Creative Direction and Brand Development
Silverline
When Michael started with Silverline, the company had fewer than 70 employees. At its peak, Silverline had over 550 employees across four continents. As Silverline’s presence in the Salesforce ecosystem grew, the company received numerous awards and experienced consistent year-over-year growth. Initially recognized for its expertise in the Financial Services and Healthcare industries, as well as Salesforce Managed Services, Silverline expanded into the Media and Entertainment industry. By the end of 2023, Silverline was acquired by Mphasis for over $132 million. The work showcased below is organized into three key areas where Michael had the most impact at Silverline—Go-To-Market Strategy, Brand Development, and Company Culture—and provides an overview of how he contributed to scaling and growing Silverline’s business and enhancing employee experiences.
Go To Market
Michael collaborated with sales leadership and account executives to develop compelling sales presentations and proposals, while also leading the creative direction for multi-channel marketing campaigns, Silverline's online and public visual identity, advertising, and industry events.
Michael’s templates have been use to garner more than $350 million in sales. Verticals had their own templates with preformatted slides to help teams generate professional and on-brand presentations.
Templates were easy to customize and offered varieties of page layouts, sample slides, and libraries (such as icons and images).
Design consistency between sales offerings were key to helping grow and scale sales processes.
As new offerings became available in Silverline's industries, their designs were matched and incorporated into existing offerings and bundles.
Assets for use in the deck templates were leveraged across the company. Above is the company methodology that was used in the sales and delivery processes.
Requests were often made for visuals that were custom to a project or a client. After creation, and where possible, these visuals would be genericized for easy customizing and leveraging in other initiatives.
Printed and digital data sheets were excellent assets to use in marketing campaigns, sales calls, and on-site visits.
Email templates in brand colors and were easily customizable and compatible with Silverline's internal Salesforce org. They offered in-depth insight into customers, blog subscribers, and potential opportunities.
Silverline constantly developed white papers and ebooks to reach new customers and to increase their visibility in the marketplace.
Ebooks were launched with an integrated marketing campaign that included social media, paid advertising, blog postings, and gated download portals.
For an in-depth look at some print and ebook samples click the image above.
Communication documents highlighting Silverline's key value as a partner were critical to establishing their place in the ecosystem and with Salesforce.
Templates for case studies and win stories were designed to be flexible and to accommodate various design elements such as quotations, screenshots, and logos.
Most Silverline events had designed elements like custom key art, presentation templates, on-site event signage and collateral, swag, and images generated for social media, advertising, and blogs.
Silverline events often had an exciting venue as a back drop – in the example above, attendees also got to attend the US Open in New York City.
Silverline events were key ways in which the sales team engaged with current and potential clients.While at Silverline Michael designed more than 300 events.
The biggest event of the year for Silverline was Salesforce's Dreamforce conference. Click the image above for an in-depth look at Silverline's Dreamforce 2023 campaign and the process used to develop it.
At Dreamforce 2019, Silverline opted to rent an off-site venue to hold events and client meetings. The venue was branded the "Silverline Oasis".
In some years, Silverline would purchase a sponsorship at Dreamforce that included a booth footprint. In order to stand out, Silverline often employed bright and less "corporate" visuals.
Silverline took a retro-pixelated art approach for their Dreamforce footprint in 2018.
A superhero-themed approach for Silverline's Dreamforce footprint in 2017.
Custom visuals created for a seven panel advertisement on LinkedIn.
The majority of Silverline's advertisements performed well with much higher engagement than typical industry ads.
Ciick through rates for Silverline's advertisements were 2x-3x higher than average rates .
A 3-D Client Journey Map tracked how a client would travel through Silverline and what to expect along the way. This visual was critical for Silverline's CEO to communicate how he envisioned the client's experience and where the company had room to grow and develop.
Discovery and delivery outputs were designed to make knowledge transfer and inter-company communications clear and easy to follow.
Experience maps were critical to client and project implementation success.
Capabilities maps tailored to a client's specific goals and needs.
Brand Steward
As Silverline's brand steward, Michael drove internal brand adoption by creating and managing guidelines, presentation templates, tools, and libraries. He leveraged the brand to lead company-wide initiatives and training programs, ensuring consistent brand engagement across all employees. Externally, Michael boosted Silverline’s brand recognition by standardizing the visual identity across email campaigns, social media, websites, advertising, and partner portals.
The Silverline Identity Book served as the brand bible internally for employees and externally for partners and vendors.
The Identity Book provided logo files, color values, visual styles, about us boilerplates, vision statements, and more.
Structured around industry verticals, Silverline wanted each vertical to have a distinctive look. Sub-logos for each one were generated and brand colors were assigned to and give a unique look that tied back to Silverline's brand.
Directly in the G-Suite, employees were able to create presentations based off of industry templates.
The templates had preformatted slides with visual assets such as logos, tables, images, backgrounds, dividers, etc.
Generating beautiful and on-brand timelines and leveraging screenshots became simple and easy to do with the templates.
Libraries of slides for employees to use were created and once a library slide was used, it could be updated to the latest version with the click of a button.
The slide libraries contained versions of each of the slides based on the service or vertical. Library slides had different color and logo schemes that matched their industry and/or service.
Relevant documents such as employee bios were standardized and leveraged across the the industries.
Libraries were generated so that employees could customize their decks and presentations with ease.
Providing a library of poses and reactions of Silverline' s mascot helped increase Sunny's recognition and use in corporate endeavors.
Headshots were standardized and as new employees were hired, photos were taken using light plots from the original sessions. This helped to ensure consistency even if employees were hired years apart.
The Silverline brand was extended to pop-up banners for use at conferences and on-site events.
Silverline's initial website needed to be overhauled – it no longer represented the skill and breadth of the company. A new website leveraging the brand was built.
As Silverline grew, the new website also needed to grow in versatility and functionality. Above is a page comp for new event/landing pages that were custom built for Silverline.
A comp illustrating additionally functionality and options for the Silverline website.
The holidays were always a great opportunity to stretch the brand and flex some creative muscles. This particular year, clients received branded mugs, boxed chocolate bombs, and a holiday card.
From animated emails to printed cards Silverline liked to experiment at holiday time with different formats and styles.
To help with brand adoption and overall presentation quality, Michael held periodic classes where he would walk through tips and tricks for using branded resources and the tools that Silverline provided (like the G-Suite).
These Creative Sessions allowed Michael to reach the increasing number of Silverline employees and contractors and to keep them on-brand while enabling them to create compelling content and presentations.
The brand was leveraged in social media posts such as the Day in the Life series (highlighting current employees and their work), social awareness campaigns, Human Resources initiatives, and more.
Printed and digital letterhead and business card templates were generated. Employees could access Silverline letterhead and other templates inside of the G-Suite.
Silverline had a revolving inventory of swag items for client gifts, employee awards, and other corporate lifts.
Company Culture
Michael led company-wide knowledge sessions and taught new hires about the brand during monthly onboarding sessions. He also collaborated with senior management on corporate communications, streamlining company meetings and recurring events by creating templated content and materials for greater agility. By bringing elements of the brand to life—such as Sunny (the company mascot), the Core Values, and HR wellness initiatives—he helped enrich the company culture and enhance the overall employee experience.
Michael met monthly with new hires to teach an onboarding session where they were introduced to the Silverline brand and the myriads of templates and tools available to them.
To highlight Silverline's company values and to encourage adoption and embodiment, Silverline tasked Michael with creating visual representations of Silverline's seven core values.
Each of the values got their own travel-themed poster which was displayed at Silverline offices around the globe. Quarterly awards were also given to employee-nominated recipients.
Silverline's CEO hosted open monthly office-hours. Employee anniversaries were celebrated, new hires were introduced, and client wins and company news were shared.
A three dimensional employee map helped clarify a Silverliner's journey at the company.
In 2019, Silverline celebrated their 10th Anniversary summit in Santa Fe, NM. Click the image above to see an in-depth look at the event.
As the company grew, meeting in person became challenging and the Summit went to an online format. Each Summit had a distinctive theme and format to distinguish it from the rest.
Silverline In Sync , a quarterly company meeting, fostered community and culture at Silverline. The presentations for these were templated to make the events easier to create.
The quarterly All Hands Meeting connected employees with each other. This example had a game show theme during which employees competed with each other in an online Kahoot game.
Designs for Silverline's holiday party at the Nat Geo Encounter in Times Square. Employees received ceramic coasters (replicating the key art of the invite) and "crew" sweatshirts.
Michael created Sunny, the company mascot. Initially he was flat and simple, but over time limbs gained a three-dimensional look and expressions gained more depth and emotion.
Sunny resonated with employees and he quickly became the face of most internal and Human Resources initiatives.
An email from HR's automated onboarding process.
To encourage friendly competition and overall employee wellness, HR held annual challenges to encourage employees to get outdoors and exercise.
Sunny's humor inspired Silverine's employees to log thousands of hours doing exercise and self care.
Sunny even became the face of the Silverline Olympics, an internal initiative that encouraged employee teams to compete in exercise events.
Sunny was leveraged to congratulate employees on their work anniversaries.
During the pandemic, Silverline bolstered company morale by sending a Sunny-themed Work/Play box filled with swag like sticker sheets, mugs, pens, fidget gadgets, and more.
The Silverline brand was extended for events like Gay Pride and HR initiatives such as DIBS (Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Silverline), Cares (a charity arm), and Allies (an ally group).