LinkedIn Corp. has acquired a small startup company that builds products that enhance sales and marketing productivity.

Heighten Software Inc.‘s technology improves the sales process through better tracking, pipeline reporting and an intelligent notepad. It has only 10 employees but raised $7.4 million in funding prior to the LinkedIn buyout. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

LinkedIn didn’t immediately outline specific plans to integrate the technology into its Sales Navigator prospecting tool, and in fact used language that made the acquisition sound as much like a recruiting move as a technology purchase.

“Over the next few months, we will be evaluating which of Heighten’s features we’ll be bringing to Sales Navigator,” Doug Camplejohn, head of products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “I’m also excited by the caliber of talent that Heighten brings to LinkedIn.”

Although LinkedIn became part of Microsoft Corp. six months ago, it chose to make the acquisition announcement itself rather than rely on its corporate parent. “LinkedIn continues to operate as an independent company,” a spokeswoman said.

LinkedIn has been aggressively enhancing its Sales Navigator prospecting tool of late, recently adding a high-end enterprise edition. The company is walking a fine line in not enabling Sales Navigator to become competitive with Microsoft’s own Dynamics customer relationship management, while at the same time integrating with Microsoft competitors such as Salesforce.com Inc.

“Our flagship product is meant to complement CRM tools, not compete with them,” the spokeswoman said.

Heighten, which says its mission is to “help salespeople operate faster and smarter than ever before,” has a sales process tracking feature that essentially automates the sales playbook, making it easier to see actions and content relevant to each pipeline stage.

The sales pipeline reporting feature gives managers and reps are more efficient view of current opportunities with all changes automatically written back to the CRM back-end. The intelligent notepad makes it easy for reps to take free-form notes and rapidly synch them with their CRM system with a single click.

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