How Ketch replaced Drift with Breakout's AI SDR

The switch

A year ago, Ketch was running Drift. 

Stéphane Le Mentec, who leads demand generation at Ketch, is quick to give credit where it's due. "They were very organized, and I can't complain much. The relationship I had with them was pretty good."

But the math had stopped working.

"We ran into some issues that they were not able to fix," he says. "And for us, at our level, we're still a smaller-ish company, we're growing fast right now; this was getting expensive for the results and the ROI that we're getting."

So he started looking. And then, in a twist any marketer will appreciate, the answer landed in someone else's inbox: Ketch's head of marketing forwarded a cold email from Breakout's founder with a note: “this sounds interesting, you should check them out.”

"Sometimes it works," Stéphane laughs. "I'm glad that we found you guys."

A migration measured in days

Stéphane arrived at the evaluation with a long list of pointed, technical questions: the things he wanted to do, and the things he never wanted to see happen again.

"Right off the bat, I saw you guys knew what you were doing. I was very pointy and technical on things that went wrong with Drift, and you answered everything."

Then came the part that usually goes sideways. It didn't.

"You gave a roadmap, a timeline, and you were true to your word. Everything was met. We went even faster. I think we implemented things faster than was forecast at first."

Ketch was live within days.

Blocks: shortcuts past your own navigation

The feature Stéphane names first is Breakout’s Blocks: modular actions that sit alongside the chat. Ketch runs four or five at once, making them one of Breakout's heaviest users of the format.

"I really like that concept of blocks. I see them as shortcuts."

Stéphane says that fourteen years in demand gen has taught him something humbling: "It doesn't matter how clear you think you're making things, or how accessible they are in the navigation. If it's not obvious, people don't take the time to read and get there."

How Ketch uses Blocks:

• Forms on high-intent pages, to convert rather than educate

• Product tours, un-gated: a bet Ketch made while the category was still trading access for an email address. 

• Placement control, page by page, rather than one fixed template sitewide

• Custom blocks Breakout built on request. "We had discussions around, can you guys do this; that you didn't implement natively. And you built that for us too."

Where AI ends and a human begins

Ketch started with Breakout inbound AI SDR alone, then turned on human-in-the-loop live chat. Leads now split almost exactly down the middle between the two.

That split is engineered, not accidental. Ketch sells to marketers, engineers, security, privacy, and legal: five personas that behave nothing alike.

The three step playbook:

Step 1

A BDR sits in live chat during business hours, plugged into any visitor who asks to talk. "We've seen a significant increase in follow-ups from having interacted with someone live, as opposed to trying to download a guide. The engagement was there, they had the question answered, they saw a person was there."

Step 2

The AI handles the self-serve majority. "Some people want to just ask their own question to the AI, don't get bothered."

Step 3

Live chat is treated as an intent tier, not a channel. Asking for a human ranks a visitor above one who only browses.

The behavioral patterns are worth stealing:

"Marketers tend to play with the chat more. Engineers tend to play with the AI a bit more. For the big security enterprise teams, it's a mix."

Ketch tunes content, pain points, and case studies by persona and industry off the back of that.

Why the website still matters when buyers start in ChatGPT

Ketch is rebuilding its site on Claude Code and Sanity so the team ships faster. "We like to say we're the privacy solution for the AI era. So you cannot say this, and then have a website that's still built for the early days of Google search engines."

Two paths in, two different jobs:

1. Buyer researches entirely in ChatGPT or Claude, then lands on a demo request page and converts. The job is machine-legible content: clear heading structure, short sentences, direct answers to the questions buyers actually ask.

2. Buyer lands and explores. These are now the most valuable visitors on the site. "They're a step ahead of everybody else. They're serious about the search. That's why it's important to serve the best experience ever."

Breakout works the second path.

"You have all this data: what type of person they are, what companies, whether they meet our ICP, what pages they visit. So we can nudge them and pique their curiosity with the right thing at the right time."

His intent ladder is simple: a visitor arriving from an LLM is interested; one who lands and explores is higher intent; one who asks for a human is higher still. "These are strong intent signals that we prioritize and go after."

Allbound: from site visit to LinkedIn DM in 15 minutes

"Demand gen has always been inbound on one side, outbound on the other. I've been trying to bridge the gap into this allbound motion, we have all these signals from inbound, let's use them to run our outbound."

Ketch uses Breakout to power an allbound motion that has reduced their speed to lead to 15 min.

The motion:

1. De-anonymize the visitor (Breakout data among other sources)

2. Check against ICP; review what they did on-site

3. If no form fill, send a tailored LinkedIn DM or email within 15–20 minutes

4. Send it from the matching persona, not a rep

Step 4 is the unlock. 

"I'm a marketer, I get all these cold DMs every single time. It's very easy to ignore; you see a salesperson and think, okay, what are they trying to sell me?"

So a marketing visitor hears from Ketch's head of marketing; an engineering or product visitor from Max, co-founder and head of product; a legal visitor from Ketch's head of legal and DPO, not a marketer, not a salesperson, but the authoritative figure for that persona. And leveraging him, we see people being more receptive.

And the message never pitches.

"We're trying to engage in a conversation, understand what these prospects are trying to solve, what's their friction. And then just show that Ketch can be the answer along the way."

Speed carries the rest: "Time is key. If you don't try something right away, you lose them. Even in a day, you lose them."

In Stéphane's words

"Breakout has become one of my favorite tools for turning anonymous website traffic into real pipeline. Instead of letting hand-raisers sit in a queue, Breakout identifies buyers and engages every hand-raiser the moment they land on the site, with personalized content, with the AI chat, and with the live chat features that we use pretty heavily.

That immediacy really matters for us at Ketch, because we get a lot of website visitors from the privacy world who come with technical, specific questions that they want answered now. Breakout can recognize who's on the site based on all these different roles, and we can kick off a really natural conversation via the AI — or make sure they talk to someone in live chat to answer those questions."

— Stéphane Le Mentec, Director of Demand Generation, Ketch

Almost a year in, Stéphane credits the Breakout agent with lifting conversions and driving significantly more MQLs:

"…because we were able to meet our website visitors where they were, serving them the right experience at the right time, and making sure they could see they could talk to us."