How to use Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to generate leads from LinkedIn

With Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, you can attract the leads on LinkedIn™ that fit your guidelines and automatically import them into Sales, Customer Service, or the other apps included in the Dynamics Suite. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and the LinkedIn Sales Navigator are two features that are included in LinkedIn’s Marketing & Sales Solutions that aim to simplify how organizations capture and nurture leads, both of which are designed to integrate well with Dynamics 365.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms automatically enter the personal information that’s required when filling out a form online. How much more likely would you be to submit a form if your information was preloaded into the form and all you had to do was click submit? This is exactly how Lead Gen Forms work.

The Forms can be applied at no additional cost to LinkedIn sponsored content, campaigns, and InMail messages. When the content or ad is clicked on, a form appears pre-filled with the information from that user’s account. Details provided from submissions can be altered to include things like job title, location, company name, or other relevant information. To ensure that the leads you’re obtaining are of a high quality, custom items like checkboxes, call-to-actions, and questions can be placed on forms. Lead Gen Forms do not carry any additional costs, but they can only be used on LinkedIn sponsored content and InMail messages, which are paid advertising channels available through LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an add-on application available through LinkedIn that gives sales teams a boost in capturing and nurturing leads. It provides features like Advanced lead and company search, lead recommendations, deals, organic marketing alerts, and more. It also contains features included in LinkedIn Premium accounts, such as InMail messages, but these are significantly enhanced and more powerful in the Sales Navigator. With its range of different tools and features, the Sales Navigator is quite a bit more complex to use than Lead Gen Forms. Organizations will need to determine internally how exactly the Sales Navigator and its features will be adopted, though LinkedIn does provide best practices and learning opportunities. A comprehensive list of features included in each Sales Navigator plan can be found here.

The Sales Navigator carries a monthly charge of $79/user/month for Professional or $129/user/month for Team. Enterprise pricing is available by contacting LinkedIn and all prices can be reduced by choosing to pay annually.

Integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Lead Gen Forms

Connecting LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps is a quick process that starts with downloading the Dynamics 365 Connector for LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. Once installed, two new security roles will appear in Dynamics 365– Lead Gen Forms Administrator & Salesperson. The Administrator will determine lead matching strategies, field mapping, and other settings while the Salesperson can authorize syncs and view details. Once the two apps are synced, leads and their associated details will be available in D365. Users can see the most recent synchronization, including number of new or updated records, by going to Sales > LinkedIn Lead Gen > Sync Status.

With the integration completed, Administrators can import or build new lead matching strategies to determine how leads are brought in from LinkedIn. Microsoft recommends deploying simple strategies based on attributes like phone number or email address to avoid duplicate records. The default strategy that’s activated in Dynamics 365 uses email address. Leads that come in from Lead Gen Forms will be sourced to LinkedIn™ Sponsored Content.

Sales Navigator

To Integrate the Sales Navigator, you will similarly start by downloading the LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Dynamics 365 app in AppSource and then enabling it in Dynamics 365. Once enabled, there are two control options available – Sales Navigator Lead shows information about member profiles and Sales Navigator Account shows LinkedIn company profiles.

The Sales Navigator is a proprietary LinkedIn product and as a result, its core capabilities exist in LinkedIn and not Dynamics 365. What this means is the high-value features that bring in leads and move them towards a purchase only exist in LinkedIn. What the integration does is sync those leads into your instance of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and create new or update existing records. There are similarly some significant capabilities only available when the two are integrated that don’t exist in solely one app or the other.