3 Social Selling Tools That Will Change How You Prospect in 2016

Let's cut the fluff and get to it. Here are three gnarly tools that you should be leveraging in your day-to-day sales workflow:

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1. Nova (My latest discovery and current favorite sales tool)

Nova.ai allows you to 3x your sales meetings in 1/2 the time. How the heck do they accomplish this? Nova is able to harness the power of public online data and social media data to generate a personalized email campaign that's automated (think of it as an automated or semi-automated hyper personalized email drip campaign to your prospects). You'll have to see it for yourself to believe it. For example, let's say you've identified 300 of your perfect buyers and you want to reach out to them via email. Once you find their email addresses, all you have to do is upload the CSV file to Nova, and their artificial intelligence software will do its magic by finding the perfect personalization to that specific person and automatically including it in the email. According to Nova, "Emails enhanced by Nova get twice the open rates, and reps using Nova drive three times as many qualified leads per week." I recently met with Nova.ai's founders in San Francisco and they are too legit to quit. Nova's founders attended Ivy League schools including Harvard Business School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Need I say more? Try Nova.ai's free trial today before everybody else jumps on this :)

2. Charlie App

I've been using Charlie App for a few years now, and it has a made a huge difference by enabling me to have valuable conversations with our prospects and customers here at HireVue. Charlie app combs through 100's of sources and automatically sends you a one-pager on everyone you're going to meet with before you talk to them. Before using Charlie App, I was spending 15-20 minutes on Google and other social media channels trying to find relevant/current information about my buyer and their company so I could learn, taylor, and fit my message to them. Those days are now over. The best part about it- Charlie App is free. All you have to do is create an account, sync your work calendar and social media accounts, and you're good to go. 

3. Crystal 

One of my good friends and VP of People at HireVue, Ben Martinez, introduced me to this app/tool called Crystal about a year or so ago. Crystal shows you the best way to communicate with any prospect, customer, or partner based on their personality. With this app, you'll be able to build healthy and productive relationships by understanding the best methods and verbiage you should use when talking to that specific person. At the end of the day, when it comes to effective communication strategies, it's all about empathy. So how does it work? According to Crystal, the way it works is by analyzing public data to detect the personality of anyone with an online presence. They recently updated their Google Chrome extension which works seamlessly for Gmail, Twitter and LinkedIn. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

That's it and that's all peeps. If you liked what you read, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Peace!

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About Gabe Villamizar

Gabe Villamizar is recognized as a leading Social Selling influencer by Inc.com, Forbes.com, and Onalytica. He currently leads the social selling training and coaching efforts at HireVue, a SaaS company that uses digital video and predictive analytics to build and coach the world’s best teams. Prior to HireVue, Gabe was part of the sales and marketing teams at InsideSales.com where he tested, learned and developed his social selling training program.