LinkedIn Brings a Step-Change in Market Intelligence for Dynamics CRM Users

In announcing this week's agreement for Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner outlined several broad areas where they believe the two companies can begin to come together.

One of the most obvious opportunities will be a robust integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn's vast graph of professional relationships, employment history, job details, and other organizational data. There is an existing integration between LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics CRM, but by most accounts the current offering remains under-used and under-developed.

But, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner told analysts earlier this week, "now we'll be able to take that business intelligence tool Sales Navigator, deeply integrate that into Dynamics and CRM, and we believe we can change the game that way."

With its premier position in the professional social networking space, LinkedIn has long been considered one of the most valuable single sources for information about sales leads, accounts. But strict new rules introduced in 2015 that govern access to LinkedIn's API have were a lesson to other software vendors that operating in the social CRM and market intelligence space could not begin and end with one social network.

LinkedIn is not the only source that sales teams need today, says Umberto Milletti, founder CEO of InsideView, an independent software vendor in the market intelligence space with over 20,000 customers and a longtime partnership with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team. He says the changes to the LinkedIn API access in 2015 taught his company more about what his clients really need when it comes to sales intelligences.

"We learned that LinkedIn is a ...