LinkedIn acquires sales presentation app maker PointDrive

LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired PointDrive, a provider of sales presentation tools, as part of efforts to empower more salespeople across its professional social network. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but most of the PointDrive team will be joining LinkedIn’s engineering, product, and sales teams.

When the deal closes sometime this year, the soon-to-be Microsoft-owned company said that it’ll “continue to honor the agreements PointDrive has in place” regarding the confidentiality of its customers’ sales prospects.

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Founded in 2013 by David Pessis and Bill Burnett, PointDrive is a sales-oriented application aimed at helping salespeople share content with customers. It takes any file, link, or video and packages it up so you can pass it along to sales prospects, with the intention of creating an engaging presentation and, ultimately, sealing the deal.

LinkedIn will be integrating PointDrive’s technology into its Sales Solutions portfolio, which has been slowly updated over the past year in an effort to show the effectiveness of the professional social network. “We believe that combining our network and product with their content-sharing application will help to better position LinkedIn as a system of engagement, where sales professionals can build stronger relationships with customers and prospects,” said David Thacker, LinkedIn’s vice president of product.

The goal is to strengthen LinkedIn’s offering around social selling, which has been defined as leveraging social media to engage with buyers, with the aim of landing a sale. It’s the new version of “cold calling.” When LinkedIn launched the offering years ago, it promised to let salespeople find relevant prospects through LinkedIn’s professional database. And with the launch of Sales Navigator two years ago, LinkedIn has slowly started to build out more capabilities for representatives and agents to manage their social selling activities. Past updates include the acquisition of predictive marketing firm Fliptop in August, launching an integration with Salesforce, and debuting a metric for salespeople to benchmark their performance.

This isn’t the first time that LinkedIn and PointDrive have had a business relationship. In fact, for the past year, LinkedIn has been a customer of PointDrive, which is likely how an acquisition became possible. Now, salespeople on the social network will have native access to features within the app. Other customers include Salesforce, Lockton, JLL, Huron Legal, and TransPerfect.