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Helping people realize Smartsheet value 📈

Hi Community,

At this year’s ENGAGE conference, many of you participated in an activity at our ‘Idea Labs’ aimed at understanding what keeps people in your organization from adopting Smartsheet.

The major takeaway? Executives and team members are reluctant to embrace a new tool without first knowing what's in it for them.

Since this seems to be a universal challenge, let’s tackle it together.

Access exclusive resources to generate buy-in: Smartsheet offers a free program to help people like you scale adoption and accelerate intelligent work in your organization. Check out the Smartsheet Mobilizer program to see what it takes to become a mobilizer.
Help improve the experience: We are constantly striving to improve the product. Join our UX Research Panel and you may be invited to participate in research where your feedback could directly influence product improvements, helping to make Smartsheet more intuitive and valuable for everyone.

Lastly, we want to leverage the power of this Community to drive change. What specific tactics have you used to successfully overcome barriers to adoption?

We are looking for real-world examples, such as:

Creating a specific executive dashboard that secured leadership attention
Running a targeted pilot project that won over a skeptical team
Specific communication strategies that worked best for you

Please share your stories in the comments so we can learn from one another!

Find more posts tagged with

ENGAGE

Adoption

Learning

Smartsheet Mobilizer Kit

Comments

Monique Odom Stearn

This was a while ago, but I helped revamp the project workflow for a team. They were handed a process that was ultimately created for people that were no longer around and most of the process did not serve them or what they needed. I sat down with different team members to understand what they were doing on a day-to-day and what would be most helpful for them and simplified the process to make it easier and more helpful for the team. They were extremely grateful and made it clear that it was me taking the time to understand them and what they do that made a difference. One of the quotes I received from possibly the biggest skeptic on the team:

"Smartsheets has gone from being an awkward, forced, and frustrating tool that doesn't serve our creators to now being a powerful, data driven, efficient tool that our whole team can use in whatever way is best for them. I'm personally so excited to learn more about how we can use it moving forward and for the hours it's going to save us."

Deanna Vandermeer

When I first discovered Smartsheet, and all that it was capable of, I immediately set out on a journey to introduce it to my school district (this was back in 2017). While this was a huge undertaking, I knew that it would be worth it in the end. At first, the struggle was always helping teams understand why Smartsheet was more than "just another spreadsheet", once that hurdle was cleared, I set out to develop a full-scale New Hire Induction solution. This solution has evolved multiple times over the years and I am very proud of the current status of this solution. Once people were able to experience first-hand just how much time could be saved by using Smartsheet, they were hooked. Since we are a K-12 Public School District, we do tend to utilize Smartsheet in many different ways across multiple departments, but I believe that is why Smartsheet is such a valuable tool for us. Especially now that we, like many other school districts across the nation, are experiencing declining student enrollment which has a direct impact on funding for the district. Another impact is that we are experiencing is when folks retire or resign from our district, more often than not, their positions are not being backfilled. This results in job duties needing to be absorbed by remaining staff, which continues to put a strain on everyone. Smartsheet, with its powerful capabilities, has been a game-changer for us during these times.

The main way we have handled barriers to adoption of Smartsheet is by creating a dashboard for our licensed users, providing them with initial onboarding training, and then providing them with the resources within our district for support with their department's adoption of Smartsheet. I have also been working on developing our internal support team (our power users) member's knowledge and ensuring they know and understand the importance of taking the time to listen to our newest licensed users. This helps us with meeting them where they are at with their learning and implementation. I love hearing about their successes, and even their pain-points, then helping to guide them on ways to fix and adjust their solutions to eliminate any remaining pain-points. Watching our departments staff members change their mindset from "this is just another spreadsheet", to "wow, this is so easy and fun and is saving me a ton of time in my day", are just a few examples of why I love working with Smartsheet and sharing with everyone and helping find their own success with using Smartsheet in their department.

Bligh

Start small. My first project was automating a manual process, order tracking for a department.

I chose this as we were writing it down in a book, but it was quite difficult to keep up to date information for our customers on where their order was at.

I used a free version first, then moved into a paid version of Smartsheet when I took on the role of tracking freight.

I think it is small, cheap incremental wins that make Smartsheet powerful. Jumping in with a large project is too unclear early on where the value is. If you really want proof, record some KPIs from your current manual process, then implement the Smartsheet solution and record the changes.

One KPI example I remember being really please with early on is when I implemented a change that made a data intake process go from 2-3 minutes into 15 seconds.

Note: Any solution/process is team led. Give credit to the teams that make these efficiencies happen, and really push to get their input while you are making the new process. Even the best solution is worthless if noone uses it.

Emile Ramsingh

As recently as May 2025, my team was looking into moving on from Smartsheet, however by committing myself to learning Smartsheet and its capabilities, I was able to develop a few dashboards, automated flows and forms and be able to integrate it with our existing visualization software seamlessly, I have since had requests to teach other teams about its capabilities with utilizing customer inputs, therefore its gone from being near gone to being key to our operations and also added to other teams.

DaniSap

Hello Everyone,

We onboard new Release List Smartsheet users through a structured process designed to ensure a smooth transition and effective adoption. This includes:

Adding users to our dedicated Microsoft Teams site for collaboration and resource access.
Scheduling Instructor-Led Training (ILT) sessions to provide comprehensive guidance.
Conducting personalized 1:1 walkthroughs of key processes and workflows.
Providing Job Aids and Quick Reference Guides for easy, on-demand support.
Offering access to a custom-built Copilot Agent, enabling users to ask questions and receive instant assistance related to our processes and their role.
Maintaining a dedicated Q&A channel and an FAQ repository, ensuring users have quick access to common questions and answers.

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