How Mindbody increased sales-qualified lead conversion by 10% with Spara

Introduction

A brand with a unique challenge: optimizing the website for multiple audiences.

Mindbody's website attracts visitors from across the spectrum: enterprise sales prospects, owner-operators searching for software, and a steady stream of consumers who navigate over from the consumer business site. For their sales team, the challenge wasn't volume. It was signal. They needed to identify the right leads fast and route everyone else to the right path before sales resources were spent on visitors who were not business prospects.

For years, Mindbody relied on a legacy chatbot to manage this challenge, first with a traditional rule-based bot, then with AI-enabled functionality. When circumstances required Mindbody to reassess that prior solution, the team had to act quickly. Rather than rush into a replacement, Mindbody's marketing ops team used the window to do something they hadn't had time to do before: rigorously evaluate the AI chat market from scratch.

"What really made Spara stand out was how naturally the chat picks up key buyer details, even the ones it was never explicitly told to look for."

Vinicius RodriguesHead of Marketing Technology & Operations

Challenge

Three goals. One platform that needed to do all of them.

Mindbody's requirements weren't simple. As the team mapped out what they needed, three distinct goals emerged:

• Increase site-to-MQL conversion. The chat agent needed to be a genuine lead intake channel, catching interested visitors before they bounced, gathering their information, and moving them into the marketing funnel.

• Improve efficiency through smart deflection. Because Mindbody is simultaneously a B2B and B2C brand, a meaningful share of visitors are consumers who have no reason to fill out an enterprise demo form. A smarter chat agent could recognize consumer intent and redirect proactively.

• Enrich and qualify leads in conversation. Forms have a ceiling. A conversational AI could collect relevant qualification information from prospects, such as company size, use case, and urgency, in a more natural experience.

"Tree-based configuration doesn't scale, and it can't keep pace with what our marketing and sales teams are running. With Spara, we describe what we're going after and the agent figures out how to get there in the conversation."

Vanessa MancillaLead Marketing Technology Manager

What ultimately set Spara apart was something that sounds simple but proved remarkably hard to find: the ability to gather lead information from conversation, regardless of how the prospect answered.

Solution

A rigorous A/B test before a full site rollout.

Mindbody launched Spara in January 2026 and immediately structured a controlled experiment. Half of their site visitors continued to see the standard web experience. The other half saw a web experience enriched by Spara's AI chat as a new engagement channel. The test window ran for about a month, enough time for leads to move through the sales process before the final analysis.

The agent was trained to ask discovery-style questions, distinguish between business and consumer visitors, and guide qualified prospects toward demos while learning more about each one along the way.

The integration fed cleanly into Mindbody's existing Marketo and Salesforce infrastructure, ensuring leads captured by Spara flowed through the same funnel logic and were subject to the same filtering and rejection criteria as any other inbound source. That made the comparison to the control group a true apples-to-apples measurement.

Results

More qualified pipeline. Better leads. And a full rollout greenlit.

When the A/B test closed and results were compiled for Mindbody's CMO, the headline finding was clean. Spara showed meaningful improvements on the highest-value funnel metrics, and leadership approved a full site rollout.

The results validated what the team had bet on: quality over quantity. MQL-to-SQL conversion improved by 10.3%, the number Mindbody anchored on because it mapped directly to sales-ready pipeline. Closed-won deals were also up with Spara compared to the control group, a signal that Spara wasn't just improving top-of-funnel volume but accelerating the right opportunities all the way through.

10.3% reflects the lift in MQL-to-SQL conversion compared to control during Mindbody's January 21 to February 16, 2026 A/B test.

Why Spara

Flexible lead qualification. Multiple layouts. A team they trust.

When Mindbody's team reflects on what they'd tell others evaluating conversational AI platforms, three things stand out consistently.

• Lead extraction flexibility. Unlike tools that require explicit configuration for every intake field, Spara picks up on lead details naturally, even when a prospect answers five questions in one run-on sentence with no punctuation. For a team managing a complex lead intake process that feeds into Marketo's qualification logic, this capability mattered most.

• Chat layout options. The ability to deploy as either a search bar or a standard bottom-right chat bubble gives Mindbody options that match different visitor experiences. The team was also impressed by the ability to deploy media within the chat interface, opening the door to in-chat demos and videos.

• The team. Mindbody's day-to-day experience with Spara's customer success team was consistently cited as a highlight, with support and responsiveness that removed what might otherwise have been a meaningful barrier.

"The support has been huge. Ditte and the entire team have been awesome. That has not been a blocker, and that's saying something."

Vanessa MancillaLead Marketing Technology Manager

Looking ahead, Mindbody is already thinking about what's next: testing fully replacing forms with the chat agent, adding rich media like demo videos and PDFs into conversations, and testing email-continuation threads that let leads who engage on the site re-enter the conversation later via email.