Here’s a quick analogy to explain one of the biggest problems facing sales today.
Imagine you own a retail store. Outside, your team is chasing people down the street, handing out flyers, hoping someone might be interested in coming inside.
Meanwhile, inside your store, customers are already browsing and actively looking to buy. But no one is talking to them, helping them, or reassuring them.
Yet this is exactly what most B2B companies are doing with their lead engagement strategies.
Instead of focusing on engaging high-intent buyers in the moment, businesses are chasing cold leads with outbound emails and calls, or they’re engaging “warm” leads based on outdated intent signals—reading blog posts from your industry, searching for keywords, attending a webinar, and so on (more on this later.)
By the time sales reach out, the lead is back to cold, or they were never warm to begin with (or worse—they’ve already engaged a competitor).
So when it comes to B2B, timing is everything. It’s well known that at least 50% of sales go to the first company in the deal.
And yet, most businesses still operate under a dated model that prioritizes identifying the "perfect lead" rather than acting quickly on the right lead at the right time.
Which sometimes means that a warm lead engaged right now is better than a hot lead engaged too late.
Let me explain this in more detail.
The Costly Timing Problem: Why Engaging Leads Too Late Kills Conversions
Engaging a lead within five minutes makes you 8x more likely to convert them into an opportunity (according to InsideSales.com). Waiting another 5 minutes from there, your odds of conversion drop by 400% (according to HarvardBusinessReview).
Yet sales teams are still making these two costly mistakes:
- They wait too long to engage leads who were in buying mode, but have since cooled off or already engaged a competitor.
- They chase ICP-aligned leads who look like the ideal customer but may not actually be in-market right now.
This is where traditional lead engagement strategies fail.
In order to understand why, we need to unpack some of the intent signals being used to drive existing sales strategies.
❌ Account ID & ICP fit (company size, location, technologies used, etc)
Just because someone fits your ICP doesn’t mean they’re in the market to buy. In fact, only 5-10% of ICP-aligned accounts are actually in-market in any given quarter—which means most sales teams are chasing leads at the wrong time (according to 6sense).
Plus, that doesn’t help for the 70% of your website visitors who are anonymous and can’t be anonymized or matched to an account / ICP, meaning you are likely missing the majority of real buyers on your website.
❌ Page visits (e.g. pricing pages)
88% of high-intent buyers aren’t on the pricing page, so engaging only pricing-page visitors ignores the vast majority of revenue opportunities. Furthermore, we’ve seen up to 94% of pricing page visitors aren’t buyers, meaning sales teams are wasting their efforts 19 out of every 20 visitors to that page. We call this the “pricing page trap”
❌ Content Consumption (e.g., industry reports and similar blog posts)
Reading blog posts, downloading whitepapers, or engaging with industry reports does not necessarily indicate buying intent. Many visitors consuming content are in research mode—students, competitors, bots, or casual readers who may never convert.
❌ Keywords Searched (e.g., solution-related terms in Google or on-site search)
Keyword searches can be misleading when used as an indicator of intent. Many searchers are looking for educational information rather than considering a purchase. Additionally, competitive research, job seekers, and partners can all inflate search volume without signaling true buying behavior.
The problem? All of these signals are lagging indicators or too limited to truly indicate intent—by the time you act on them, the buyer may no longer be interested (or wasn’t interested to begin with).
Simply put, if you’re engaging a lead after they’ve already moved on, you’re too late, and you’re leaving revenue on the table.
Strike While the Iron is Hot: The Future of Lead Engagement is Right Now (Real-Time)
So the solution isn’t to spend more time building your ICP list or acting on lagging (or ineffective) signals - instead the key is to engage all of the leads demonstrating intent right now on your website, in your store, at the precise moment they are ready to act.
And more than any other step in the buyer journey, the right moment is typically on your website.
That’s because your website is the closest step prior to generating revenue. Virtually all sales are closed after the prospect visits your website. There may be a series of calls, demos, and negotiating afterwards, but the pivotal moment is the website visit.
Look at any marketing and sales funnel, and you’ll see the website is always at the bottom. Below is just one example from Auxinsights.com.
This visual represents more of a transactional sales flow than the requirements of an enterprise B2B sales motion, but it definitely still holds true for creating that initial conversation and pipeline.
So why would you spend another dollar or minute on tactics further afield from the website if you already have a healthy volume of website traffic demonstrating sales readiness and buyer intent right now?
The simple answer is that there hasn’t been any way to find the actual buyers on your website effectively (refer back to the typical “pricing page trap” explained before).
That’s why most attempts at real-time engagement are underperforming right now.
Why Existing Attempts at Real-Time Engagement Aren’t Working
Because there hasn’t been a way to accurately, reliably spot buyers in real-time, marketing and sales teams have leaned on tactics that aren’t performing.
For example:
Site-Wide Chat or Pop-ups
Most chatbots and live chat implementations engage all visitors the same way, regardless of intent. This leads to either customers getting trapped with bot only experiences, or sales teams being overwhelmed with unqualified conversations and missing actual buyers.
Meanwhile, generic pop-ups frustrate visitors and are often ignored. Without understanding visitor intent, they disrupt rather than convert.
Page-Specific Chat / Pop-ups
As already mentioned, narrowing your engagement criteria to certain pages can miss up to 88% of buyers who are strewn across other pages of the website. And even going narrow doesn’t guarantee quality leads (as shown with the pricing trap example)
Asking for Email Too Soon
When websites demand an email before offering value (via chat, gated content, gated webinars, or contact forms), visitors leave. In fact, prematurely asking for an email can reduce conversions by up to 80%.
So with all of these tactics underperforming, what can you do?
With the rise of AI and behavioral analytics, we no longer have to guess when a lead is sales ready. We can find and engage them at the right time, with the right message, no matter where they are on the site.
How to Find & Engage Website Buyers at the Perfect Time
Lift AI analyzes hundreds of micro-behaviors in real-time to determine a visitor’s likelihood to convert right now.
This allows businesses to act while the sales-ready visitor is demonstrating intent to engage and convert before they leave the site.
The primary value of this approach is being able to surface all of the sales-ready visitors that are completely anonymous (no ID match or deanonymization).
Using this strategy alone, Lift AI customers have experienced game-changing results:
- Chronus uncovered 85% of their website pipeline from anonymous visitors—buyers that would have otherwise been ignored.
- Similarly, Payscale captured 54% of website pipeline from anonymous visitors
- And Boomi saw 58% of their pipeline come from previously anonymous visitors
- Truckstop booked $55k in new ARR with Lift AI in the first month to achieve a 3.8x ROI and $286k for a 27x ROI by month five by engaging high-intent website visitors in real-time
Here’s how they did it:
Deploy Real-Time Chat with Lift AI Buyer Intent Scoring
Tools like Drift, Intercom, and HubSpot allow you to engage leads in real-time, but without accurate intent scoring, sales teams waste time on low-priority visitors.
However, routing high intent visitors to your live sales team in chat leads to significant impact.
🔹 Loopio saw a 733% increase in meetings booked by integrating Lift AI with Drift to engage high-intent visitors immediately
🔹 Fluke Biomedical increased revenue per site visitor increased by 345% using Intercom
🔹 RealVNC got a 71% increase in individual customer conversion rates using Hubspot Chat and Lift AI scores
🔹 On average, Lift AI customers using Drift see a 9x conversation to pipeline rate by targeting high intent visitors
Targeted Pop-Ups Based on Real-Time Intent
Traditional pop-ups are intrusive and ineffective. But personalized offers and CTAs triggered by Lift AI’s real-time buyer intent score increase conversions dramatically.
🔹 RealVNC increased pop-up CTR by 94% by targeting high-intent visitor.
And Follow-up With Missed High Intent Visitors Within Minutes
Lift AI doesn’t only work with anonymous visitors. You can integrate Lift AI’s website buyer intent scores with account deanonymization software and your sales tools to surface high intent accounts and follow-up with them within minutes of their website visit.
Remarket to High Intent Visitors After Visit
For high intent visitors (both anonymous and known) that didn’t convert on the website, you can immediately add them to your remarketing audiences to target them with tailored messaging and display creative to get them back to the website for the next logical step.
🔹 RealVNC remarketed to high intent visitors to double their lead volume from the same remarketing spend, decreasing their cost per lead by 67%
Prioritize Sales Follow-Up Within Minutes
For known accounts that don’t convert on-site, prioritizing follow-up within minutes (not hours or days) is crucial. This leads to better sales efficiency, pipeline, and revenue.
🔹 Payscale saw a 19x increase in conversions in it’s highest performing 6Sense segment by integrating Lift AI individual buyer intent scores (which results in 10x more opportunities generated compared to forecasts).
🔹Chronus got a 11.6x boost in sales efficiency by combining Lift AI with 6Sense for account prioritization.
🔹RealVNC achieved a 216% increase in sales efficiency by adding Lift AI scores to HubSpot Lead Scoring alongside a 21% SMS response rate and 39% increase in email response rates for sales outreach targeting high-intent visitors.
Fix The Problem Right Now
The modern buyer moves fast. If you’re engaging them based on traditional lead scoring methods or chasing ICP fits alone, you’re already behind.
Success in B2B sales today isn’t about waiting for the perfect lead—it’s about identifying and engaging the right lead at the right time - even if they don’t appear to be perfect on paper.
If you want to convert more leads, boost pipeline, and maximize sales efficiency, stop chasing cold leads and start engaging the high-intent buyers already inside your store.
Want to see how Lift AI can help you engage website buyers at the perfect moment? Get a 30-day proof of concept and start seeing results immediately.
