Microsoft bought LinkedIn in December last year for $26billion, and now the company has introduced its first major integration. We’re looking forward to seeing how developers and others in the chain take advantage of this new integration. The corporation has taken the excellent step of connecting LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool to Dynamics 365, enabling salespeople to access its 500-million-user database.

Empowering teams

This means that sales teams across the world will now be empowered through LinkedIn’s fantastic 500-million-strong user data. Salespeople will now be able to tap into their personal and professional contacts lists to be able to improve the effectiveness of their own pipelines. According to Scott Guthrie, executive VP for Microsoft’s enterprise and cloud group, “Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 will dramatically increase the effectiveness of salespeople by tapping into their professional networks and relationships, giving them the ability to improve their pipeline.”

Complete integration

This all goes back to the reason that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for in the first place: to work towards the full integration of its enterprise and productivity software portfolio to enhance the productivity of individuals, teams and organisations across the world. David Obrand, COO at Radius, explained, "Applications will now be required to contain not just workflow capabilities, but network effect driven data and intelligence as well. Achieving critical mass with data and intelligence takes time and has been the focus of companies including Radius and LinkedIn. Combining workflow with network effect driven data and intelligence creates a massive competitive advantage for B2B Marketing and Sales leaders. Those that remain tethered to traditional data sets will constantly find themselves late to every sales and marketing opportunity." As David notes, those salespeople taking advantage of this new integration will be one step ahead in the race to generate that next lead. And of course, whilst the technology itself is interesting, what we are really intrigued to see is how this technology will impact Dynamics development resource across the world – particularly in the UK and US, where adoption of Dynamics 365 has been most rapid. We expect to see new Partner CRM solutions enter the marketplace with access to this technology over the coming year. That said, however, we believe that overall, it is great to finally see Microsoft begin to take full advantage of what was an expensive acquisition, and we are excited to see where the data from LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool appears next. If you would like to keep up to date with the goings on in the Dynamics industry, feel free to read our blog. If you would like to speak with one of our friendly, expert consultants, contact us directly today on +44 (0)1483 233 000 for our UK team, and +1 646 202 1761 for our team in the US. Contact us online here.