News
LinkedIn-Dynamics 365 Sales Solution Launches
- By Gladys Rama
- July 10, 2017
- Complete Microsoft Inspire 2017 coverage here.
A new Microsoft solution that integrates the Dynamics 365 Sales app, Office 365 and Azure with LinkedIn's Sales Navigator tool is now generally available.
First announced in April, the new LinkedIn-integrated solution, dubbed Microsoft Relationship Sales, had its formal launch during Monday's opening keynote of the Microsoft Inspire partner conference in Washington, D.C.
Alysa Taylor, marketing general manager within Microsoft's Dynamics unit, gave a demonstration of Microsoft Relationship Sales during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote presentation, saying the solution is designed to enable salespeople "to have a holistic view of their business, to be able to engage their customers more effectively, and to network more efficiently."
Taylor's demo showed how Microsoft Relationship Sales uses Microsoft's various machine learning and data mining tools, combined with the PointDrive content-packaging system within LinkedIn, to give salespeople a complete view of all the assets related to a single deal.
Microsoft Relationship Sales gives salespeople "the ability...to take a variety of data sources and surface it in a way that's meaningful for a seller," Taylor said.
Pricing for Microsoft Relationship Sales starts at $135 per user per month, which Taylor claimed in a blog post is roughly 50 percent lower than comparable products.
Other Dynamics 365-related announcements at Inspire on Monday included:
- Two new Dynamics 365 apps, Dynamics 365 for Retail and Dynamics 365 for Talent, are expected to be released by the end of July.
- New Sales and Marketing apps in the Dynamics 365 Business Edition are now available for preview via the Dynamics 365 Insider program.
- Earlier this month, Microsoft activated a "hybrid deployment" capability allowing users to run some Dynamics 365 components out of their on-premises datacenters.