Secrets from a Smartsheet Overachiever: Learn to scale your most complex initiatives

Editor’s note: In 2020, we launched a new program for our most passionate Smartsheet ambassadors: the Smartsheet Overachievers. This elite group of customers aren’t just product experts; they are innovators, changemakers, and the ultimate Can-Doers. This is the eighth (and final) in a series of blog posts introducing you to our inaugural cohort of Overachievers as they share their Smartsheet wins, challenges, and tips.

Rachel Schiele has a big job. As director of professional services and customer success, she oversees the implementation team and technical integrations function of her company as well as the customer success function. In short? She works with customers at every stage of their relationship with Motus, a software as a service (SaaS) provider that helps companies manage their fleet vehicles, reimburse employees for their mileage, and generate actionable business intelligence on their operations. 

When you have dynamic work responsibilities, you need a tool that can keep up. Rachel has found that in Smartsheet, leaning on Control Center for automated deployments and Bridge as a driving force behind automated emails.  

Diving into dynamic work  

When Rachel assumed responsibility for the implementation team in 2018, her predecessor had started a workflow through Smartsheet Control Center. Being the overachiever she is, Rachel jumped right in.

“When I took over, I saw the possibilities of the application,” she says. “I became heavily involved tactically with how we could use Control Center to take the team to the next level.”

On the implementation side, her team had still been creating project plans manually in Excel, which Rachel described as “awful.” She empowered her team to embrace Smartsheet instead, and asked them how they could implement more features. 

“We started asking, oh, can we use auto alerts for customer reminders?,” she says. “How do we use dashboards and make them really pretty? I could see what the platform could do for the team.”

Using Control Center for growth  

When the implementation team was faced with defining the implementation process without increasing headcount, Rachel sought to find a solution that allowed the team to do it all —  scale, report efficiently, and provide a robust customer onboarding experience.

That solution was using a combination of the Salesforce Connector in Smartsheet, plus Control Center to deploy customer projects. 

“This new process allowed us to launch all necessary components of the customer project plan, rollup reporting for management and executive-level reporting, and an individualized customer dashboard that provides transparency — all in two minutes,” Rachel explains.

“My team uses Smartsheet to be better at their jobs because they have more time to focus on the customers.”

Early on, Rachel calculated that after a year of this new process, the company had saved the equivalent of a full-time employee’s salary. 

Building a Bridge to Smartsheet 

The next big business challenge formed through the team’s automated Salesforce emails. The environment became a bottleneck, and again the need to scale fast led Rachel to look at what Smartsheet could offer. The solution for her challenge was Bridge, introduced last year. 

Rachel was able to take the implementation team’s automated emails outside of Salesforce and move them into Bridge through the use of an API with SendGrid. This move saved them time and has allowed the team to accelerate process improvements. 

“We are better empowered to own our process in its entirety, and as a result, accelerate our team’s ability to support the business as [Motus] adds products and services that require implementation support,” she says.

When Rachel isn’t fostering growth for her company, team members, or two beautiful children, she can be found running, reading, or traveling. 

Learn more about Smartsheet Overachievers and get involved in the Smartsheet Community.