Success Metrics
- Secured 6 earned media placements, with 2 business press placements in Yahoo! Finance and Forbes’ CFO newsletter
- Achieved an estimated 96 million total reach across business and trade publications
- Generated Certinia’s highest website traffic spike of 2025, driving 6,856 direct sessions – a 52.5% increase over the second-highest increase
- Secured approximately $225,000 in earned media value based on comparable paid media (CPM) rates
- Established Certinia’s CFO as thought leader backed by data that appeals to C-Suite-level business press audiences
Background
Certinia is a leading provider of AI-powered Professional Services Automation (PSA) software built natively on Salesforce. The company helps services organizations connect operations across the entire customer lifecycle, from opportunity through renewal, while improving revenue predictability, margins, and resource utilization.
Certinia powers the services operations of more than 1,400 organizations worldwide who rely on the platform to improve project visibility, optimize resources, and drive financial predictability, leading to stronger margins and better client outcomes. The company uses its own AI-powered PS and CS Cloud products, essentially practicing what it preaches. As a result, Certinia achieved a net retention rate (NRR) of over 105% and the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) in company history of +40.
The Challenge
Certinia wanted to elevate its thought leadership beyond the traditional PSA software conversation and break into tier-1 business and CFO-focused media outlets typically reserved for household-name enterprise tech companies.
The challenge was not simply earning coverage. Certinia needed to prove, with credible market evidence, that professional services organizations prioritizing customer success and retention strategies were outperforming their peers financially and operationally.
At the same time, the company needed a differentiated content asset that could:
- Demonstrate executive-level market expertise
- Support ongoing sales and marketing conversations
- Strengthen Certinia’s credibility with finance and enterprise leaders
- Create a repeatable media and thought leadership engine
Market Context
From increasing AI investments driving pressure to prove measurable ROI, to rising energy and data center costs, economic uncertainty drove business decision-making in 2025. This volatility, combined with shifting post-pandemic growth expectations, increased pressure on professional services organizations. These organizations are increasingly expected to deliver predictable revenue, stronger retention, and sustainable long-term growth. Firms increasingly needed predictable revenue streams, stronger customer retention, and long-term growth strategies to maintain investor confidence.
At the same time, conversations around customer success were evolving. Some industry leaders questioned whether dedicated customer success organizations were still necessary, while others doubled down on retention and expansion strategies as sales cycles lengthened.
The Solution
As professional services organizations navigated economic uncertainty, 10Fold and Certinia saw an opportunity to demonstrate how customer success (CS) and net revenue retention (NRR) were becoming increasingly important business indicators for public companies and investors alike.
10Fold led the development of a proprietary research asset and media campaign, the 2025 Public Market Pulse Report, designed to uncover how customer success and NRR correlated with business performance across publicly traded professional services organizations.
The project combined primary and secondary research methodologies, analyzing:
- More than 4,000 quarterly earnings reports
- Over 430 public companies
- Earnings data spanning January 2022 through June 2025
Using AI-powered text and sentiment analysis, the 10Fold team tracked how companies discussed customer success and NRR during earnings calls, then correlated those findings with stock performance before and after earnings announcements.
Just as importantly, 10Fold conducted early journalist feedback sessions with reporters from Forbes and Bloomberg. Those conversations fundamentally reshaped the narrative strategy. Rather than positioning the report as PSA software research, the team reframed it around:
- CFO and board-level business priorities
- Revenue predictability and investor confidence
- Cross-industry adoption trends
- The growing “customer success maturity gap” between leaders and laggards
The updated media strategy paired executive-level business narratives for CFO and business press, in addition to operational and retention-focused narratives for professional services trade media.
This dual-track approach allowed Certinia to speak credibly to both financial executives and operational leaders simultaneously. Leveraging Certinia’s CFO, Erin Sawyer, as the spokesperson provided a unique perspective that resonated with media.
The Results
The campaign succeeded as a data-backed thought leadership driver for financial audiences and became one of Certinia’s most successful thought leadership initiatives of the year.
Key outcomes included:
- Coverage in Forbes CFO, CFO Dive, CFO.com, Yahoo Finance, and additional trade publications. Certinia leveraged partnerships with Diginomica and Enterprise Times
- Two feature-style tier-1 business press placements from interviews with Certinia’s CFO
- A combined reach of approximately 96 million readers
- Certinia’s highest direct website traffic spike of 2025, increasing traffic by 52.5% over the next-highest traffic surge
- Strong internal adoption by Certinia’s sales and executive teams as a sales enablement and board-level communications asset
Perhaps most importantly, the campaign established a repeatable research-to-media framework that positioned Certinia as a credible voice in broader business conversations around customer retention, operational maturity, and predictable growth.
The report also reinforced a key market narrative: organizations aligning customer success, professional services, and revenue retention strategies are increasingly outperforming competitors in both operational performance and investor confidence.
Build a Research-Driven PR Strategy
At 10Fold, we help B2B technology companies transform proprietary insights, customer data, and market research into differentiated thought leadership that drives visibility, credibility, and business impact.
Data is at 10Fold’s core. From our MetricsMatter dashboard and research-driven campaigns to executive thought leadership and integrated content strategies, we help brands own the conversations shaping their industries.
Looking to create your own data-backed assets that drive lead generation? Learn more about 10Fold’s services.