MarTech Breakthrough Awards celebrates Smartsheet as the "Best Team Collaboration Software”

The disruption of the pandemic challenged organizations and agencies to pivot quickly to fully remote work and find new ways to collaborate. We worked hard to help create a smooth transition for our customers and we are proud that the MarTech Breakthrough Awards named Smartsheet for Marketing “Best Team Collaboration Software” in 2021, recognizing the role we played when our customers needed us most. 

Collaboration has always been an important part of marketing, connecting internal employees and external agencies around shared strategies and goals. When business shifted to remote working arrangements in March 2020, however, technology and tools that connect distributed teams became critical.  

“Marketers have always had unique needs,” says Anna Griffin, chief marketing officer for Smartsheet. “But today modern marketing is an entirely new, multifaceted, and wildly demanding discipline.”

An explosion of customer engagement channels and content formats has provided marketers with huge opportunities. But with all of the new opportunities comes incredible challenges, including the need for speed, the demand for a high volume of content, increased complexity, and more silos, friction, and inefficiencies within teams. 

 Currently, marketing teams use an average of 12+ tools to manage, execute, and communicate on their work. Disjointed tools and processes lead to missed deadlines, ineffective communication, high costs, lower volume, and ultimately poor ROI. 

We recognized the need to unify the marketing function and did something about it. Smartsheet for Marketing combines the robust project management features of Smartsheet with resource management, digital asset management and more, giving marketers a comprehensive suite of tools that helps them better compete in today’s marketplace. In fact, it’s these capabilities that helped earn us the MarTech Breakthrough Award.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Learn how some of our customers have used Smartsheet for Marketing to grow their businesses through collaboration.

Speed to Market

Overtime publishes more than 40 original series on YouTube, Snapchat, and IGTV. As the newest and hottest sports media company, Overtime creates inclusive, engaging experiences for new sports fans who want to watch games and connect with the athletes. Smartsheet for Marketing helps the team quickly manage its vast amounts of video content.

“We are a ton of creative minds moving really quickly, and we needed a little more organization,” says Tanya Cuadra, senior production manager at Overtime. “We needed something that can scale with us, where we can see all employee time, with information that adds into our budget, and to have all of our videos in one place rather than having to mix and match.” 

Overtime prides itself on being fast, posting game highlights within five minutes of the final buzzer. That pace is difficult without organization—a problem Smartsheet solves by making it easy to quickly find the right file. “If we go to a basketball game, we will have the highlights up before anybody else,” Cuadra says. 

Freedom to Focus on the Right Things 

Even before the pandemic pivoted students to online learning, educational publisher McGraw Hill developed thousands of digital and print learning products each year. The company used to track development and revision of these assets with spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected project notes, hindering workflow. After implementing Smartsheet for Marketing, McGraw Hill created a central platform that fostered collaboration and problem solving. 

“Smartsheet frees up our designers to spend time being creative, brainstorming, and concepting big ideas with their team instead of spending hours on data entry, pulling metrics, and chasing answers through emails,” says Karen Pytel, Design Lead, Design Operations and Strategy, McGraw Hill. “Smartsheet lets us focus on the fun stuff.” 

With a central repository, McGraw Hill saves time and money. “It’s important to be able to find and quickly repurpose assets that exist already, without spending hours reinventing the wheel every time, helping us work within budget and at scale,” says Pytel. “Not only are we doing more with less, but our project timeframes are getting tighter.”

Tapping into a Wealth of Information 

Colliers International provides full-service commercial real estate expertise to its clients with its brokerage, property management, and investor services. One of its competitive advantages is its ability to understand and anticipate clients’ needs. The company’s Wisconsin office uses Smartsheet to package real estate portfolios and present them in a compelling manner. 

“Being full-service, one of our goals is to have information talking across different departments,” says Maggie Blair, director of marketing and research, Colliers Wisconsin. “We have a ton of information; it’s our most powerful asset.” 

A challenge is making sure the information is up to date. The Smartsheet dashboard helps the team ensure the information is accurate, transparent, and consistent no matter who’s looking at it, where they’re looking at it and how they’re utilizing it.

Optimizing Team Performance

According to MarTech, “Customer expectations have never been higher, and our annual MarTech Breakthrough Award winners showcase standout technologies and services that are revolutionizing how brands exceed these expectations with personalized experiences throughout every customer interaction.” 

We’re happy that Smartsheet for Marketing has made a positive impact on our customers’ businesses, helping them better research and ideate, build strategies, plan, source, assign and deploy the right teams to launch every day. Once all of those pieces are aligned, performance is optimized and expectations are achieved. 

Griffin says it best: “[Smartsheet for Marketing] allows marketing operations to approve and distribute assets with speed and scale, all while ensuring the security, control and compliance every organization needs today.”