As Sarah Hartman steps into her role as CCT’s Director of Marketing, she’s building a marketing function designed to create value for the casino industry it serves.
by CCT
When Sarah Hartman joined CCT in 2025, one of the biggest projects waiting for her was a company-wide rebrand.
There was a new website to build, messaging to rethink, a visual identity to establish and an industry event on the calendar creating a very real deadline for getting it all done.
Sarah got to work.
The rebrand launched. Then the work kept growing.
Over the following year, Sarah helped build out CCT’s marketing team, strengthened the company’s presence at industry events, elevated its annual Connect customer conference and expanded the way CCT tells stories about its customers, its people and the work happening across casino operations.
That progression ultimately led to Sarah’s promotion to Director of Marketing, recognizing a role that had already become much larger in practice.
Recently, CCT Chief Revenue Officer Cliff Unger was asked what he wanted customers to know now that Sarah had been appointed Director of Marketing.
He stopped at the word appointed.
“I would say she earned it,” he said.
Sarah had already been building the team, bringing more intention to CCT’s presence in the industry and taking greater ownership of how marketing supports the business. The title recognized an evolution that was already underway.
Ask Cliff what makes Sarah particularly effective and he comes back to the way she works across the organization. He describes her as a phenomenal cross-functional collaborator, thoughtful about the people she serves and someone with a strong bias for action.
Then he puts it more simply.
“Sarah’s more like, ‘See something, do something.’”
That instinct has become especially valuable as CCT’s approach to marketing has evolved.
There are still casino operators discovering that some of the operational challenges they have lived with for decades can be approached differently. That gives marketing a larger role in educating the market, connecting people and helping useful ideas move throughout the industry.
Sarah sees customer stories as an important part of that work.
Casino operators carry an enormous amount of knowledge. They know what happens on the floor, in the cage, inside audit and across the departments responsible for keeping a property moving every day. They have tried things, solved problems and developed ways of working that another casino leader may never have encountered.
CCT has an opportunity to help those experiences travel. That idea is showing up in Every Casino Has a Story, a campaign built around the people and experiences behind casino operations. It is also part of the thinking behind Connect, where bringing customers together creates something that extends beyond the event itself.
Sometimes the most valuable outcome is simply two casino leaders meeting each other.
They exchange ideas. They compare how their properties approach a problem. They leave with someone new they can call six months later and ask, “How are you handling this?”
Sarah wants CCT marketing to create more opportunities for that kind of connection.
That requires a marketing team that is deeply connected internally, too. Sarah works across sales, product, client teams and leadership, bringing together perspectives from people who see different parts of the customer experience.
That combination of collaboration and action has helped CCT become more deliberate about how it shows up in the market, and customers have noticed. Cliff says clients have commented on the new brand and on simply seeing more of CCT, including more stories about what their peers are doing.
For Sarah, there is still plenty to build. More customer stories that put casino operators and their expertise at the center. More opportunities for leaders to meet their peers and learn how other properties are approaching the same challenges. More events and content that give people something useful to take back to their teams.
That is where Sarah sees CCT marketing going next: helping casino operators share what they know with one another.
CCT works with people across the industry who have spent years solving problems, improving processes and learning what works inside their properties. Sarah wants marketing to make more of that knowledge visible and more of those connections possible.
When one casino’s experience can help another casino operate better, that story is worth telling.
And under Sarah’s leadership, CCT intends to tell more of those stories.
