How Houzz turned anonymous website traffic into qualified pipeline with Fin

Houzz is a leading platform for home remodeling and design, connecting homeowners with professionals and providing construction and design businesses with Houzz Pro software to manage their work.

Houzz had a strong inbound engine, but its website sales motion was largely form-led. Unless a signed-out visitor filled out a form and booked time, the team couldn’t tell which visitors were potential Houzz Pro buyers.

“We knew we were leaving a lot of opportunities on the table with anonymous visitors on our website. Some of those people are ready to talk to sales, but we had no way of knowing who they were,” says Cameron Jahn, Senior Director of Product & Marketing.

Having already seen Fin, an AI customer agent, perform successfully for their customer service, Houzz decided to deploy it to engage those anonymous visitors, identify and qualify potential buyers, and book qualified prospects directly into sales meetings.

Now, by the time a prospect reaches a rep, Fin has already gathered context on who they are, what they’re looking for, their business and their biggest pain points.

The impact is already showing up across Houzz’s sales funnel. In an A/B test against Houzz’s form-led experience, Fin drove a 16% lift in completed demos and a 25% lift in closed-won rate. Following that success, the team is now rolling Fin out across all of the Houzz web properties.

Here’s how Houzz turned previously invisible buyer intent into a new source of qualified pipeline.

Houzz serves two very different audiences: homeowners looking for ideas and professionals who may be evaluating Houzz Pro for their businesses.

SEO and paid advertising already generated strong website traffic from both groups. But when someone arrived while signed out, Houzz couldn’t tell whether they were casually browsing or actively evaluating its software. Unless a potential buyer chose to fill out a form, the team had no way to recognize that intent or start a conversation while their interest was high.

Even when a visitor did fill out the form, the sales team went into the meeting cold. “Before Fin, we’d get an email and a mysterious person would book time on a salesperson’s calendar,” Cameron shares. “There was no qualification history, so the rep still had to figure out who they were and whether they were even a good fit.”

As a result, each first call had to begin with basic discovery before the rep could focus on how Houzz might help.

To solve this, Houzz had already experimented with AI voice bots, outbound SDRs, and an earlier website bot. The team had also considered building something itself. But none had quite delivered what the team was looking for.

Then Fin for Sales arrived, giving Houzz a way to engage and qualify prospects directly on its website.

Houzz already trusted Fin to handle customer service, where it is involved in 80% of conversations and resolves 60% of total volume end to end. Impressed by Fin’s accuracy and the customer experience it delivers, expanding its role into inbound sales felt like an obvious next step. It also meant Houzz could build on its existing Fin setup and investment rather than bring another AI tool into its stack.

Setting up Fin to handle sales was easy. Cameron gave Fin the company’s ideal customer profile (ICP), the questions it should ask, and the outcome it should work towards: a booked sales meeting. The team then decided which visitors should see Fin and where it should appear across the website.

They started by embedding Fin on Houzz Pro pages, where construction and design professionals were most likely to be evaluating the software. Fin engages visitors with questions shaped by the page they’re viewing, then learns more about their business and what they’re trying to solve. It uses that context to identify and qualify potential buyers before booking them a sales meeting.

“We don’t want our salespeople spending time talking to prospects who aren’t a good fit. Fin handles that qualification for us, filtering out the people we don’t want to talk to and moving the right prospects forward,” shares Cameron.

With Fin now handling that first interaction, Houzz’s team could finally act on the buyer intent hidden within its website traffic.

“Fin has opened up another source of pipeline for us,” says Cameron. “Previously, we were very reactive and had to wait for website visitors to book time. Now, Fin can start the conversation, qualify them, and book a sales meeting when they’re a fit.”

Beyond creating a new source of pipeline, Fin is helping those opportunities move through the sales cycle faster.

During qualification, Fin captures each prospect’s BANT details (budget, authority, need, and timeline) and passes them directly into Salesforce, Houzz’s CRM.

“Fin shortens the sales cycle by taking care of discovery and qualification upfront. By the time a prospect gets to sales, we already know what they’re looking for, what kind of business they run, their revenue, and their biggest pain point,” Cameron says. “And our sales team loves it because the leads coming through Fin are simply better. They come with richer context and they’re already warmed up.”

That head start is helping opportunities convert faster. In July, Fin booked 50 sales meetings for Houzz, seven of which closed within the same month. By three weeks into August, three more Fin-sourced deals had closed. In an A/B test against Houzz’s form-led experience, Fin drove a 16% lift in the share of website visitors who completed a demo and a 25% lift in the closed-won rate.

As Fin began talking to more signed-out visitors, Houzz gained visibility into who was behind that traffic and discovered that many were existing customers returning to the website for help.

“One of the biggest surprises was realizing how much of our web traffic is existing paying customers,” Cameron says. “We thought we had more people shopping and browsing who hadn’t previously bought from us, but many were customers returning to the site.”

An existing customer might visit while logged out, using a different browser or browsing in an incognito window. Because Fin works across sales and service, Houzz can seamlessly direct them towards the right experience.

For Cameron, that gives Houzz something a standalone AI sales qualification tool cannot. “There are plenty of point solutions that can qualify a lead, but they sit outside your core system of record and can’t take care of the rest of your business,” shares Cameron. “Fin connects sales and service in one experience. It can move a potential buyer toward a sales meeting or seamlessly switch to service if that visitor turns out to be a paying customer looking for help. That means we can create new pipeline while still taking better care of the customers we already have.

Now that Fin handles initial qualification on Houzz Pro pages and generates a new source of pipeline, sales reps have more time to progress existing deals and create new opportunities through outbound prospecting, helping Houzz build a more proactive sales motion.

The next step is to scale that model. After seeing the results Fin delivered with just half of Houzz Pro’s traffic, the team had the confidence to put it in front of more visitors across their website.

“We’ve proved that Fin can drive the pipeline and win new business for us,” Cameron says. “Now we’re expanding it across all of our web properties.”