The Challenge

For Granicus, all roads lead back to the website. The marketing team uses a number of strategies to drive site traffic—like email campaigns, webinars, and LinkedIn paid ads—because it’s the primary tool for lead generation. Historically, website visitors would submit a form to get in touch with a sales rep. The lead would then get pushed into Salesforce via Marketo and Business Development Reps (BDRs) would manually add them into a cadence for outreach. Needless to say, it would take hours, or even days, before sales reps connected with that interested visitor. This was a huge problem.

Furthermore, this same form was also used for general questions and customer support. This meant qualified leads were getting lost in the shuffle, creating inefficiencies for the sales team who would spend more time combing through the clutter and less time engaging with buyers who were the right fit for the business.

Granicus sought a conversational sales and marketing solution that would make the website work harder, turning it into a selling machine. Specifically, they wanted to 1) increase MQLs for the sales team, 2) automatically weed out unqualified visitors, and 3) provide an alternate channel—besides phone and email—for the sales team to engage with visitors in real time.

The Solution

Granicus turned to Qualified. With a complex Salesforce instance and five separate BDR teams scattered across time zones, they needed a solution that could handle intricate customizations; like mapping to custom Salesforce fields, robust routing rules, and A/B testing.

While Granicus aimed to book more meetings and generate more Opportunities at a higher ASP, their #1 KPI was speed to lead. They worked closely with their Qualified Customer Success Manager, Hung, to assemble the right approach:

• Use chatbots across the website to ask pointed qualification questions
• Immediately route qualified visitors to the correct BDR for a real time conversation
• Deflect unqualified visitors to helpful support resources

Before rolling out the program to the entire team, Granicus started with a few senior BDRs to promote the tool internally and increase adoption. For the wider rollout, Hung spent time with the larger team to train on best practices, walk through real examples, and build trust.

The Result

Since the start of their program, MQL conversion rates have increased 40%. Additionally, demo requests have increased 150% and there’s been 52% YoY growth in Stage-2 Opportunities. With Qualified, Granicus has a better chance of capturing qualified leads when they’re most interested in learning more.

While Granicus BDRs have spent most of their time responding to handraisers, they plan to expand their program with Qualified Conversations. This means segmenting website traffic by Opportunity stage and leaning into more proactive outreach. Granicus also plans to implement an ABM strategy with 6sense, so BDRs can prioritize visitors by purchase intent and focus on personalized conversations with the right people at the right time.

Key Learnings

For Granicus, the biggest surprise has been website analytics—like visitor volume and engagement on select webpages. This insight has enabled them to optimize their program and encourage BDR outreach even after a visitor has left the website.

In terms of advice, Granicus says to avoid the “set and forget” approach. You can’t implement the tool and assume it will rake in leads. Instead, be prepared to build your program over time. Leverage Qualified’s robust analytics to understand website traffic, rep performance, and visitor engagement then make small tweaks as needed. Once you know what’s working and what’s not, your lead generation will skyrocket.