We Started Running Our Own Company on Certinia. Here's What Happened
Summary
- Certinia runs its own global business — sales, services estimation, customer success, and finance — on the same platform it sells to customers.
- The internal rollout produced measurable results: 43% faster project kickoffs, 60% faster staffing, and a 50%+ reduction in financial close time.
- Certinia's "Customer Zero" approach means every claim in the customer story is backed by Certinia's own real world operating data, not a hypothetical use case.
Our CEO, CFO, CRO, and CCO put Veda and the Certinia platform through the same test we ask every customer to trust. The results are in a new customer story and video series.
Every software company gets asked the same question eventually: do you use your own product?
At Certinia, we run our entire global business — sales, services estimation, customer success, and core accounting — on the Certinia platform.
Not as a pilot. Not as a demo environment. As the system of record for how Certinia operates day to day.
To showcase the impact it’s had on our business, we just published a new success story along with video interviews with the executives who led the work: CEO DJ Paoni, CRO John Tully, CCO Todd Kisaberth, and CFO Erin Sawyer.
Here's what stood out.
Faster Kickoffs, Fewer Surprises
Kickoffs got faster. By deploying Certinia's Services Estimation internally, CRO John Tully's team pulled resource planning into the sales cycle instead of waiting until after signature.
The result: a 43% reduction in project kickoff time, and estimate-to-actual variance that's now close to zero.
Pro Tips
- Look for vendors who run their own business on their own platform. If a vendor can't show you their own operating data, ask why. Internal proof points are the fastest way to separate a platform that works from one that's still being tested on customers.
- Ask a vendor to show you the number behind the claim, not just the claim. If a platform says it makes teams "faster" or work "easier," ask what that looks like in kickoff days, staffing hours, or close-cycle length. Certinia's own numbers — 43% faster kickoffs, 60% faster staffing, 50%+ faster close — came from tracking those exact figures internally before publishing them.
- Evaluate platforms on connected data, not connected tools. The biggest gains in this story came from sales, delivery, and finance running on one unified record, not from stitching separate systems together.
One System, No Silos
CSMs used to work out of a separate, external customer success platform, disconnected from the delivery data living in Professional Services (PS) Cloud. Then, our CCO Todd Kisaberth's team brought Customer Success (CS) Cloud onto the same native Salesforce environment, connecting customer success directly to the delivery and revenue data PS Cloud already tracked.
Now CSMs and delivery teams see the same information at the same time — support history, revenue models, services status, all of it. Veda AI and Salesforce Agentforce now trigger health checks and draft success plans automatically. Staffing time dropped a whopping 60%.
Numbers You Can Defend
The finance team can defend every number. CFO Erin Sawyer runs global financial management on Certinia Financial Management (FM) Cloud, connecting what's sold, delivered, and billed into a single system. Financial close is down more than 50%. Revenue leakage is gone.
This is how Certinia closes its books, staffs its projects, and forecasts its pipeline, every week.
As our CEO DJ Paoni puts it in the video series: "We could not run Certinia the way we do today without it."
Being Customer Zero means we don't ask you to take a leap of faith on a platform we hope works. We ask you to trust a system we depend on ourselves, for our own margins, our own compliance, and our own growth.
Read the full Certinia Customer Zero story and watch the executive interviews to see how each domain — sales, delivery, and finance — got measurably better.
Want to see what these results could look like for your organization? Request a demo and we'll walk through it.
Frequently Asked Questions