The pace of change can be overwhelming.
We’re all under pressure to keep up with the bombardment of new tools, AI, and that “next best thing”.
Every quarter, marketing is expected to generate more pipeline while sales is expected to close more deals — with fewer resources and tighter timelines.
But in that scramble, we forget something important:
Some of the most powerful tools in our stack are already in place. We’re just not using them right.
Take chat for example.
A few years ago, chat was the hottest thing for marketing. Since then, it’s often treated like a checkbox — put a chat widget on the pricing page, a bot that answers FAQs across the site, or a fallback decision tree experience. It’s become a “set and forget” kind of tool.
And with this you get a frustrated and overwhelmed sales team, or underserved and annoyed visitors and poor conversion rates.
But done right, chat is still one of the most impactful things you can do to generate pipeline and revenue by converting high-intent website visitors, while they are on your website — especially the anonymous ones you are completely missing.
Just last week I was looking at the conversational marketing results for a company that is a household name for anyone who works in the go-to-market space. They are a global brand with thousands of customers and have one of the best marketing tools in the world, and we are looking to integrate Lift AI with them to extend the value our customers get from Lift AI.
They are also a Drift customer, and are still doing exactly what we saw three years ago when we did this analysis with Drift customers using Lift AI and saw an average of 9x increase in conversations to pipeline.
They are still making the same mistakes as everyone else with chat, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity on the table. This is an issue that Lift AI can start to change and make an impact in the first week.
In fact, while our customers today are using Lift AI for everything from CRO to retargeting to sales prioritization, no tactic moves the needle faster than combining Lift AI with chat - finding and converting the buyers in your digital store right now before they move on to a competitor.
So what does “doing chat right” look like?
Chat Is Still Crucial to Sales
The idea behind chat was always strong: meet buyers in the moment. Capture demand while buyers are in your store and interacting with your brand. Remove friction from the buying process.
All of this is still true today, and the data still backs it up:
- Intercom data shows customers who chat are 2.8x more likely to convert.
- 79% of businesses see positive ROI from live chat within the first year (Kayako).
- Forrester found that 53% of buyers will abandon a site if they can’t find quick answers.
So chat has always promised to be your website’s best sales tool, and one of your customers’ preferred ways to interact in real-time.
But the strategy and execution is where many go wrong.
Where Chat Went Wrong
Spray and Pray on Every Page
Most companies fall into a “spray-and-pray” strategy:
Put chat on every page with an “Engage All” playbook. Trigger the same or similar message for every visitor.
No segmentation. No intelligence. No prioritization.
Sales teams ended up buried in conversations that led nowhere — job seekers, support requests, competitors, tire-kickers. The few real buyers got lost in the noise.
So companies tried to fix it with automation.
Automation Doesn’t Sell (Very Well)
Chatbots were the logical next step. Scalable, 24/7, and able to deflect low-value traffic. But here’s the problem: 65% of buyers have one-off questions that canned responses, automation, and FAQ links can’t solve.
Especially in B2B, real buyers often want real conversations. They want to ask nuanced questions and get nuanced answers. They want human validation. They want reassurance before they advance. A bot just doesn’t cut it in those moments.
Decision Trees Are a Trap
To get smarter, many teams built complex logic flows — decision trees that try to guide every visitor down the right path in the chat window.
But when one of our customers had 77,000 unique pathways to purchase, it became clear: you can’t map every journey manually.
Decision trees take forever to build, break when your site changes, and create a brittle experience that still doesn’t adapt to actual buyer behavior.
They’re rigid when you need agility. Static when you need personalization. And an absolute pain to manage.
Asking for an Email Upfront Kills Conversion
The classic move: “Can I get your email in case we get disconnected?”
It sounds polite, but everyone knows it’s so you can follow-up with them via email and get them in your CRM. It sabotages conversion.
Asking for contact info before you’ve delivered value can reduce engagement by 80% or more. It’s like asking someone for their number before you’ve even had a conversation.
It turns off real buyers before they’ve even had a chance to explore.
The “High-Intent Page” Myth
So finally, companies got more cautious. They limited chat to “high-value” pages like pricing or contact.
But that’s a seriously flawed strategy too:
- 88% of high-intent buyers never visit the pricing page.
- 94% of pricing page visitors aren’t buyers.
So now you’re ignoring your best prospects and still wasting sales team time on those specific pages.
It’s a lose-lose.
The Ultimate Solution to Chat Challenges: Real-Time Behavioral Buyer Intent
Here’s what actually works.
Lift AI scores the buyer intent of every website visitor — in real time — based on hundreds of nuanced behavioral signals.
Not pricing page views. No simplified “time on page” metrics. This is serious signal and pattern recognition modeled and processed by advanced AI.
This intent scoring happens for 100% of your visitors — even if they’re anonymous (but it works for known visitors too if you integrate Lift AI with your ID reveal software).
Based on those scores, you set up chat playbooks experiences to engage each segment accordingly:
High intent
Route to a live sales rep immediately during business hours. No friction. No email gate. Just straight to value, custom responses, reassurance, and validation.
Medium intent
Use automation to qualify or escalate back to live sales reps. Offer tools like ROI calculators, demos, or ask if they want to speak to someone.
Low intent
Deliver top-of-funnel content. Guide them to your industry report or learning center. Let them browse and build trust. Don’t waste sales rep time with low intent visitors.
And It Works: Real Results from Lift AI + Chat
Here’s what happens when companies do it right:
Truckstop (Lift AI + Drift)
- 3.8x ROI and $55k in new ARR month one
- 27x ROI and $286k in new ARR by month five
- Sales team converted high-intent visitors at 9.72% (vs 3.28% for general traffic)
Fluke Biomedical (Lift AI + Intercom)
Lift AI found that only 6.3% of high intent visitors were going to the pricing page. After implementing based on intent, rather than pages, Fluke got:
- 246% increase in revenue per conversation via Intercom
- 345% increase in revenue per site visitor overall
Loopio (Lift AI + Drift)
- 733% more meetings booked in the first month after adding Lift AI to Drift
RealVNC (Lift AI + Hubspot)
- 13% increase in webshop bookings in the first 60 days.
Payscale (Lift AI + Drift + 6sense)
- When Lift AI scores were added to known accounts in 6Sense, Payscale was able to build a segment that converted 19x more.
This Strategy Works For More Than Chat
Chat is just the beginning. Lift AI’s real-time buyer intent scores can be used across your entire tech stack:
- Website Conversions: Personalize content, CRO tests, pop-ups, and on-site experiences based on each visitor’s real-time intent.
- Advertising Optimization: Identify which campaigns are driving high-intent visitors — increase budget there and reduce waste on low-intent traffic. Or focus your retargeting spend on high-intent visitors who are more likely to convert — not just those who “visited a page.”
- Sales Follow-Up & Activation: Alert sales teams to known visitors with high intent and enable follow-up within minutes of them leaving your site using SEP, CRM, MAP, and much more.
Lift AI doesn’t just make chat smarter — it upgrades every critical touchpoint in your go-to-market strategy.
Final Take
Chat isn’t irrelevant. It was just missing the strongest buyer intent signal possible.
Now, with real-time behavioral intent from Lift AI, chat becomes what it was always supposed to be: a true sales conversion engine.
You will:
- Save your sales team from wasting time
- Turn anonymous traffic into revenue
- Optimize your known traffic for higher conversions
- Close more pipeline and revenue — faster
Done right, chat will deliver pipeline and revenue from potential buyers who are already shopping you today on your website. Lift AI will make it work.
So now you get the best of both worlds. Breakthrough AI innovation combined with immediate execution.
If you want to see how it looks on your site, get a 30-day proof of concept.
