Podcast: From AI Visibility to Revenue: Agents, Warm Leads & Better Customer Context

I recorded an episode of Backtier's AI Visibility podcast this week with host Jason Wade and fellow guest Jonathan W. Pritchard, a former touring performer turned fractional CMO who spent 15 years reading minds on stage before he started prompting language models. It was a conversation that wandered, in the best way, from local-first note systems to why marketing works when it makes the customer feel seen.

A few things from it have been rattling around in my head since. Here they are.

Most companies don’t have a lead problem. They have a follow-up problem.

This is the thing I say the most. Companies pour money into generating new cold leads (outbound sequences, LinkedIn, SDR motions) while the people who already raised their hand sit untouched in a form submission queue.

The conventional wisdom in sales is that a five-minute follow-up on a web lead is the gold standard. Someone who fills out a form is almost certainly filling out three other forms on three other sites. Whoever calls back first usually wins the business. Meanwhile the practical reality at most companies is measured in days, not minutes.

Jonathan put it better than I did, from his time in home services marketing:

“They’re like, well, I’m busy doing a roof today, I’m not going to take any phone calls. So you can invest so much in marketing and drive as many leads as you want, and then they don’t call back for a week. And then they’ve already hired somebody else, and then they get mad at the marketer. It’s like, you didn’t call the leads we sent you.”

A warm lead is a perishable good. Somebody who met you at an event, scanned your card, or chatted with your site already knows who you are. That’s an enormous head start, and it decays by the hour.

The little chat bubble in the corner doesn’t work, and everyone knows it

Jason brought up a client, a securities attorney with real traffic to his blog posts and essentially zero conversion. He’s done everything right on paper. Floating CTA, bottom right, the works. Nobody touches it.

He’s correct that it doesn’t work, and I think the reason is that we’ve collectively been trained by a decade of bad chat widgets. You click it, you wait, and eventually a human in another timezone tells you they’ll get back to you.

On mobile it’s worse. Try chatting with Amazon Pharmacy Chat Support on their mobile app, go back to check your prescription, and now re-join the chat… which went… where’d it go?!??!?!

What actually changes the numbers is putting the agent inside the things people already do on your site. Make it look like a search box: a real one, that indexes your content and tells you where the thing you want lives. Trigger it on scroll depth when someone lands on the pricing section. Put it behind the button someone was already going to click. But then make sure it works great.

And here’s the underrated one: replace your forms. Any form with more than about three fields is a form nobody finishes. But a form is also all-or-nothing: the user gives you everything or you get nothing. A conversation is incremental. Name captured. Email captured. Interest captured. If they drop off after question two, you still have question one.

The other thing that came up: build trust upstream

Jonathan’s answer to the attorney problem was to go further upstream than the website, and I thought it was sharp. If people are spending three minutes on your blog posts and not converting, the site probably isn’t the broken part. It’s being asked to do a job it can’t do.

His framing: build the human-to-human trust where your audience already spends time (for him, long-form video), let AI script and leverage it from your own body of writing, and let the website be the conversion event rather than the trust-building event. Asking one page to warm someone up, establish credibility, and close them is a lot to ask of one page.

“That’s why your competition’s not doing it,” he said. “It’s the super easy way that’s hiding behind the smallest bit of effort.”

A small AI workflow I’ve started using

Before every sales call, I run a Claude skill that visits the prospect’s website, takes screenshots via a browser plugin, mocks our web agent onto their actual pages with tooltips, and builds the whole slide deck against my template. I kick it off, walk away for half an hour, and come back to something I can present.

The notable part isn’t that it works. It’s that a year ago the same request would have produced something not worth opening. I’ve been working with this stuff for about three years and the useful-output curve has been steep enough that “I tried that and it was bad” is no longer a reliable data point about anything.

Listen to the episode

Jason runs a good conversation. Worth a subscribe.

Find Jason at backtier.com and jasonwade.com

Find Jonathan at icanreadminds.com, or getmorewith.ai if you want his whole Obsidian-plus-local-agents system. He’ll convince you.

Find me at youex.ai and tomgersic.com. There’s an agent on the site that’ll get in touch with me, or just email tom@youex.ai. If you’re sitting on a pile of leads you haven’t called, that’s the thing we built the platform to fix.