Innofactor Oyj : LinkedIn now with Microsoft 365 solutions

Nearly a year ago, Microsoft's LinkedIn trade was announced. In December, the deal came into effect and now LinkedIn can be paired with Dynamics 365 and Office 365. Yesterday at WTC New York, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and his team revealed how Dynamics 365 users can benefit from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Talent.

We use LinkedIn to keep up with competences our business network information as well as our own business profile information. Now all this is available from inside the Dynamics 365 and can be combined with your company's existing customer information. The goal is to empower your employees and their networks, make more and better deals and serve your customers better (Relationship Sales).

From Dynamics 365 it is possible to see the existing LinkedIn network: who in your organization already knows the customer and its employees. LinkedIn Sales Navigator will also tell you in real time when people are moving on with their careers and where. Everybody maintains their own profile information in LinkedIn and content is more accurate than in the services provided by any 3rd party. It is crucial to be aware when these moves are happening, LinkedIn helps with that: giving alarms and news feeds.

Some of us have been using LinkedIn for communication as well. But those communication threads have been separate mailboxes, not connected to our businesses, organization or processes. We are used to copying emails and meetings from Outlook and Office 365 to Dynamics 365 customer information (Account, Contact, Opportunity, Lead etc). In the future, the same can be done from LinkedIn, for LinkedIn messages.

Even if you do not want to copy your emails or communication threads from LinkedIn to your CRM system (Dynamics 365 for Sales) you can see these emails in Dynamics 365 entities. As well as emails from Office 365. This is done dynamically every time you open the contact card. These insights come from your own Office 365 mailbox and your own LinkedIn Messages but are not visible to anybody else in your organization. For example, if you want to share them - you can click once to copy them to your Dynamics 365 Sales. These insights make it easier to keep up with customer communication right when you need that information: during the sales process or serving the customer.

The Talent module includes prospecting; finding a suitable candidate from LinkedIn through competencies. It also includes messaging, interview scheduling (syncing with existing Office 365 calendar reservations for the interviewers) and interview comments. And after a hire - Talent can be used to create an introduction program and provide access to team information even before employment begins (and the creation of an employer ID to AD) for a new employee.

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Of course, this Talent module can be used for recruitment, but LinkedIn can also act as a competence register for the company's own employees. You can empower the internal talent management by creating PowerApps and using Flow, or with Power BI's dashboards to keep up with your employees' certificates and competences.

Bringing LinkedIn into Microsoft's cloud services and towards Common Data Service (a common database model for Dynamics Services) will certainly bring a great deal of additional opportunities for business development and automation of processes in an easy and quick way. With no coding, only configuring.

(pictures from Microsoft webinar yesterday)

Mari Yliperttula
Director

The author works as Director in Business Productivity unit and is strongly involved in the offering development. Follow Mari on Twitter @MYliperttula!