Integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 Sales

When integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can provide sales teams with crucial information regarding their opportunities directly in the Dynamics 365 interface. But what is 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.

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator in Dynamics 365

The major addition to customer records in Dynamics 365 when LinkedIn Sales Navigator is enabled is a LinkedIn card that provides insight into their LinkedIn activity including headline information, recent news, job changes, and recent activities. With this embedded card Salespeople can easily review this information on the contact record to ensure their communication with the customer is timely and relevant. See a timeline of communication activities across Dynamics 365, Outlook, and LinkedIn with a focused activity window right on the Dynamics 365 record.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator also handles much of the info gathering usually placed upon the salesperson. Sales Navigator can put together a visualization of the organizational chart related to opportunities based on their LinkedIn profiles. This information can be vital for salespeople to target decision makers in the organization. A secondary tab also gathers recommended leads from the organization based on their role or title for salespeople to review as needed. Dynamics 365 administrators can customize forms to show LinkedIn Sales Navigator profiles an any layout needed to fit their unique business needs.

Beyond the changes to the unified interface, the most important aspect of the integration is the data sync and activity writeback between the two systems. When synced to Dynamics 365, Sales Navigator will include direct links to lead and account records in Dynamics 365 making navigation between the two systems seamless. Sales Navigator will also include filters for leads based on whether they are active contacts or leads in Dynamics 365 already.  

Getting started

To Integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365, you will need  to download the LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Dynamics 365 app from AppSource and enable 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.