How are you currently using Smartsheet for Marketing?

Kevin Branscum

Hello fellow marketers! My name is Kevin Branscum and I am the Marketing Solutions Manager here at Smartsheet. I've spent my career in various marketing roles (brand marketing, product marketing, creative project management) and have been using Smartsheet in most of them.

For my first question to the group, I'll keep it broad: How are you and/or your teams using Smartsheet for marketing? Are there any particular features or functions that you use most?

Barry Bowles

Hi @Kevin Branscum - looks like this thread needs a starter comment - so I will jump in. I'm not sure how much detail you are looking for here so I will give you what I think might be helpful with the conceptual use and some detail of how it was implemented.

A small group from our business development team started using smartsheet when their planned marketing event sponsorship for an event in Las Vegas was cancelled due to COVID19 and then converted to a virtual event. We needed tools to track attendee interest in our solutions offering and to manage the team's meetings and our own marketing department did not have anything suitable. We had very little time to prepare so smartsheet came to the rescue with its rapid development capability.

Background: We are working with an event organizer who brings Csuite attendees and solutions provider sponsors together at the same event. Its a clever and well run campaign and it needed us to provide a small team of professionals to work with the organizer to identify qualified attendees and then execute around 100 individual meetings with attendees all within one week. This meant that every team member needed to have visibility what each other was doing to ensure we had the resources to attend and run each of the meetings.

We are using smartsheet to track every attendee with a single row allocated per attendee. The first function we needed was to rank each attendee as to its importance to each of our team. We did that using a column for each team member and giving them a dropdown choice list (High/Medium/Low/No) Those rankings were then consolidated into a single weighted number in a result column for the Team score.

In the second phase of our campaign our marketing event partner arranged meetings for us so we used smartsheet to record the meeting details and allocated members to each meeting. Columns were added to record the result of the meetings including no-shows, cancellations etc. Another column houses "progress" beyond the meeting and is a multi-select drop-down with check boxes for marking off each step as it is reached. This saved a lot of space on the sheet instead of having multiple columns (or multiple rows) for each meeting. There are also some compliance requirements which were also added as columns either as drop-downs or checkboxes. We also had to store information sheets on every attendee as well as the attendees' answers to a qualification survey. A consolidation sheet was created to extract data from the main sheet and used to drive a dashboard to give the team quick access to the important information. Multiple reports are being used as part of the dashboard to focus attention on specific areas of interest and having team members updating that information directly on the reports (live reports are opened by clicking on the report in the dashboard). I did use a smartsheet labs feature to map the attendees on to the map to identify the best resources to allocate to attendees but as this is a feature that is being removed by smartsheet I did not incorporate it into the dashboard as these are going to be ongoing events we run several times a year.

Some monitored items on our dashboard include : # meetings actually held, # interested in more discussion, conversion ratios, # of attendees at each stage of campaign progress, # of records outside of marketing compliance policy, Industry and revenue demographics of prospects etc.

As far as features use goes, contact list columns were used quite a bit ( we had 5 separate contact columns). There are some issues with smartsheet displaying email addresses instead of names randomly throughout the sheet despite being restricted to a pre-typed list of choices -(not resolved yet).

A big issue with the scheduling of meetings was smartsheet's inability to handle time of day and only being able to use the day of appointment in calendar view. A request was sent to smartsheet about this as I see the lack of using time in smartsheet as a significant limiting factor. for any time of day based marketing in smartsheet. Time of day information recording and use in formula are important functions in marketing especially online marketing. It is almost inconceivable that smartsheet cannot handle time od day functionality given that functionality has been basic and core to excel forever - how did this get missed in smartsheet's development? I did put in an enhancement request for it of course.

Another missing feature for marketing is the lack of mapping - I know that can be addressed by connecting to an outside reporting system like Power BI or maybe Tableau but smartsheet has a basic deficiency in its dashboard reporting capability and needs to either be married to (closely integrated) with an external partner or to add the functionality into smartsheet itself.

Dashboards in smartsheet are extremely limited and those limitations will drive most marketing people up the wall and they will have to ask their IT department to spend significant time (and cost) getting smartsheet driving an external dashboard app. Its a very basic dashboard and requires the interim step of creating a consolidation sheet of some sort for much of the summary reporting.

But the bottom-line is smartsheet got the job done for us in record quick time. Only one person in the team had ever used smartsheet before this event (myself) and users had to learn how to use it on the fly. Indeed much of it was built on the flay - as we found a need for a function it was added - and that's a big strength of smartsheet. We had a functioning campaign tool up and running in a few hours. Teaching collaborators to use it has also been pretty easy.

I should say that our organization has a global IT department and a worldwide CRM (Dynamics 365) but it is not configured to do what we needed in this campaign and would have taken months if not years for the IT department to add the functionality we needed to the global system. A classic case of smartsheet empowering marketing and business development at the field level.

I know many people in marketing will have quite different uses for smartsheet to what is described above but this is what we use it for in our marketing and I hope someone finds it of interest.