LinkedIn Buys Sales Tech Startup, Heighten, to Aid Sales Productivity

LinkedIn, on Tuesday, announced that it is buying Heighten, a sales-tech company to enhance its offerings in their Sales Navigator tool, thereby adding more features intended to enhance the productivity of the sales teams.

LinkedIn aims to improve effectiveness of sales personnel throughout their sales cycle by incorporating the three key functional areas that Heighten offers into its own Sales Navigator product. These include sales process tracking, intelligent notepad and hyper-efficient pipeline, which together form Heighten’s intelligent workspace – collating important components of a sales rep’s requirements – CRM, calendar, email, social.

To elaborate, the sales process tracking feature aids Sales teams to have access to their strategies at all times so reps can know each other’s actions that met success. Besides this, sales-ready content that aligns to every prospect across various stages of the sales pipeline can be easily brought into play when needed.

The sales pipeline reporting option enables monitoring current opportunities with a capability of including details like sales volume, closing dates, at what stage is the sale cycle and the next steps all directly added into the CRM as well without any additional effort.

The intelligent notepad permits reps to jot down notes and ensure it gets added back into the CRM with just a click. The notepad feature lets sales reps have access to data on various deals like the person and account profiles, the competitor pitch and other important collaterals involved for any sales opportunities. Such on-demand information is made possible without depending on excessive CRM data entry activities.  

Doug Camplejohn, Head of Products, Sales Solutions at LinkedIn, spoke of the acquisition in his blogOpens a new window , “Over the next few months, we will be evaluating which of Heighten’s features we’ll be bringing to Sales Navigator. I’m also excited by the caliber of talent that Heighten brings to LinkedIn. Their team is world-class. We’re excited to see what the future brings with the Heighten team on board.”

Redwood-city based Heighten raised around $7 million in 2015. Following their acquisition, Heighten will discontinue their standalone offerings and concentrate on incorporating their product features with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator product.

Luke Braud, Founder and CEO at Heighten, wrote on his blog, “The Heighten intelligent workspace approach to sales productivity is a natural extension of LinkedIn’s goal to make Sales Navigator the best version of LinkedIn for Salespeople, the System of Engagement, and ultimately influence every relationship‐based sale for our customers. That’s why we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to partner with them to accelerate getting our capabilities in the hands of every salesperson in the world.”

Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn last year, has ensured the acquisition bears fruit, even as LinkedIn has been aggressively updating its Sales NavigatorOpens a new window product to be now fully integrated with the Dynamics 365 CRM.