Balihoo - Managing Local Marketing Programs for National Brands

Andrew Piron – Director of Program Management

Balihoo is a Boise-based provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs. Companies like Quiznos, Chevron and Kohler, representing over 25,000 local affiliates, can quickly and efficiently enable their local affiliates to plan and launch local marketing efforts utilizing the Balihoo system.

I joined the company as the head of our Program and Account Management teams, and my first order of business was to streamline the collaboration across our internal teams and with our clients. Each client project represents a smorgasbord of tasks, dependencies, files, decisions and responsibilities. Our rapid growth, and the scale of many of our national customers, was stretching our team and infrastructure.

Our CEO proposed we try Smartsheet for two primary reasons.

1. It looked like a tool that would be good at handling all the moving parts and responsibilities in a convenient format, and
2. It seemed like something our Clients would engage with

Invariably, our clients roll their eyes when we introduce a ‘vendor tool’ as part of our service. You can just see the thought bubble above their heads, “Great, another clunky vendor website to learn and fight through.” Interestingly, adoption has been very good without any client complaints or training. And, the fact that we’ve had no need to train folks to use Smartsheet has been a big part of the success.

Smartsheet has a familiar interface, but with all the need information and automation baked into one primary screen. It’s very refreshing when compared to the tools that take you through screen after screen to see and manage your work.

We’ve set up automatic notifications so that everyone is kept abreast of changes and due dates. The email update feature enables us to get information and feedback from team members and clients without needing to pester then to log into Smartsheet.

It’s very much like having a full time executive admin overseeing the busy work part of project management, which frees us up to do the real “value added” work that make our clients money.

- Andrew Piron