Dynamics 365 & LinkedIn Sales Navigator: New Features Q1-2020

I wrote two other articles about Linkedin Sales Navigator and the Dynamics 365 integration, which can be found here (1) and here (2). Several new features were added to LinkedIn Sales Navigator between May 18 – June 15, 2020 which prompted me to write another article. These changes affect both the team edition and enterprise edition licenses. In this article I am going to focus on most of the the new features and changes regarding the Dynamics 365 CE integration. For more details on all the updates on Team Edition updates click here. For the Enterprise Edition updates click here. If you’re not sure which license you have, click here and log into your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account. This link will take you to the page listing your license.

Admin Console

The first thing I noticed is that the admin console for LinkedIn Sales Navigator looks different and there are three areas; admin home, admin settings and account center. Admin home shows all the actions you can perform as an admin, like team on boarding and activation, connecting your Dynamics 365 instance, and the ability to sync licenses with Dynamics 365. When you click on the last option this will take you to the account center page. The account center is where you can invite users and assign LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses. This is also the area where you can turn CRM sync on or off, change user permissions, remove users, etc.
When you click on the ‘connect your CRM’ button this will take you to the admin settings page. There are a few options that have been added to this page. You’ll see that under ‘Enable Sales Navigator data to sync back to CRM’ section now has Smart Links listed as well.

Smart Links

Smart Links will be replacing the PointDrive functionality, which allows Sales Navigator users to share content (I.E files and documents) with customers and prospects. When this content is accessed they will receive a notification email and the ‘view’ will also be visible on the contact record in Dynamics 365 (if there is a matched contact in Dynamics 365) as a ‘PointDrive Presentation Viewed’ activity. Users can share SmartLinks outside of Sales Navigator (I.E email, chat), but they also have the ability to attach them through LinkedIn messages. They can create a new SmartLink from within the context of an inmail or message by clicking the link icon in the bottom left side of the screen. Keep in mind that SmartLinks are available for both the team and enterprise licenses, however you’ll need an enterprise license for the CRM writeback.

Create Contact Record in Dynamics 365

The other interesting thing that most users have been waiting for is the ability to create a contact record in Dynamics 365 from a LinkedIn profile with one click of a button. No more copying and pasting data from Sales Navigator to Dynamics 365 Sales! Before you can enable this functionality you need to make sure CRM Sync is enabled and the ‘Auto sync all seat holders with CRM’ is set to ‘Yes’. This can be done by navigating to Admin settings > CRM Settings. When you scroll down you’ll see the added buttons that allow for an admin to turn contact creation on or off.

Besides enabling contact creation, admins can require an email address to be mandatory in order to create the contact in Dynamics 365. Lastly there is the ability to select the lead source value that should be associated to contacts created from Sales Navigator. This field is looking at the leadsourcecode field in Dynamics 365. Any values you have configured in that option set field will show here.

NOTE: If you have created your own custom lead source field you could put in a business rule to update your custom field with the Sales Navigator value based on the value in the leadsourcecode field.

The fields that will be available to the user when creating a contact from Sales Navigator to Dynamics 365 Sales are:

• Account
• Opportunity
• Stakeholder Role
• First Name (pre-populated by Sales Navigator)
• Last Name (pre-populated by Sales Navigator)
• Job Title (pre-populated by Sales Navigator)
• Country (pre-populated by Sales Navigator)
• Email
• Phone Number

When the user initiates contact creation from Sales Navigator there is a duplication check that will run on the Dynamics 365 contact records. If a duplicate is found, the user can simply click the match button. If there is not a duplicate contact record in Dynamics 365 for Sales, the user can move forward and create the contact record by completing the fields in Sales Navigator.

Users can create a contact from Sales Navigator by opening a LinkedIn profile in Sales Navigator. When they click on the ellipse (…) on the right hand side (next to ‘Message’) they will see the ‘Add contact to CRM’ option. Clicking this option will start the matching of an existing profile, if no contact is found in the Dynamics 365 database the ‘Create new contact’ form will open where the user can link the contact to an existing account. By selecting the account the opportunity field will filter to only show opportunities related to the selected account. Once the opportunity record has been selected, the user can select a stakeholder role. Users can also save the LinkedIn profile as a lead in Sales Navigator (checkbox in left bottom).

Notes

You can now set Sales Navigator notes to private (visible only to me) or public (visible to anyone on my contact), but its important to understand that these modes are only for Sales Navigator. If a user wants to synchronize the note to Dynamics 365 they can, but the ‘private’ and ‘public’ setting won’t be honored in Dynamics 365. Who has access to the note is depended on Dynamics 365 security roles.

The below video shows the new features. I hope you enjoyed this post! Be sure to check in again next week for another post or subscribe here to never miss another post!