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How CaptivateIQ grew paid search meetings 200%+ year over year after switching from Drift to Breakout
Industry
Sales Compensation Software
Funding
$164M
Stage
Series C
HQ
San Francisco
YoY lift in paid search meetings
leads from 2,815 chats
more conversations than Drift
CaptivateIQ was getting plenty of chats on Drift but losing buyers right at email capture. In a head-to-head pilot covering only off-hours, Breakout drove 5x the conversations and more than twice the emails captured. After moving over, CaptivateIQ went live in about three weeks with no playbooks to build. The result: 2,815 chats, 397 leads, and paid search meetings up more than 200% year over year.
A quick intro
Shelby Wilson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at CaptivateIQ. I’ve been here almost six years and own our website, SEO, AEO, paid media, and conversion strategy.
How this all started
CaptivateIQ was with Drift and our previous CMO was introduced to Sachin. The AI capabilities of Drift at the time weren’t as developed as we hoped — we were getting plenty of chats but losing people right at email capture.
We ran a limited pilot with Breakout alongside Drift. Breakout only covered our business off-hours, and that turned out to be the difference maker — in the same window, Breakout drove about 5x the conversations and more than twice the emails captured, with both of its meetings coming from enterprise accounts. The Drift’s well-known incident further accelerated the decision to migrate to Breakout.
We also looked at Qualified. Strong product, but more of a full web personalization platform than a chatbot — it would have needed dedicated ownership across four teams and a six-figure spend in a year where ROI was the priority. Breakout was a fraction of the cost and something we could actually run.
Getting up and running
Going live with Breakout was very fast and simple — we were up in about three weeks. We particularly loved the whole aspect of having an AI agent trained on our knowledge base, and updating that was easy. The initial lift was a couple of hours, and now it scrapes our blog, resources, and events pages weekly, so the agent stays current without anyone maintaining it.
We didn’t have to deal with any complex rules or create playbooks. That was a real departure from what we were used to — with Drift, so much of the work was building logic. Here we point it at our own content and it handles the conversation.
The integration with HubSpot and Salesforce was also seamless. Breakout works with our LeanData routing, fires Slack alerts to the BDRs, and handles calendar scheduling across four separate demo forms — it stamps routing data back into HubSpot so we can tell chat-booked meetings apart from form fills.
The impact
To date Breakout has handled 2,815 chats and captured 397 leads.
The clearest signal has been in paid search, where meetings through the Breakout path are up over 200% year over year. We now count chatbot meetings separately from demo requests, so some of what looks like softness in form fills is really demand getting redirected into chat by design. Chatbot-sourced records in Salesforce are up about 21% in the first half of this fiscal year.
The meetings coming through chat also skew enterprise — we’ve booked conversations with companies running incentive comp for hundreds to over a thousand payees, often from a single late-night chat on a product page.
On the qualitative side, the thing I’d point to is responsiveness. Almost every gap we flagged during the evaluation — live chat, SFDC routing, calendar scheduling, cookie consent handling — shipped within the year. They’ve also caught problems on our side before we did, like the week our script quietly stopped loading.
It means I spend less time managing a tool and more time on strategy. I’m not building playbooks or chasing routing bugs.
What's next
AI is a real growth lever for our team this year, not just a talking point — we’re investing in AEO, AI-assisted ad copy, and structured data to protect our CTR as search changes. Breakout is the conversion layer in all of that. It’s where intent actually turns into a conversation.
Near term, I want our BDR live chat fully dialed in. The handoff from agent to human is where I think the next step change comes from.
The one thing I’d love to see: deeper attribution. I want to look at chat-sourced pipeline all the way through to closed won inside my own reporting without stitching it together by hand. Breakout creates the conversations — I’d just like it to be easier to prove what they’re worth.
In Shelby's words
“Every gap we named when we passed on Breakout shipped within a year. I’ve never had a vendor treat my objections like a roadmap before.”
“Our previous chat went dark with almost no warning, and Breakout had us live across the site that same day and bought out the rest of our old contract. You learn more about a vendor in one bad morning than in a six-month evaluation.”
— Shelby Wilson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, CaptivateIQ
