This episode features an interview with Susan Ganeshan, CMO of Granicus. Susan is a three-time CMO with an impressive 25-year marketing career that includes leadership roles at Clarabridge, newBrandAnalytics, and Deloitte Consulting.

On this episode, Susan discusses the unique challenges and opportunities that come with selling exclusively to government entities. She also expands on her career-long objective to convert leads faster, why she says there is no silver bullet in demand gen, and her philosophy that you have to do everything right.

• There is no silver bullet in demand gen, which is why every component of the funnel must be done right.
• If you don't have a highly functioning BDR team, you might as well take your leads and throw them into a lead graveyard. 
• Beware of treadmill marketing. Get off the treadmill of constantly producing one small thing at a time, and create a strategy.

“I have a philosophy on demand gen and my catchphrase is ‘there is no silver bullet.’ There's no one thing you can do that will make an amazing demand gen cycle, so you have to do everything right. You have to think of the entire funnel from top to bottom…and everything in that cycle has to be pristine. If there's even a little bit of fray on that thread, it will break. There’s no silver bullet, you have to do it all right.” 

“When you don't have a highly functioning BDR team–and I've talked to hundreds of CMOs about this–you might as well take your leads and throw them into a lead graveyard. Because salespeople don't have the diligence or the time to follow up in the way a BDR team does, and have a multi-touch cadence and that practice of continuing to go after those hot leads. So I would say that the people-spend that is probably most important to me is that BDR function.”

“When you have a hot lead, it has a half-life, and you have to catch them while they're hot. That's been my objective as a CMO for a long time is to really focus on the speed at which we're talking to these people, catching them while they're thinking of us. The cool thing about Qualified is that when someone visits our website, we can use the Qualified workflow and logic to understand what pages they landed on...Qualified routes that person to a live conversation and my BDRs can start the conversation with them instantly.”

“What we've found is that when someone requests a demo, about 10% of those are going to turn into opportunities. When someone comes through Qualified, it's 25%. It's remarkable.”

“Memories are short. Catching someone in real time while the information is fresh and top of mind can make a dramatic difference in the overall conversion metrics."

“You’ve got to do everything right, but don't let that overwhelm you. Start tackling one thing at a time, but make sure it's all strung together. There is no silver bullet. Don't let sales tell you that if only they had a single one-pager that they could get the deal done because they will keep telling you that.”

“I call it treadmill marketing, when you are constantly producing one little small thing for sales, but it's not being reused or scalable in any way in the organization. And you're on the treadmill, you're running, running, running, but you're going nowhere. Get off the treadmill, create a strategy, and make sure it goes all the way through the funnel and pulls the string tight. Make sure it's consistent.”