LinkedIn TeamLink: Who on Your Team Knows This Lead

Warm introductions are the highest-converting motion in B2B sales, and the reason most teams do not run on them is discovery: nobody knows which of fifty colleagues happens to know which of five hundred target leads. TeamLink, a Sales Navigator Advanced feature, unifies your team's LinkedIn graphs and puts that answer on every search result.

Key Takeaways

• TeamLink is Advanced-tier only — it is not in Sales Navigator Core, and it needs a handful of colleagues on the same contract
• It surfaces reverse paths you'd never find: the marketing colleague who met your lead at a conference three years ago
• Most TeamLink hits are weak ties: a typical colleague has thousands of first-degree connections and has spoken to a fraction of them
• Colleague privacy settings silently remove them from the graph — the most common cause of thin coverage
• There is an undocumented throttle around 20 intro requests per user per rolling week, and it fails silently

What TeamLink Actually Does

Every lead card in Sales Navigator gains a badge showing how many of your colleagues are first-degree with that person, and who they are. Three things follow from that.

Discovery cost drops to zero. The "does anyone know someone at Stripe?" Slack thread stops being necessary.

The ask becomes a native workflow. Sales Navigator has an "Ask for intro" button that messages the colleague with a pre-filled request and tracks its status.

It finds paths nobody remembered. The account owner rarely knows that someone in finance met the buyer at a conference. TeamLink does.

For a team of twenty or more on Advanced, TeamLink typically surfaces at least one warm path into somewhere between a third and half of a given ICP target list.

What Most Guides Get Wrong About TeamLink

Wrong: "a TeamLink badge means your colleague knows them." It means they are connected. A typical LinkedIn user has hundreds to thousands of first-degree connections and has never spoken to most of them. Assume weak tie until the colleague tells you otherwise, and write the ask so that admitting "I don't really know them" is easy.

Wrong: "more seats means more coverage." Only if those seats are on one contract and those colleagues share their connections. Two Sales Navigator contracts at the same company — sales on one, marketing on another — are invisible to each other, and procurement creates this by accident constantly. Consolidate before optimising anything else.

Wrong: "send intro asks as you find them." There is a soft cap around twenty intro requests per user per rolling seven days, and hitting it produces a silent "message not sent" toast rather than an error. You can be quietly shipping nothing. Batch weekly and spread requests across the team.

Setting It Up

Step 1: Confirm you are on Advanced or Advanced Plus

TeamLink is not in Core. Check Settings → Subscription. If you are on Core, this feature does not exist for you at any volume of usage.

Step 2: Get at least a handful of colleagues onto the same contract

Under Sales Navigator → Admin → Users, confirm your teammates are on the same contract rather than separate accounts, signed in with their real personal LinkedIn accounts, and past the initial graph indexing — which takes a day or two after first login.

Below about five colleagues, TeamLink returns overlap too thin to build a workflow on.

Step 3: Ask colleagues to check one privacy setting

This is the step that decides whether TeamLink works. LinkedIn respects each user's "Who can see your connections" setting. A colleague who has it set to "Only me" contributes zero connections to the TeamLink graph even though they are paying for a seat.

If coverage looks thinner than it should, this is nearly always why.

Step 4: Filter and sort by TeamLink

In the filter panel, set Connections of → My team to restrict results to leads with at least one internal path. Sorting by TeamLink connection count descending puts the most-connected leads at the top of the queue.

Stacks that produce good queues:

Asking for the Intro

Sales Navigator pre-fills a generic template. Rewrite it every time — sending the wrong tone to the wrong strength of tie is the main reason intro asks get ignored.

For a colleague you work with weekly:

Hey — you're 1st with [lead] at [company]. Warm enough to ping? I want to talk to them about [context].

For a colleague you barely know, include the forwardable blurb so they write nothing:

Hi — we haven't chatted much, I'm on the [team] side. Sales Nav shows you're 1st-degree with [lead] at [company]. If you're close enough for a soft intro I'd appreciate it; if not, no worries at all. Blurb below so you don't have to write anything.

Offer something first — this converts best of all:

Noticed you've been working on [their thing]. I'm 1st-degree with [person in their ICP] if that'd be useful, happy to intro. Separately — you're 1st with [my lead]. Any warmth there, or should I go direct?

Give an explicit out:

If you know them well enough for a soft intro, would love it. If it's a weak connect, no worries — I'll go direct and mention you lightly. Which do you prefer?

If you batch several leads into one message, cap it at three, do it no more than monthly per colleague, and always include the "never met" option. A batched ask with no easy out reads as extractive.

Wait about two days. If there is no reply, do not chase — go direct to the lead and mention the shared connection honestly.

What to Expect

Community and vendor-reported figures put intro-sourced meetings far ahead of cold outreach on both booking and close rate. Treat the multiples as directional rather than measured, because almost all of them come from people selling the motion.

The arithmetic that matters is simpler: ten well-targeted intro requests a week, most of which get agreed to, most of which produce a meeting, is a handful of warm conversations a week you were not getting cold. That is the case for the feature, and it holds even if the headline multiples are generous.

Gotchas That Quietly Cost You

• The graph rebuild lags about a week. A new hire with a huge network will not show up in TeamLink immediately. Do not put their overlap into a forecast until it appears.
• Departed colleagues linger. Connections can stay in the graph for up to a month after someone leaves. Cross-check Admin → Users before pinging a badge.
• TeamLink-Extend is a separate paid add-on. Base TeamLink only covers colleagues on the Sales Navigator contract. Indexing finance, ops and engineering connections requires the Extend SKU.
• CRM stage is not checked. If CRM sync is on, TeamLink will happily surface intro paths into accounts flagged closed-lost or do-not-contact. Run the list against your CRM before firing asks — nothing burns colleague goodwill faster than an intro request to someone your company already annoyed.
• The lead sees nothing until the introduction actually happens. Discovery is asymmetric in your favour.

If You Don't Have Advanced

The free equivalent is real, if narrower: the People tab on any company page filters by school, location, function and connection degree, which reproduces the warm-path query manually for one company at a time. Our LinkedIn Alumni tool guide covers it in full.

The difference is scale. The alumni tool answers "who can introduce me into this account." TeamLink answers "which of my three hundred target accounts has a path" — which is a different question, and the one worth paying for once your list is long enough. Our Core vs Advanced comparison covers where the upgrade line actually sits.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is TeamLink in LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

TeamLink unifies the LinkedIn connection graphs of everyone on your Sales Navigator contract, so search results show which colleagues are first-degree with each lead and offer an "Ask for intro" workflow.

Is TeamLink included in Sales Navigator Core?

No. TeamLink requires Sales Navigator Advanced or Advanced Plus. Core does not include it at any seat count.

Why is my TeamLink coverage so low?

Usually one of three things: fewer than about five colleagues on the contract, colleagues whose "Who can see your connections" setting is "Only me" and therefore contribute nothing, or two separate Sales Navigator contracts at the same company that cannot see each other.

What is the difference between TeamLink and TeamLink Extend?

Base TeamLink only indexes connections belonging to colleagues who hold a Sales Navigator seat. TeamLink Extend is a separately priced add-on that also indexes connections from colleagues who do not use Sales Navigator, such as finance, operations and engineering.

How many intro requests can I send in Sales Navigator?

There is no published limit, but Sales Navigator begins throttling around twenty intro requests per user in a rolling seven-day window, and it fails silently with a "message not sent" toast rather than an error. Batch weekly and distribute across the team.

---

No Advanced seat yet? The free People-tab method reproduces the warm-path query one account at a time.