Last week I watched a rep do something I have done a thousand times myself: she had Dynamics 365 open on one monitor and LinkedIn on the other, and every time a new contact came up she copied the name, alt-tabbed, pasted it into LinkedIn search, and squinted at the results trying to figure out which of the four people with that name was hers. The research instinct is exactly right — you should know who you’re talking to before you talk to them. The tax is the trip. Every alt-tab is a small context switch, and thirty of them a day quietly eat the hour she was supposed to spend actually selling.
Once your Sales Navigator integration is wired up, you can stop paying that tax: Dynamics 365 will render the live LinkedIn profile inside the contact form, matched to the record you’re looking at. In this post we’ll add the Sales Navigator control to a form in the maker portal, walk through what each module and field binding does, and see what your sellers get on the other side. It’s a fifteen-minute change, and it’s the moment the integration stops being plumbing and starts being visible.
Why the two-monitor approach falls short
Researching in a separate browser tab works, in the sense that rowing a boat with one oar works. Nothing you find writes back to the record. Nobody else on the team can see what you learned. And the matching is entirely on you — LinkedIn search will happily hand you the wrong John Smith, and you’ll personalize an email based on the career history of a stranger in a different industry. The embedded control fixes all three: it matches on the record’s actual data (name, email, job title), it lives where your teammates already work, and the profile it shows is the live one, not a note you pasted three months ago.
Step 1 — Make Sure the Plumbing Is Connected
This post is the second half of a story. The first half — turning on the integration in Dynamics and connecting the CRM sync from the Sales Navigator admin side — is covered in Two Systems, One Conversation. Installing the integration is also what drops the LinkedIn controls into your environment’s component library, so if you skipped it, Step 3 below will be searching for components that aren’t there. You’ll also want a Sales Navigator seat for each user who should see the widget — Advanced Plus is the plan built for the CRM-embedded experience.
Step 2 — Open the Form in the Maker Portal
Head to make.powerapps.com, pick the environment that hosts your Sales app, and open Tables → Contact → Forms. Choose the main form your sellers actually use — in my trial that’s the AI for Sales form, but yours may be a custom one. The same control works on the Lead table’s forms too, and once you’ve done one, the second takes two minutes.
Step 3 — Get More Components, Find the LinkedIn Controls
In the form designer, select the section where you want the profile to live (I used the Contact Information column — the widget earns a prominent spot), then choose Component → Get more components and search for “LinkedIn”. Four controls show up, and it’s worth knowing what each is for:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead (member profile) — the person widget. This is the one for Contact and Lead forms.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account (company profile) — the company twin, for Account forms.
- Lead lookup and Account lookup — control variants that resolve the LinkedIn match via a lookup field instead of the record’s own columns.
Select the Lead (member profile) control and the designer shows you a preview of what you’re about to add — the profile card with its tabs. Add it, and it lands in your chosen section like any other component.
Step 4 — Modules and Field Bindings: the Five-Minute Decisions
The add dialog is where the actual configuration happens, and it’s two lists: a set of yes/no toggles for the widget’s modules, and a set of field bindings that tell the control which columns hold the data it should match on.
On the modules: Top Card is the profile itself (photo, headline, current role) — always yes. Icebreakers surfaces shared experiences, recent posts, and mutual interests — the raw material for a first line that isn’t “I hope this email finds you well.” Get Introduced finds colleagues who can make a warm introduction, and Related Leads suggests other people at the same account worth knowing — your hedge against single-threading a deal. I turned all of those on. The one I left off is Connect, which lets users fire LinkedIn connection requests straight from the CRM form; I’d rather my team send those from LinkedIn itself, where they can see the person’s activity and write something worth accepting.
On the bindings, map Last Name, First Name, Email, and Job Title to the corresponding contact columns (Company Name is there too if you want it). This is the matching engine’s fuel: the more of these are actually populated on your records, the more confidently the widget lands on the right human. Email is the quiet hero here — names collide constantly; work emails almost never do.
⚠️ Important: the bindings match on your data as it exists. If your contacts are name-only, expect the widget to ask for help more often — it will show candidate profiles and let the user confirm. Garbage in, ambiguity out.
Step 5 — Save, Publish, and Sign In Once
Choose Save and publish, then open any contact in the Sales app. The first visit shows the widget in its signed-out state — a Sign in with LinkedIn button. Each user signs in once with their own LinkedIn credentials (this is a per-user identity, not an org-level one — LinkedIn wants to know exactly who is viewing profiles), and the session persists across visits after that.
And then the payoff. The widget matches the record and renders the live profile — photo, headline, location, current role — with the module tabs across the top and a Matched badge confirming it found the right person. Save in Sales Navigator adds them to your SN lead list without leaving the form; View profile deep-links into Sales Navigator when you want the full workspace. If the match ever is wrong, Not the right person? lets the user correct it, and the correction sticks.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
- Do the Account form too. The company-profile control gives your sellers the firmographic view — headcount, growth, recent news — on the account record, and it’s the same five-minute flow.
- The widget is live LinkedIn data, not copied data. Nothing from the profile is written into Dataverse by this control — it renders in an embedded frame, permissioned by the signed-in user’s Sales Navigator seat. The syncing of records and activities is the CRM sync’s job, not the widget’s.
- Roll it out with the form, not before. If users see the control before they have seats, all they get is a sign-in wall — sequence the license assignment with the publish.
Wrapping Up
None of this changed what my rep was doing — she was always going to look the contact up on LinkedIn. It changed where. The profile now shows up matched, inside the record, next to the timeline and the opportunity she’s actually working, and the hour of alt-tabbing goes back into the conversations the research was supposed to serve. The best integrations are the ones that delete a habit nobody realized was a cost. This one deletes the trip.
