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.

You get started with the software by dumping a batch of email addresses in along with the text of your specific pitch. Nova follows up by delving into the contacts and pulling info from public online sources and social media accounts to look for areas of connection.

It’s first-and-foremost an analytics platform so Dinkel tells me the platform will learn over time what approach works best with a salesperson’s specific set of customers, whether that’s highlighting connections related to education history, shared hobbies or recent public work.
After the introductory couple of sentences is slapped onto the top of the email, the salesperson gets a preview and can edit the intro paragraph accordingly before letting Nova ship out a batch of messages.
The idea that software for artificially relating to someone on a personal level exists is both alarming and kind of hilarious, but it’s ultimately a byproduct of how important creating swaths of connections is for salespeople. I must say I’m kind of dreading the day when I open my email and see an endless stream of messages from random people who seem to know a creepy amount about me, but hey, it’s the world we live in.
The Nova platform is available to any company with a Gmail account. It integrates cleanly with a little button at the top of your inbox that lets you dive right into the analytics on your recent email blasts of formulaic friendly greetings.
