To most of us, it looked like Microsoft was loosing the CRM fight to Salesforce, though with the recent purchase of LinkedIn the game has changed.
For years I have been working with social selling, using also LinkedIn Sales Navigator, CRM and marketing platforms as Sitecore and Episerver, and at all times challenged by customer data distributed in several and separate systems. This may finally change.
Just recently Sitecore released a new standard integration module to integrate their CMS (Experience Manager) with the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and with that users can enjoy customer data streaming between the platforms, allowing marketers to do advanced marketing automation in the marketing platform, and sales can enjoy close to real-time data about their clients use of the company’s online services.
Imagining LinkedIn data into this new connected scenario, with more than 433m members, that gives Microsoft CRM strong advantages.
In the future organizations can enjoy their CRM, as the only source for their sales people to spot new potential customers as they navigating their websites real-time. Or by browsing comprehensive LinkedIn data from within their own CRM system.
I wonder how soon we can have algorithms that do this for us, replacing sales peoples time consuming searching through data. I also wonder how soon we will experience to be targeted with auto generated InMails suggesting new vendors and services to us as individual professionals. For sure the recent more advanced programmatic advertising possibilities in LinkedIn, will be able to lead the way for this effort.
Exciting times ahead for marketers and sales teams with Microsoft CRM systems, and good luck to the rest of us, about 433m people just dreaming about a new job with our carefully updated LinkedIn profiles, dodging the computer tailored marketing bullets coming our way.
Game on!