Mediafly makes its latest in a long list of acquisitions. Find out why it’s a key one for the revenue enablement platform.
From founder-led to professional management
Mediafly is not a young company, but being founder-led, it has acted like one for the last eighteen-plus years. Over the last seven years, it has made seven acquisitions, including this latest one, each one bringing unique capabilities to the platform:
- Alinean for Value (ROI) selling (2018)
- Presentify for presentation software (2020)
- InsightSquared for revenue intelligence (2021)
- Aptology for behavioral matching (talent intelligence) for salespeople (2022)
- ExecVision for coaching and call recording (2022)
- Dooly for deal rooms (2024)
- Appinium for learning management (2025)
At some point, it’s time to move from founder-led to a more professional business, and that’s why in early 2024, co-CEOs Carson Conant (Mediafly’s founder) and Mary Shea exited the company, and Bill Walsh took the reins as CEO.
Walsh was not new to the company; he was the CEO and founder of Aptology and is a six-time CEO (now seven), including with companies such as Navis, Zebra Enterprise Solutions, and PeopleSoft. His mission is to take Mediafly into its next phase of growth, which he pointed out is a natural progression for the company.
Mediafly isn’t just a mix of acquired companies. The biggest engagement capabilities of its offering were built in-house and are competitive with similar offerings, such as ShowPad, Seismic, and HighSpot. Its biggest competitor differentiator to date is its focus on content, which includes everything from interactive presentations to ROI calculators, coaching data, and learning materials.
Now, Walsh says, it’s time to digest and integrate with the goal of making the company strong and profitable:
“Some of our competitive differentiator products, like Coach and Value, are an additive to the standard checklist of things that people do, and so we’re excited to bring all of these to bear. Now, with having LMS, I think we’re in the conversation, and once you’re in the conversation, I think we’re happy and excited to show some of the other offerings we have and what you can do with that complete picture”
Why Appinium?
Why did Mediafly select Appinium to bring learning management capabilities into the platform? The LMS is the only one natively built on the Salesforce AppExchange and has won awards for the most innovative ISV on the AppExchange. Founded in 2014, Appinium helps companies onboard, certify, and train employees, customers, and partners.
Walsh explains that this acquisition was key for Mediafly for two reasons:
- It strengthens Mediafly’s position in the revenue enablement market. All of its competitors have an LMS, but Mediafly partnered to get the functionality. Partnering was often challenging as competitors began acquiring their LMS partners. Additionally, not having a native LMS offering was causing Mediafly to rank lower on analysts’ lists.
- It is a strategic acquisition that will bring in more logos and revenue, creating a wider footprint. Appinium is a global company with a lot of big-name companies across every industry.
Owning a native application in the Salesforce App Exchange gives Mediafly a new strategic ecosystem to play in. Walsh explains that companies that are Salesforce users prefer to use applications that are natively built on Salesforce because they can move seamlessly between them:
“When you’re built natively, you are part of their desktop. So it’s not really a fair competition with our competitors as it relates to salespeople at Salesforce. They want to keep us; they want to keep natively built solutions at the top of their list because it keeps them on the desktop.”
Meeting reps where they are, with the tools they need
Mediafly operates on the belief that it needs to meet sales reps where they are. Walsh said they want to enable salespeople to focus on building relationships and understanding their customers’ needs—the things AI and chatbots will never replace.
It aims to make the rest of their job, including data and content, seamless for them, and that’s where AI and agentic come in. As Walsh notes:
“We want to make sure they get the right content for the right customer at the right time.”
With the acquisition of Appinium, Walsh said they can leapfrog competitors in a few areas. First, they have a heavier content side compared to others. They also have the coaching and value-selling capabilities that others lack, and they have access to direct data from the LMS and Salesforce. Second, they now have access to data that provides a more comprehensive picture of a salesperson’s performance. Walsh provides an example:
“We have a Coach product which allows you to record salespeople, and you can hear on a call maybe where a salesperson isn’t quite strong at one particular thing, let’s say, closing, or getting the next meeting, or whatever it happens to be. That data can now funnel into our LMS system, so we can tailor learning offerings for the salesperson based on the areas that they need to be strengthened, and not just a generic set of courses and recommendations. That’s just an example of where owning all the data and having all of these systems and solutions wrap really nicely together. So that’s a huge strategic element for us.”
Moving forward
Walsh sees two key opportunities for Appinium. First, they can rebuild some of the technology and functionality from Appinium in the Mediafly platform. And second, they can extend Mediafly functionality to the Salesforce platform. Mediafly wants to be the “go-to partner of choice” for anything it offers on Salesforce, which could be a game-changing competitive differentiator:
“I’ll use an example with our Value product. The value space, and it might not be one you know a lot about, and by the way, most people don’t, it’s a kind of smaller, but a really growing space with technology to help prove and show your ROI for your services and products. But imagine re-platforming that natively on Salesforce. You’re already using Appinium, and you click a button, and you can also use Value and help your customers see what kind of return they would get by using your product. There’s a heck of a lot of Salesforce customers out there, and a lot of them that would love to use Value. And if we were that easy to just switch out of the Salesforce system and into our own app, it would be a pretty easy adoption.”
Will there be two versions of Mediafly going forward? One on the AppExchange, and one standalone? No. There will always be shared elements. Walsh said they are looking at how to build in a way that minimizes duplication. For example, what can they keep in the back office, and what can they build using a lighter layer on Salesforce? This, said Walsh, is the perfect opportunity to leverage agentic AI.
As for the next steps for Mediafly with this acquisition completed, Walsh shares:
“Appinium is a smaller company than Mediafly, and we have far more resources and capabilities. We would like to bring those to bear to really accelerate their business and go after more of the business inside Salesforce and close it at a quicker pace. So think of that as sort of a version one is standalone. How can we help them as is, without any technological changes, to do more? And that’s obviously marketing and sales, and some discipline and process. So we’re going to really focus on that.”
The next step will be to sell Appinium to Mediafly’s customers. Almost 75% of Mediafly’s customers are also Salesforce customers, so Walsh sees an opportunity to sell Appinium to customers who don’t currently have an LMS or are unhappy with their current one.
In the background of all this, the company will be working on integrating the LMS with Mediafly and then pushing Mediafly capabilities into the Appinium application.
Regarding the Appinium employees and brand, all employees are joining Mediafly, and the company will continue to operate as usual, with Mediafly supporting them for now. Appinium is a highly recognized name in Salesforce, whereas Mediafly is not, so they don’t want to lose that mindshare.
Walsh said that in the future, they will determine the right time to bring the two companies together, possibly even creating a new brand name for the company overall.
Mediafly also has a big SAP partnership and a partnership with Litmos, an LMS that was acquired by SAP but sold in 2022 to Francisco Partners. Going forward, Walsh suggests: Litmos would be their LMS partner for customers who don’t use Salesforce:
“We’re kind of in a new place right now. I mean, we went from not a young company, but it’s certainly been a startup. It went through a lot of acquisitions and a lot of energy, and I think we’re kind of bringing all that together and a little bit more professional management. I think a much more solid, financially run company, which is really important, because we have very big customers who have expectations that you’re here to stay, and we’re here to stay. We’ve got great investors.”
“We’ve raised money again recently, just obviously, when you’re acquiring companies, you’re going in the right direction in terms of, you know, you’ve got to have good financial backers to do those things. I think we’ve done a lot of the blocking and tackling to put ourselves in a position to start delivering the exciting results we shared earlier. So it’s kind of a new day here at Mediafly, and this acquisition, to me, gets us in the bigger picture. We’re ready to innovate. We’re ready to compete.”
My take
The revenue (sales) enablement market is a highly competitive, in-demand space. It’s a space where sales and marketing come together to ensure sales have everything needed to help customers make the right purchase decision. That’s a challenge in itself and a story for another day.
It’s also a space that provides salespeople with the tools they need to not only help customers but also improve their own skills. That’s why having a built-in Learning Management System (LMS) is so important. Being able to seamlessly integrate performance monitoring and sales training enables a more personalized and contextual support experience for salespeople. Something that can not only make them better at their jobs but also drive more revenue for their companies.
Comments are closed.