Nova (YC W16) Helps Salespeople Send Highly Personalized Emails, at Scale

by Y Combinator3/8/2016

Many salespeople send out hundreds of impersonal, template-based emails per day in an effort to garner more sales. This is bad for business: It makes a bad first impression, triggers spam blocking, and wastes leads. More personalized emails are vastly more effective, but naturally require much more time.

Nova is a company launching out of our Winter 2016 class that provides an alternative. Nova is a tool that creates and sends highly personalized emails on behalf of salespeople. According to Nova, this leads to salespeople booking 3x as many meetings by spending half of the time they normally would.

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney wrote about Nova in a story published recently:

“Sometimes generating leads is about finding connections wherever you
can. I went to school at X too!’ ‘X is a great cause, my brother has
done some work with them also.’ And so on and so forth.

The problem for salespeople is braving the firehose of information
available online to find these connection points easily and quickly.
YC-backed Nova is an
email analytics platform that also uses artificial intelligence to
scrape through a contact’s online identity and generate a personalized
introductory paragraph that salespeople can add to their pitches.

The software, which integrates directly into a user’s inbox, tracks
the rate of opens, clicks, replies and bounces for sales pitches. A key
to boost those numbers, Nova CEO Will Dinkel tells me, is email
personalization.”

Read the full story on TechCrunch here.

Author

  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon