You’ve spent a fortune (of money and time) on ABM, buyer intent, and sales intelligence tools—yet your pipeline still isn’t where it should be.
Your tech stack is sophisticated on paper, but your website conversions aren’t keeping up.
Why?
Because these tools, while powerful at defining your market and tracking their wider activity, don’t do a deep-dive into your best marketing and sales asset - your website.
Consider this. If you could wave a magic wand to see the true buying intent of every single visitor on your website right now, you would tap into your toolset and do everything in your power to convert them right now before they move on.
Especially when you’re spending a big budget to target, segment, and advertise to your target audience with the hopes of driving them to your website—missing them at the finish line and losing them to a competitor is almost criminal.
I’m not suggesting that these tools aren’t valuable. They play a critical role in your marketing and sales strategy. But they’re missing buyers hidden on your website.
But before I explain how you can find and convert these buyers, let me unpack in full detail what’s happening with website buyer intent and why a nextgen approach was needed to fill the gaps and make existing tools stronger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Don Simpson is the Founder and CEO of Lift AI, the behavioral buyer intent technology for anonymous website visitors. Before founding Lift AI, Don ran MarketLinc, where he helped enterprise brands convert website visitors into customers through commission-based live sales chat. With over 15 years of real-world sales data, and hundreds of millions of purchases, his team built Lift AI—training a proprietary model to detect high-intent buyers in real-time to help his own team. Today, Don is a recognized leader in AI-driven buyer intent, helping companies maximize pipeline efficiency and unlock hidden revenue from their website traffic.
The Truth About Buyer Intent (And Why You Need to Add a Website-Specific Approach)
Let's break this down step by step:
The market is focused on pre-website intent signals
Take a look at how Forrester sees the buyer intent market as of 2025.
The market clearly focuses on keyword coverage, content consumption, geography, account identity matching, and buying groups as key buyer intent criteria.
These are all off-website or pre-website activities. These are signals you use to start cold calling, emailing, advertising, and so on.
This is great.
Of course you’re better off doing advertising and outreach to companies who fit your ICP and are showing some level of intent.
It tells you who might be in the market, but not who is actually sales-ready when they land on your channels (e.g. your website).
That’s because keyword searches and industry topics do not directly translate to purchase intent - they could be competitors, early phase product research, existing customers, or non-commercial intent.
Yet most ABM and buyer intent tools still segment their audience and marketing/sales funnel based on these signals.
As you can see, 6sense, Zoominfo, Demandbase and Bombora view of the funnel starts with “solution based” keyword searches and then narrows it down by industry-specific keywords and topics.
Pre-website signals result in large segments and low conversion rates
However, these signals are broad and high level, they could apply to tens or hundreds of thousands of prospects.
Which means your ABM or buyer intent tool ends up having massive audience segments.
Where does your sales team even begin with hundreds of thousands of potential leads?
How do you prioritize your marketing spend and efforts?
Take a look at the data from a case study using one of these ABM tools.
As you can see, the segments across the buyer journey are too big and broad to be actionable for sales, resulting in low conversion rates. It's also clear that many of the accounts in “Decision” and “Purchase” phases aren’t sales-ready either.
And the data looks like this for many users of ABM and buyer intent data.
it’s clear these signals are not enough on their own to prioritize, but why?
Most of these intent signals are:
- Sparse - too few in nature or too small in scope to lead to a statistically significant and genuine understanding of behavior or intent
- Untimely - signals that are not real-time may be too late to act on by the time your sales and marketing team get to them
- Broad - looking at “solution keywords” may have a completely different intent to purchasing your product or service
- Biased by humans - these signals are mostly based on human guesswork - we assume someone looking at a piece of content aligned to your product may be a potential buyer, but it may be very early research
On-website buyer intent signals are not deep enough
When it comes to your website; your store where buyers are actively shopping right now, these existing tools have a light touch - typically “account visited your website”, “account visited your pricing page” or similar.
Which leads to the common misconception that certain page views, like pricing page views, is an accurate indicator of intent.
Tools like ZoomInfo’s Websights and HubSpot’s Breeze assume that if a visitor lands on a pricing page, they must be interested.
But our data proves that 88% of high-intent visitors never touch the pricing page, meaning you will miss the majority of buyers on your website.
Plus, up to 94% of pricing page visitors are not actually ready to buy. Which means sales efforts could be wasted on 19 out of every 20 prospects.
If you have a website with a large volume of visitors, you can’t afford to miss out on 88% of buyers, or waste 94% of your sales and marketing resources engaging non-buyers.
This is what we call the Pricing Page Trap—a major blind spot that’s causing you to miss the real buyers hiding in plain sight.
This leads to a huge inefficiency in how marketing and sales teams operate.
Instead of focusing their time on real buyers, they waste resources on low-intent visitors, resulting in missed opportunities and an overworked sales team.
So it’s clear that we need a more accurate, nuanced, and deep view of the potential buyers on your website.
If ABM and buyer intent tools are the telescope, we need a microscope for your website.
Existing tools don’t work with anonymous visitors. No account match? No intent
The final problem facing marketing and sales teams today is that most of their website traffic is anonymous.
In fact, on average, 70% of traffic is anonymous and cannot be anonymized through an ID reveal process (e.g. reverse IP address lookup, form fills, chat conversations, cookie ID, etc).
Which means if there’s no ID match, there’s no intent data at all.
So to summarize, the current view of ABM and buyer intent data is great for defining your market and using high level in-market activity to focus your outbound and produce more targeted advertising.
But once a prospect lands on your website, you need a deep-dive view that can turn those large audience segments into conversions.
And there is a solution to this - and it’s right under your nose.
The Solution: Lift AI’s Website Behavior Analysis Technology
Unlike other buyer intent tools that focus on pre-website activity or limited signals, Lift AI taps into the strongest form of intent data available: first-party website behavior.
Lift AI analyzes hundreds of real-time website behaviors - which we call “micro behaviors” - for each visitor to separate a buyer from a casual browser.
Because your website is the only 1st party data source you have with enough data to capture statistically significant, meaningful, and nuanced understanding of sales ready behavior.
And Lift AI does this with unmatched accuracy, using a machine learning model trained on billions of data points and hundreds of millions of purchases.
- It works instantly. The moment a visitor lands on your site, Lift AI scores them in real time—no need for form fills, lead tracking, or external data.
- It works on every visitor. Whether they’re anonymous or known, Lift AI can predict their intent without needing to know their identity.
- It turns your website into a sales conversion engine. By routing high-intent visitors to the right experience before they leave and go to a competitor.
- It integrates with all of the existing ABM and buyer intent data tools. You don’t have to replace them, you can add them together to make them stronger.
This is the magic wand I mentioned before. Except it’s not magic. It’s 15 years of proprietary data pulled into an AI model that’s been getting proven results for clients since 2020.
With Lift AI, you can see the buyers in your store right now. Which means you can start by converting them before layering in your ABM or external buyer intent data.
This strategy isn’t just a change in thinking, it’s a nextgen technological leap. Here are just some of the results of using Lift AI in the “buyer out” strategy:
- 54% of Payscale’s website pipeline came from anonymous visitors.
- Chronus uncovered 85% of their pipeline from completely anonymous visitors.
- Boomi doubled their SDR sales efficiency and pipeline
- Loopio increased booked meetings by 733% .
- Truckstop added $285k in new ARR for a 27x ROI by month five.
These results are unachievable using traditional intent tools alone. In almost every case study, Lift AI clients are finding the majority of their revenue from anonymous visitors being ignored or overlooked before.
Lift AI is both a game-changing tool for capturing and converting anonymous website buyers, and will compound the impact of your existing ABM and buyer intent tools.
Let me explain:
Better Together: A Three-Stage Framework for True Intent
Lift AI doesn’t compete with or replace any tool in your stack.
In fact, Lift AI doesn’t do anything at all until a prospect lands on your website - so don’t go throwing out your existing tools.
Instead, Lift AI makes your entire tech stack stronger while capturing the anonymous visitor opportunity they miss.
Lift AI makes ABM and buyer intent tools more efficient and effective in 3 key ways:
- Feed your tools accurate, proven buyer intent data from your website
- Get real-time data to act quickly, before competitors do
- Capture all of the anonymous visitors that ABM and intent data tools miss
If you take a look at the appendix of this article, I’ve compiled a table comparing all of the signals current ABM and buyer intent tools offer.
Lift AI is the only behavioral buyer intent technology that focuses solely on your website.
And with Lift AI, your existing ABM and buyer intent tech stack become dramatically more accurate and effective. Here are some of the things you can do:
- Stop wasting SDR time on “Decision” stage accounts that aren’t actually sales ready.
- Stop treating all website visitors equally—engage only the buyers.
- Stop missing the buyer conversions after spending marketing and sales dollars to get them there
- Start capturing all of the anonymous buyers that no other tool can see
- Start integrating Lift AI website behavioral scores with your existing tools to make them more effective
Comparison Summary
So to turn your tech stack into a pipeline-generating machine, the best and most comprehensive approach to buyer intent is to segment it into three key stages:
1. Use Existing Tools (Telescope) for Pre-Website Demand Generation
Pre-website intent data is useful for identifying potential accounts and running outbound campaigns and advertising to those doing research and comparisons. Tools like 6sense, Demandbase, Bombora, and ZoomInfo provide essential insight into which accounts are researching topics related to your industry, engaging with content, or searching relevant keywords.
Although we know that this data doesn’t necessarily convert into buyers, it can help direct your marketing and outbound activity with the goal of driving these accounts to your website for conversion.
2. Use Lift AI (Microscope) for On-Website Intent: The Strongest Indicator of Sales Readiness Right Now
Your website is where Lift AI dominates, because it was built from the ground-up specifically for website behavior.
Use Lift AI to surface all of the sales-ready visitors on your website right now, even if they are anonymous.
You’ve already invested the time and money getting these visitors to your website, so now it’s time to capitalise on that investment.
You can integrate Lift AI’s buyer intent scores into your tech stack to:
- Optimize the on-page experience using CRO tools, personalizing the experience for each visitor based on their intent and promoting the chance of conversion
- Engage high intent visitors in real-time using chat and pop-ups, converting them before they leave the website
And if you happen to get an account match, you can integrate Lift AI’s buyer intent scores to get a more actionable and useful segment of accounts to engage.
This will help you find the buyers being missed in early phases of the buyer journey (Lift AI high intent visitors from the earliest “Target” and “Awareness” phases were converting higher than the low and medium intent visitors from the “Purchase” phase).
3. Post-Website Intent: Prioritizing and Optimizing Follow-Up
Once visitors leave your site, Lift AI will feed high-quality buyer intent data into your marketing and sales automation tools.
- Sales teams can prioritize follow-ups based on high intent visitors within minutes of them leaving the website (Chronus did this to build a segment that gets 11.6x more conversions compared to 6sense data alone, and Payscale did the same to get a 19x increase in conversion in their best performing segment)
- Remarketing campaigns can be targeted to high intent visitors that didn’t convert on the website (RealVNC did this to double their remarketing leads from the same spend, decreasing cost per lead by 67%)
But more than anything, this is where huge sales efficiency gains can be made.
As you can see from the Payscale data above, their 6sense “buying stage” segments were too large to convert effectively.
After integrating Lift AI’s real-time behavioral website intent scores, they were able to narrow each segment and convert them leading to a 19x improvement in the “Purchase Stage” alone.
The Bottom Line: You’re Missing Buyers Right Now
On average, 9.8% of your website visitors have high buyer intent. But most businesses fail to capture them because their existing view of buyer intent isn’t precise enough when it comes to your website.
So If you’re relying solely on pre-website intent data or basic website metrics like pricing page visits, you’re leaving massive revenue on the table.
It’s time to plug the gap.
Lift AI finds the hidden buyers on your website right now and ensures they convert before they disappear. Then it plugs into your existing tools to make them stronger.
Want to see Lift AI in action? Try a 30-day Proof of Concept and see how Lift AI delivers ROI within the first month.
