Microsoft-LinkedIn Deal to Revolutionise Dynamics CRM

Last week, Microsoft announced plans to acquire LinkedIn in an all-cash deal worth a whopping $26.2bn. This is believed to have significant impact on Dynamics CRM, with the potential to boost productivity, selling and marketing. If you are an existing Dynamics CRM, now known as Dynamics 365, user or considering a CRM investment, here we look at how you can benefit from this future integration.

According to Hubspot.com, an average sales professional logs more than 2000 hours annually on emails, meetings and gathering information. Following the acquisition, Microsoft aims to address this by making the most of the big data available in LinkedIn, automating social workflows.

LinkedIn integration has the power to transform the sales cycle with actionable real-time insights to enhance lead generation, open conversations and close deals. For Dynamics CRM customers, this means efficiency gains and more importantly a vast amount of data to work with.

Here is what you can expect following the acquisition

Improved data quality

According to Gartner, the deal will solve the CRM challenge of access to accurate, timely data. LinkedIn data can feed into your Dynamics CRM software in real-time, providing better targeting and improved audience engagement. This will be extremely beneficial for sales, marketing and customer service representatives, allowing them to work with the most up-to-date information, because users maintain it themselves.

Enhanced Sales Navigator

An existing integration between LinkedIn and Dynamics CRM – Sales Navigator – allows you to view LinkedIn information about leads, contacts and accounts right in Dynamics CRM. Designed to feed the sales pipeline, it enables sales professionals to find prospects and generate more leads. Following the acquisition of LinkedIn, Microsoft is looking to transform the application from a lead generation service into a fully automated sales tool, supporting you through the entire sales process, from prospecting to a closed deal.

Enhanced automation

Prospecting through LinkedIn, recording leads in the CRM and setting future reminders to follow up is a manual process, impacting on employee productivity. Microsoft-LinkedIn integration can resolve this by giving you the ability to automatically import contact or company information into your CRM. Saving you thousands of hours every year, this will help you stay on top of your accounts, significantly improving lead generation.

Social listening intelligence

With an impressive network of more than 433 million professionals, Linkedin will make ‘social selling’ a reality. The integration can enable you to easily analyse conversations in LinkedIn groups, users’ updates and their articles in order to create buying personas and strategically target prospects with the right message.

Improved Lead Scoring Mechanism

LinkedIn updates (liking the company’s page, updates by team members) might become the basis for lead scoring. This real-time data could help you prioritize prospects, streamlining sales processes for a better return on investment.

Announcing the deal, Microsoft and LinkedIn outlined a vision in which LinkedIn is closely connected with Dynamics CRM and other Microsoft products including Windows, Outlook, Skype and Office productivity tools, “changing the way the world works”. Combining the professional knowledge and data, this acquisition will definitely improve productivity and lead generation processes to meet the needs of businesses like yours, both now and in the future.

Find out more about Dynamics 365 here.