The Challenge
Mactech provides portable machining, cutting, and field machining equipment and services for industrial applications, where buyers often arrive with highly specific technical requirements.
A visitor may not simply want to know what a portable mill does. They want to know whether a particular machine can make a particular cut, what its operating range is, how much it costs, or whether it can handle an unusual application.
Mactech already had much of that knowledge across its product pages, spec sheets, operating manuals, blogs, and other website content. The challenge was making it immediately accessible to a buyer with a very specific question.
There was another challenge hiding beneath the first: Mactech’s traditional forms and phone calls only revealed the questions visitors chose to bring directly to the team. They did not show all the questions buyers were asking while researching on their own.
The Solution
Mactech deployed the Navu Sidebar across its website and gave the assistant a fitting name: Mac.
Mac is grounded in Mactech’s own website content, including product information, operating manuals, spec sheets, and educational resources. That allows visitors to ask detailed questions in natural language and receive answers without searching across multiple pages or waiting for someone from Mactech to respond.
As Luke Wittenbraker, Marketing and Sales Director, put it: “Mac works 24/7, feeds directly off the information we provide him, and gets people the information they need without putting strain on our admin or inside sales teams.”
When a visitor is ready to speak with someone, Mac can also connect them with the sales team.
The implementation was backed by a human team Wittenbraker found equally important.
“The people behind Navu are wonderful to work with and responsive. In a world where AI chatbots can have negative connotations, their human team is surprisingly easy to get in touch with. That’s a powerful thing.”
The Results
For buyers, Mac can turn a highly specific technical question into an immediate next step.
One visitor came directly to Mactech’s Portable Mills product page with a particular machining application in mind. They asked:
“would this work on a stripper plate cutting 2″ wide by 1″ deep slot”
“The MT4 LRA Portable Milling Machine is well-suited for this type of application. It is a precision 3-axis linear rail mill designed for close-tolerance milling, drilling, and boring on-site.
Key Capabilities for Your Task:
- Precision: The rigid construction and precision feed screws ensure accurate machining for slots and other features.
- Versatility: It can be welded, clamped, bolted, or magnetically attached directly to your stripper plate in any orientation.
- Power: You can choose from hydraulic, electric, or air drives to match the requirements of your material and cut depth.
- Boring Capacity: For reference, it is capable of boring holes up to 6-1/2 inches in diameter.
We offer this machine for both sale and rental.”
The visitor received an answer tailored to their exact application and filled out the form on the same page.
That is the most obvious value of Navu: helping a technical buyer get enough information to take the next step.
But for Mactech, conversions have only been part of the story.
“The real gold has come through the conversations, not through the conversions,” Wittenbraker said.
Navu gives Mactech a record of what visitors actually ask, including questions that never reach a form or phone call.
Reviewing these records then uncovered new content opportunities. Repeated pricing questions prompted Wittenbraker to add price ranges to product pages, which Mac could then use in future answers. A question about cutting H piles revealed a gap on the website. Another about diamond-wire cutting speeds inspired Mactech to turn an internal Excel calculator into a web-based tool.
Each conversation gives Mactech a clearer view of what buyers need—and what the marketing team should build next.
What it Means
For Mactech, Navu is doing more than answering questions. It is creating a continuous feedback loop between buyers and the marketing team.
A visitor asks a question. Mac either answers it from Mactech’s existing knowledge or exposes a gap. The marketing team can then add a price, create a page, develop a tool, or clarify existing content. Once that information is on the website, Mac can use it to better serve the next visitor.
That turns previously invisible buyer questions into actionable marketing intelligence.
Now, Mactech’s team can:
- Answer highly specific application and product questions at the moment of intent
- Convert technical research into direct sales opportunities
- Discover gaps in pricing, content, and website tools from real visitor conversations
Wittenbraker sees that human element as essential to getting the most from AI.
“Some of the best value comes from you, as a human, thinking about and answering the questions that other humans are asking your AI tool.”
The better Mactech understands those questions, the better its website becomes. And the better its website becomes, the more useful Mac becomes to the next buyer.
This case is one example of how Navu boosts lead conversion by helping B2B companies make their websites smarter and more responsive to visitor needs. Want to learn more? Read about how Sidebar users are 4.7x more likely to convert.
