From Chaos to Collaboration: How Conga Uses Smartsheet to Optimize its Creative Operations

On the latest episode of Six Five Media at Smartsheet ENGAGE, host David Nicholson sits down with Smartsheet’s Jennifer Stockton, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, and Conga’s Courtney Finger, Principal of Product Marketing Operations, for an insightful conversation about how Conga has leveraged the Smartsheet platform to transform its marketing operations.

Their discussion covers:

  • The key challenges Conga faced in marketing operations and why Smartsheet was the ultimate solution.
  • The journey from “chaos to collaboration” made possible by Smartsheet’s adoption within Conga.
  • Favorite Smartsheet features that boost marketing and creative operations.
  • The importance of scalability for creative teams and how Smartsheet supports this growth.
  • Unique benefits that Smartsheet offers to organizations seeking streamlined and collaborative creative processes.

Don’t miss out on this deep dive into how Smartsheet is driving innovation in marketing! Learn more at Smartsheet.

Be sure to watch all the episodes from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2024!

Transcript

David Nicholson: Welcome to Smartsheet ENGAGE in beautiful Seattle, Washington. I’m Dave Nicholson with Six Five Media On the Road. And I am joined by a couple of wonderful and interesting guests. Courtney Finger from Conga.

Courtney Finger: Hello.

David Nicholson: And Jennifer Stockton from Smartsheet from Product Marketing and you are in…

Courtney Finger: Product marketing as well.

David Nicholson: Product marketing. Well, at Conga. Tell us about Conga. I’m sorry. I pronounce it Conga. Let’s say Conga. Conga. Tell us all about Conga.

Courtney Finger: Yeah. So Conga is the revenue company and our mission at Conga is to make sure that our customers can optimize their revenue that they’re bringing into their company. We know that that is the most important thing that a lot of companies need to achieve and we want to give them a revenue advantage. And we do that with three specific pillars of products and solutions. So document generation and e-signature, configure pricing quote, and contract lifecycle management, and all of those solutions encapsulated under an AI component, bring our customers a full revenue lifecycle experience.

David Nicholson: So how does Smartsheet help Conga do what Conga does for Conga’s customers?

Courtney Finger: Yes. So Smartsheet has played a very integral role, especially within the marketing team of making sure that we deliver on our key marketing objectives, key marketing initiatives that move the business forward. So we use it as our full project management software for the entire marketing team. So we have five key initiatives per se right now, and all of those have different elements of Smartsheet, whether it be a project plan, a dashboard, whatever we need to do in order to make sure that we execute. So one of the main ones that I’m working on right now is product launch, which sounds familiar to a lot of product marketers.

And so what we do is we have our executing team who goes into the Smartsheet, knows what their tasks are, knows what we need to get done, the dates are there. We have a dashboard where we can get the high level details up to our executive team who knows so that they know what they need to know and not all of the details. And so we really drive our projects forward with that. And then we roll all of that up into a main dashboard where we have all of the projects culminated up there so that our executives and teams can know what we’re doing. And it’s really moved Conga forward in the marketing department and made us be much more streamlined and cohesive.

David Nicholson: What does Conga look like from a distributed workforce perspective? Are you guys all pretty much together or do you have remote workers? What does that look like?

Courtney Finger: Yeah. So we have a lot of remote workers. So we have a few offices around the world, but we can be remote, we can be in an office, we can be where we need to be to work, and that comes with the need to be able to collaborate using any piece of software no matter where we are. And so wherever our workforce is, if you’re in the office one day or if you’re across the world the other day, it can still work.

David Nicholson: So you’re here at ENGAGE, which is Smartsheet’s gathering where we’ve got tons of really cool breakout sessions for education, rolling out new things that are going on. So you’re clearly a fan, but give me an idea of something that you might identify as a special feature or something that you particularly like.

Courtney Finger: Oh, yes. So I have an affinity towards Brandfolder.

David Nicholson: Okay.

Courtney Finger: So my journey with Smartsheet started as a Brandfolder user. That’s what we originally started using in the marketing team and have grown our usage with Brandfolder greatly. And so my favorite is actually a Brandfolder specific feature of the Brandfolder portals. So we use a Brandfolder portal as the one stop shop where everyone in the company goes to, to get their resources, their content, their collateral, whatever they need, we keep it in one place in Brandfolder, and they go to the portal to get that access to things like data sheets and demos and customer stories and our logos and colors, all the things that you would need to represent Conga beautifully in the market. And it’s a one stop shop. So Brandfolder would be my favorite.

David Nicholson: Jennifer, is Conga a typical customer in terms of what they’re leveraging and how they’re leveraging some of the creative capabilities that you deliver?

Jennifer Stockton: Yeah. Absolutely. We see a lot of customers who start with either Smartsheet or Brandfolder and then extend across their marketing organization as they become more mature.

David Nicholson: So if I had to put you on the spot and ask you what are they missing out on? What do they need to be using that they’re not using yet?

Jennifer Stockton: No. I think-

David Nicholson: Okay. Let’s be fair. Something cool that we just learned about in the coming days.

Jennifer Stockton: I think continuing to add more AI features-

David Nicholson: More AI stuff.

Jennifer Stockton: … is really going to be a game-changer because it’s going to help those users who aren’t Smartsheet experts or gurus-

David Nicholson: Right.

Jennifer Stockton: … understand how to do more in Smartsheet just natively using formulas, for example. It’s a game-changer for a lot of Smartsheet users.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

David Nicholson: So have you seen anything in particular so far that was intriguing to you? You may have gotten earlier hints about what’s coming, but anything that you’re going to be going home to your team?

Courtney Finger: Yeah. 100% the AI that Jennifer mentioned the formula. So I am not necessarily an innately enabled numbers person or formulas person or don’t geek out to spreadsheets quite into that level. And so what’s really been a learning curve for me is learning how to do that kind of stuff in Smartsheet, and eventually when you get the hang of it, it’s great, but using the AI to get you there faster and to get your team enabled faster and to make the things that you didn’t think you could do possible because you’re like, “Well, I don’t know how to do that, so I’m just going to try something else.” Well, now you can dream bigger because AI can help you as something that’s right at your fingertips to get you where you want to be.

David Nicholson: Jennifer, can you talk a little more about how that takes shape? How is AI bridging that gap? I’m outsider looking in and what I’m wishing for is the ultimate plain language user interface where I can just speak my mind and it’s the equivalent of asking my son to go down into the garage and get me something from the refrigerator in the garage and he comes up and it’s like, “Here you go.”

Jennifer Stockton: Sure. And that’s exactly where we’re headed. So if you look at the natural language that AI is using, you can go in and as a user, and it doesn’t even have to be perfect. Tell it what you’re trying to do and the AI will figure it out. I’ll give you an example. Just last week, I was playing around with it and a formula that if I had had to write it by myself, probably would’ve taken three to four hours to get it right.

David Nicholson: Right.

Jennifer Stockton: I used the AI and I told it what I was trying to do and it worked. It was like it gave me exactly what I was looking for. Now when you imagine that at the scale across all Smartsheet users where they’re not having to go back to their admin because they get stuck because they don’t know how to build the formula that they need, which happens quite a bit, now all of a sudden they can just do it on their own. It’s a game changer for productivity and efficiency.

David Nicholson: So we’ve heard a lot from a lot of companies that are infusing their offerings with AI throughout the industry, just beyond what we’re talking about here. And often the pitch is we can turn a person with 10 weeks of experience into as productive a person as someone with 10 years of experience. So when you think about these enhancements that AI brings to just the user interface, what do you see the future for the folks on your team? What do you see that looking like? Is it one person doing the work of many or is it everyone is enhanced individually? What does that look like?

Courtney Finger: Yeah. I definitely think it’s the latter. I think it’s everyone being enhanced individually to perform at their best and to take some of what used to be a harder item for them to complete during a day, or something that they were pushing to do, which was going to take them a lot of time. Making everyone more productive and being able to hone in on people’s more strategic and creative capabilities, and less so their do you know their software expertise. We all want to be experts in Smartsheet and us that love it so much, want everyone to be an expert in it and know how to use it like we do and everything.

But I think AI is going to help them be able to get to that level faster because the learning curve will be so much smaller with an AI-enabled product, where if they are just wondering, “Oh, how do I do this?” They can use the AI to figure it out. And also it helps us who are more at the admin level of creating these different workspaces or work apps or dashboards for our teams to do more with those as well. We want to continually innovate on those and make them more interesting for our stakeholders, and AI can teach us some things that we may not have even thought of.

David Nicholson: Is this a typical journey in terms of what we are expecting to see AI deliver through Smartsheet?

Jennifer Stockton: Yeah. I mean, I think we still have a lot to learn about what AI is going to be able to do, but I agree with Courtney, that AI enhances an individual’s productivity. It makes it so they can get things done faster. You brought up the example of the 10 weeks versus the 10 years. Well, AI can’t make up for 10 years of business experience, but what AI can do is take that person with 10 years of business experience and give them back a significant amount of time from an efficiency and productivity perspective with those things that would’ve taken them extra time so they can move a lot faster. And for your person who’s 10 weeks in, it can help them learn about the business faster because they can use AI to pull back information that they might not have known how to find otherwise. So I really do think it’s a combination of AI plus worker and gaining productivity wherever they are in their journey.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

David Nicholson: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you share this experience, but just think about word processing software, whatever you might use for word processing software. Speaking for myself, I’m sure that I can probably only leverage 5% of the capability of what is on my laptop and in the cloud today. And I’m hoping that natural language processing AI, being able to speak plainly, is going to frankly reveal a lot of the magic. I can imagine being an engineer at Smartsheet, working really hard to create really cool stuff that maybe a small subset of people are accessing on a regular basis because you have to be the power user. So maybe AI turns more people into power users?

Courtney Finger: Yeah. I mean, as a product marketer, part of our job is to figure out how to tell all of our customers prospects the world about what’s new in your solution. Right? What innovations do you have? What can you take advantage of? And if AI can help surface that so our customers can take advantage of new solutions that are going to be available in the product, that are going to help them be more successful in their business, I think that’s a perfect use case for it.

David Nicholson: So you gave me an idea where you came at this from, and so therefore your favorite features in Smartsheets. Jennifer, what some maybe overlook things that might be your favorite or things that-

Jennifer Stockton: My favorite by far, and it’s such a simple one, but it’s automations.

David Nicholson: Yeah.

Jennifer Stockton: And just being able to build those automations to take care of notifying people and updating things and it does it on its own and you never have to think about it. And it just adds so much productivity and efficiency back every single day. I think we take it for granted-

Courtney Finger: We do.

Jennifer Stockton: … as you start to use Smartsheet because it’s just built into everything we do.

David Nicholson: Now are these canned automations or these automations that you can create?

Jennifer Stockton: You can create the automation.

David Nicholson: So by using building blocks-

Jennifer Stockton: When certain things happen… Exactly. It triggers something else-

David Nicholson: But you don’t have to be able to write code per se to be able to do that?

Jennifer Stockton: No. They’re very easy to build.

David Nicholson: So in theory, it gets easier as natural language… I’m not revealing roadmaps here, but I mean from a philosophical perspective, the more that we just interact with the machine, the better. What’s on the horizon that you can tell us about that you think is cool? What are the exciting announcements here that you’re most excited about?

Jennifer Stockton: I think I am really excited about File Library and where that’s going and Collections as well, because they both give you capabilities to do more with marketing assets and control over what’s happening within your marketing organization, which I love.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

Jennifer Stockton: Collections, in particular, is very cool because you can pull in assets from all over the place from third parties, and it just gives you the ability to create that collection with the right visibility.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

Jennifer Stockton: So that one’s pretty exciting.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

David Nicholson: Well, Smartsheet has a fascinating history if you go back far enough in time and you think about collaborative work and what a tool needs to be able to deliver. Now we’re in 2024, and there are huge customers highlighted today were circumstances where there might be a billion cells worth of information going into it. This file sharing capability was a pretty significant move forward, isn’t it in terms of scale, or am I misreading that?

Jennifer Stockton: No. Absolutely. And a lot of what we’re doing, you heard it from Ben today, right?

David Nicholson: Yeah.

Jennifer Stockton: Is building at scale so that we can take companies from small companies who grow into massive enterprises and they can still leverage Smartsheet every step of that journey.

David Nicholson: Yeah.

Courtney Finger: And I was really geeking out during the keynote today because when they share stuff like that, it really shows how Smartsheet is incorporating the other products that have become part of the Smartsheet family into their core product, and Collections is a big thing that’s in Brandfolder.

Jennifer Stockton: Yeah.

Courtney Finger: And being initially coming into all of this as a user of Brandfolder, it’s so amazing to see that functionality that I love in that product co-exist in the Smartsheet product. I think it’s just going to be a really good solution when I roll it out.

David Nicholson: So from a customer perspective, when you see a partner company that you work with that’s delivering things of value to you and then you see maybe they go out and they acquire something, you don’t want to see that on a dusty shelf?

Courtney Finger: No.

David Nicholson: You’d like to see that integration actually happening. You’re seeing that?

Courtney Finger: Absolutely.

David Nicholson: Okay.

Courtney Finger: I mean, again, starting with Smartsheet acquired Brandfolder, and I’ve still felt regardless of where it has lived, that it has gotten the attention and the innovation that it deserves, in my opinion because I love it. And, yeah, again, just to see how it’s going to be highlighted, whether they call it Brandfolder or not, those capabilities are very similar and it’s very cool to see that within Smartsheet.

David Nicholson: Fantastic. Courtney and Jennifer, thanks so much for being here.

Jennifer Stockton: Thank you.

David Nicholson: Especially talking about the customer journey side of things and what someone’s actually doing with software, my head was spinning during the keynote as screens were flashing up with new user interfaces and it’s really remarkable what you can do remotely now from a workplace collaboration perspective. It’s really impressive.

Courtney Finger: Yeah.

David Nicholson: It’s been great to have a conversation with both of you today. Thanks for being here with us on On the Road from Six Five Media. I’m Dave Nicholson. Stay tuned for more content.

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