I’m thrilled that you are considering LinkedIn Salesforce integration, and I would like to share some of my experiences with you. This is not a how-to guide but an account of what we have done so far.
Salesforce LinkedIn Integration is a Big Deal
Linkedin is a social media platform that allows users to publish (or “write”) status updates, comments, photos and videos. It is a place where people share information about themselves and the people in their lives. The best way to think about this is to imagine that the average person on the planet cannot even figure out how to access their LinkedIn profile. But, if we can give them a few simple tips (and some free training), they will be able to fill out their profiles in minutes.
We are currently in the middle of this journey and are still working towards getting our product into the hands of people who will want it, but we have done enough research over the last year or so to know that we need help. It would be great if some of you could share your knowledge with us!
Why Linkedin SalesForce Integration is Cool?
LinkedIn SalesForce Integration (LSFI) is simple, but not necessarily easy to use, way to connect Salesforce.com with Linkedin. You can add contacts from both social networks into Salesforce or use the free version of the product.
It helps you get more leads from LinkedIn, but I would highly recommend paying for the plugin as well.
Here’s what it does:
- Adds a contact from LinkedIn into Salesforce by using https://www.linkedin.com/in/user-details and a URL to an image that was taken by your company’s website or app
- Allows you to follow up with people on either network via their profile pages and in the comment section of their posts in your chosen social network
- Makes it easier to reply to people on each network (or send them private messages) by adding the Post that they have just replied to in your chosen social network
- Allows you to save contacts from one social network into the other (you can even email them!) – this means that when you see their profile on Linkedin or Facebook, you can click on it and import it into your Salesforce account, so you don’t have to do this again! This means that when someone comes back into your Salesforce account, you can quickly see everything they’ve done since they left yours!
- Features of the Linkedin Salesforce Integration
The Salesforce Sales Cloud is a relatively new product introduced in early 2013. The product was designed for businesses of all sizes and is meant to be a central hub for all the sales automation tools that companies use to track and automate sales, including CRM, finance, marketing, customer service and more.
The Salesforce integration is simple: you upload your Linkedin data into Salesforce, from which you can see who is interacting with your company (the connections) and who they are interacting with (the contacts). You can also see what they are saying about your company. These connections are based on the content you publish on LinkedIn — details like job title, industry, location and so on.
Once this process is complete (you set up an integration with Salesforce), you can update the data in Salesforce to reflect LinkedIn connections by pulling out their names directly from LinkedIn’s API and adding them to the data in Salesforce — which means they show up as contacts in your CRM.
The integration works well (and has been seamless for me so far), but there are a few things we recommend doing before starting:
• Get a list of all of your current or past employees from LinkedIn using one of the following methods:
a. Using the LinkedIn API directly: https://www.linkedin.com/services/developer-tools/api-documentation?lang=en;
b. Using an OAuth2 token endpoint that you have set up within Salesforce: https://accounts.google.com/oauth2/oauth2_token?client=xxxxxx&client_id=xxxxxx&scope=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ednl%2FLinkedIn;
c. Using a third-party tool such as ODataTools or Datastax ODataLink: https://www-datalink-online-connection/generate_odata_linkedin_data;
• You will need access to every customer’s contact information uploaded via their LinkedIn account (you can find out what their names are if you know their names). You will also need access to this customer’s LinkedIn info so that it can be used as part of your CRM integration with Salesforce when updating contact info in Salesforce’s database.
• When you have done all these things above, then it’s time to add some code into your application
How to Create a Salesforce LinkedIn Lead Generation Program
I only recently learned the real power of LinkedIn salesforce integration. It’s been a long time coming, but I am grateful to have it now, and I’m now totally sold on the idea of using it in conjunction with Facebook as well.
It all started with a simple code snippet:
So at first glance, this seems like an exciting idea, but it immediately falls apart for me. First of all, I see no value in writing a script that does “adding” or “removing” relationships from your database.
What would be the point? Who would even use such a thing? And yet there is a considerable demand for this sort of thing – so why don’t we write it?
This is not what makes LinkedIn great, though. It is hard to find good examples where sales teams have used LinkedIn/social media/Facebook for lead generation purposes or have made strategic choices about who and what to promote (though there are many examples where these paths were taken). The best example I can think of is an article I wrote on how companies in India can use Facebook marketing to reach out to potential customers through their local communities (the author was using LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously). But the problem here was not that they were using Facebook, but that they were doing so in India (where people are much less likely than Americans (or Westerners) to know anyone who works at Facebook).
I once ran into an employee at one of my past companies who had been promoted to full-time manager by his boss because he had encouraged his team members to do more social media marketing than they were doing before. He said that after he started letting his team members post comments on other employees’ profiles and started asking them questions about them, his team members began responding better than ever before. He told me that he didn’t want him promoted; he just wanted him to think more positively about himself and his work – which meant using social media more often instead of sitting around waiting for feedback from HR or someone else who might be able to provide some valuable insight into how people were thinking about themselves and their work. In other words: if you manage yourself well enough, you will know yourself better than others can tell you, which means you will know.
This post is about the LinkedIn SalesForce Integration, which we attempt to integrate with Salesforce. It is a reasonably complicated process (it’s been done before), but I wanted to write this so that others can learn from our experience and perhaps avoid some of our mistakes. We’ve done it before, and we hope you find it helpful as well. It’s a long process but worth it.
Here are the links:
The Post: https://linkedin-salesforce-integration-blog.herokuapp.com/
The Process: https://linkedin-salesforce-integration-blog.herokuapp.com/process/.
The Products: https://linkedin-salesforce-integration-blog.herokuapp.com/products/.
The Timeline: https://linkedin-salesforce-integration-blog.herokuapp.com/timeline/.
