve Casey, Creative Director
You might have noticed that Certinia.com has been completely redesigned and the content refreshed. In this blog post, I want to bring to the forefront, Steve Casey, our new Creative Director, who has been leading this charge the past few months! And he’s just gotten started. Read more to learn more about Steve, our new tagline’s origination and what he’s got next on the agenda.
1) Hi Steve, when did you join Certinia.com and what attracted you about this opportunity?
Last fall, Tom Brennan called me to say that he has this great job and needed a guy like me. I owned my own agency and wasn’t looking, but I agreed to keep an eye out for him. And we agreed to a limited contract to help with Dreamforce 2013. During the build up, I got to meet the team, work side-by-side through some fast moving issues, and see how this dynamic team pulled off a humongous show — one that came off without a hitch. And they had fun doing it and all seemed to like and respect each other.
So after things quieted down, I went back to my agency— but I kinda missed the people and the energy. So I called Tom up in December and told him I found his guy. I joined full-time in January 2014.
2) The company recently made a big splash entering the cloud ERP market with a new website, tagline and product messaging. As one of the brains behind this launch, can you tell us what ERP at Customer Speed means to you personally?
Certinia.com had the foresight to build an ERP system on a CRM engine. So you get the promise of ERP, which is operational efficiency, and the promise of a CRM platform, which offers better collaboration and visibility. ERP systems are built to make information systems of record flow smoothly across departments — that’s table stakes. But when you eliminate mundane transactions, the remainder of an employee’s day is split between being strategic or troubleshooting — both of which need collaboration and visibility — something systems of engagement (CRMs) are really good at.
You can look at the tagline, ERP at Customer Speed, from either end. The back office folks get all the operational efficiency they need with the added bonus of employee productivity and collaboration. Or you could see it from the perspective of future-focused leaders that has pushed their system of engagement as far as it can go to offer air cover over a less than optimal business process.
So to me, ERP at Customer Speed means your non-sales systems and employees serve the end customer indirectly and directly — growing customer loyalty by getting the job done in the background, and when they are seen, being as sharp as your sales and support team.
3) What do you want people to feel and get out of when they visit financialforce.com?
When someone visits our site, landing pages or any of our digital outposts, I’d like them to feel that they’ve found a vibrant, energetic company that has terrific momentum. And that our momentum was earned on building solutions that are unique, relevant and in high demand because we got it right.
What I’d like them to say to themselves is… “Here’s an offer I can take action on that’ll help me solve my problem. And it looks to be from a proven company that has a unique perspective.” And as they take their next step, if they feel that we’d be fun, earnest and honest to work with, that would be cool too.
4) What is your creative vision for the company the rest of the year?
Now that we are feeling good about the look of the logo, the brand and the messaging behind ERP at Customer Speed we’re applying it across the company. We’ve taking an inside-out approach. We started with sales kick off powerpoint decks, then we applied the brand to the website. Currently, we’re redoing the landing pages and e-mails. Next is to provide the brand assets necessary to allow people to update their corporate assets. I’m on that now, I promise.
The next big thing for marketing is to prove our promise. And that’s already starting to happen — in ERP, it takes time to make the sale, deploy, and then and get the happy customer to speak on our behalf. But if all goes well, we will be poised to take advantage of customer wins over the spring and summer — going into Dreamforce with strong proof points to our promise.
