These are two products that I love; Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn. Back in the day, I wrote a step by step guide on how to get them both working together – long before Microsoft started flirting with the idea of owning their own social network.

There is no better social network than LinkedIn when it comes to business-to-business (B2B) relationship discovery or, more to the point, people-to-people (P2P) relationships with a professional focus.

Gone are the days of using the Yellow Pages, Wards Business Directory or some localized version of these (my sales manager back in the early 90’s used to refer to these books as LEADS 😊 just waiting for me to cold call them).

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, there was much rejoicing by everyone that worked in Dynamics. Not because we would now have access to this massive data set of Leads 😉, but because we thought we would get an AWESOME integration between Dynamics and LinkedIn.

What has changed since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn?

A couple of things has changed since the announcement of the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft.  Salesforce’s Marc Benioff chucked his toys about the sale not been fair; hand that guy a wet wipe and Sippy cup.

Microsoft and LinkedIn have continued to run independently of each other in the way they do business with the public.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in play, and everyone is extremely cautious when it comes to Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

LinkedIn Integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales

As of today, we have the following visible integration between Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn for Leads, Contacts, and Accounts.

Lead Entity

Account Entity

Also, on the Lead and Contact record, you can access the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tab for this view:

Okay, not too bad, but I had close to that before the acquisition, sure there’s been a little UI tweak here and there, but is that it?

I can now message from within the LinkedIn embedded area, but that is a little broken.

Say I want to create an activity like a LinkedIn Message, why is it not in the same place as all other activities?  Also, if I am sending this from Dynamics 365 why would I need a checkbox called CRM (we don’t even call it CRM anymore)?

Let me be clear, I am not asking Microsoft to pull data from LinkedIn into Dynamics 365 for Sales, but there is no reason why some data like messages created in Dynamics 365 as a LinkedIn Message type should not be accessible from the create new Activity part of Dynamics.

I feel like this is a minimum viable product to tick the box and show them working together. But for the hard working salesperson, they have to do all of the real work in LinkedIn Sales Navigator when it comes to working with potential new customers.

10 Ways to Improve the Dynamics 365/LinkedIn integration

1. Explore the use of Virtual Entities to allow data to be visualized from LinkedIn in Dynamics 365 for Sales while staying GDPR compliant.
2. Upgrade the integration to include LinkedIn Activity types natively in Dynamics 365.
3. Why are there no tools in the Account entity of Dynamics 365 to target industries? If there were, we could rack them, sort them, filter them – so many possibilities.
4. What about SMBs, Start-Ups or Medium sized business? Based on the minimum seat number required for LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team (minimum of 10 – $11,988.80 per year) or LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise (minimum license number unknown, but anytime you see Contact us on a website in the pricing section you know you’re going to have to sell a superyacht to cover the cost)
5. Smart Notifications. If I am working with a company and there is a relationship between Dynamics 365 for Sales and the LinkedIn record, it should be possible to let me know when they increase in staff. It shows on the LinkedIn Company page, so why not start using that information proactively?
6. Maybe we could start seeing some examples of ‘smart’ PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) on the roadmap showing Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn working together.
7. Address the delay in the form load of the current component.
8. Provide me with the ability to link a Contact or Account when your search/match tool fails (oh and it does fail from time to time).
9. Is anyone asking the right question? How can we make the Dynamics 365/LinkedIn integration nothing short of amazing for people other than TSPs and SSPs doing their sales pitch?
10. Is there a dedicated engineering team (R&D) with in-depth knowledge of sales or at least access to people that do represent Microsoft target customer base? Does coming up with ideas to make this better keep them up at night?

As I said at the start, I love these two applications, but there is massive room for improvement in how they play together.

The integration should be a showcase of how to integrate third-party software and data with Dynamics 365, and the minimum pay to play should be more affordable than it is currently.

If some Design Thinking workshops were run on this topic, and an engineering team had the resources (and legal approval), I bet we could develop a backlog of features tied to tangible benefits that would have business owners selling their private jets, and sales team giving up their gold watch, to get access to such an income generating tool.

This is just me spitballing on the weekend.

Check out my previous post – Dynamics 365 for Sales has not Changed in 20 Years.