LinkedIn TeamLink shows which colleague already knows your prospect, so your next message can arrive as a warm introduction.

What is LinkedIn TeamLink?

LinkedIn TeamLink is a feature of LinkedIn Sales Navigator that shows when someone at your company is already a 1st-degree connection to a lead you are researching. Instead of searching your own network, you search the combined network of your team.

Sales Navigator Help describes it plainly: TeamLink helps you find prospects who can be introduced to you through someone you know, and lets you identify leads and accounts where your colleagues already have established relationships.

The exchange runs both ways. Your teammates can see your 1st-degree connections too, and you see shared connections across your company rather than only your own. That is the whole trade, and it is why the privacy settings further down matter.

What TeamLink does not do is make the introduction for you. It points at a person on your side who might help. The asking, the wording and the follow-up are still human work.

Which Sales Navigator plan includes TeamLink?

Sales Navigator Help states that TeamLink is available only with the Advanced and Advanced Plus subscription plans. On the Sales Navigator compare plans page, TeamLink appears in the wider feature list rather than among the features every plan shares.

Two things follow. TeamLink is a team purchase, not an individual upgrade, and a single seller on Advanced gets very little from it until colleagues join the same contract. Prices change, so check the plan page before you budget anything.

How TeamLink works inside Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator Help lists three prerequisites before TeamLink results appear: an Advanced or Advanced Plus subscription, TeamLink enabled for your organization, and at least one teammate connected to a lead on LinkedIn. Miss any one of them and the filters return nothing useful.

The pool is built from the connections of people on your TeamLink contract. Add a seller with a long history in the industry and the pool grows; remove them and it shrinks. Coverage is a staffing question before it is a software question.

Because the underlying data is ordinary LinkedIn connections, the same rules apply as anywhere else on the platform. If you are unsure what the labels mean, our entry on what 3rd means on LinkedIn covers degrees of connection.

The three TeamLink lead filters

TeamLink is not a separate screen. It is a set of lead filters that sit under the Best path in category in Sales Navigator lead search, alongside the filters you already use for company, geography, seniority and function.

The third filter is the one most teams forget. You type the lead's name and Sales Navigator returns the colleagues who can introduce you. Help notes that you can add your company name after the lead name to restrict results to people in your own organization.

Use TeamLink as a sort order, not as your entire list. Filtering to TeamLink only will quietly hide good accounts where nobody happens to know anyone yet, which is exactly where ordinary LinkedIn prospecting still has to do the work.

TeamLink versus TeamLink Extend

Plain TeamLink only sees the networks of people who hold a Sales Navigator license. In most companies that is the sales team, which is not where the oldest relationships live. TeamLink Extend exists to fix that.

An admin assigns TeamLink Extend licenses in LinkedIn Admin Center, under Admin, then Admin Center, then the Users tab. Licenses show as available, invited or activated, and an email goes to everyone assigned one asking them to opt in.

That opt-in step is where programs stall. Help recommends following up with everyone who was assigned a license, and an admin can resend the invitation email. Nothing appears in TeamLink until the person actually accepts.

TeamLink Groups across contracts

TeamLink Groups, which Help also calls cross-contract TeamLink, joins the TeamLink networks of several Sales Navigator contracts or of several dashboards under one contract. It is how a group with separate regional or subsidiary contracts sees one shared pool of warm paths.

• Not self-serve: TeamLink Groups cannot be activated by an admin and must be set up by LinkedIn Sales Solutions support.
• Offline contracts only: Help limits the feature to Advanced and Advanced Plus contracts bought through a sales representative.
• One group per dashboard: a dashboard can belong to only one TeamLink Group at a time.
• Paperwork first: every associated contract owner signs a data sharing agreement, and the people signing confirm they are authorized to do so.
• Timeline: Help says the group is initiated within 48 to 72 hours once the completed forms are returned.
• Opt-outs still win: if a member opts out of TeamLink, their contribution is hidden for every contract and dashboard in the group.

Practically, TeamLink Groups is a legal and procurement project as much as a sales one. Raise it early if your company sells across separately contracted entities, because the signatures take longer than the setup.

What your colleagues actually see

The honest answer to the question every colleague asks is narrow, and it helps to quote it. Sales Navigator Help says that accepting a TeamLink Extend invitation means Sales Navigator users at your organization can see if you are connected to people they are searching for, and can request an introduction from you.

The same page adds one short sentence that settles most of the worry: no other information is shared. That is the scope of the agreement, and it is worth reading aloud in the meeting where you propose the rollout.

One caveat is worth saying out loud rather than burying. Help notes that for users of Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus, TeamLink Extend overrides network privacy from the LinkedIn account. Tell people that before you send the invitations, not after.

Opting in, opting out and privacy settings

TeamLink is enabled by default for people on a TeamLink contract, and every individual can leave. In Sales Navigator, click your profile picture, choose Settings, open TeamLink under the About section, clear the Activate TeamLink checkbox and save.

Help spells out the consequences. Once you opt out you do not appear in the TeamLink network even if you are on a TeamLink-enabled contract or in a TeamLink group, and your connections are not used for warm introductions. Nothing else about Sales Navigator changes.

TeamLink Extend has its own switch

People with a TeamLink Extend license manage it on LinkedIn.com: Settings and Privacy, then Account preferences, then the Partners and services section, then TeamLink Extend and the View connections via TeamLink toggle.

If someone has been invited by more than one Sales Navigator dashboard, each dashboard appears separately. Help confirms you can share your network with one team that invited you and decline another, which matters in companies with several independent sales units.

Profile privacy quietly limits TeamLink

Help is direct about this: if your LinkedIn profile is set to private, or connection visibility is restricted, or you browse in private or semi-private mode, your contribution to the TeamLink network might not be visible. Teammates simply will not see you as a possible path.

Connections visibility is the setting that catches people out. If yours is limited so that only 1st-degree connections can view your network, that can restrict how far TeamLink is able to use it. Worth checking before anyone concludes the feature is broken.

What the admin controls

An admin can turn TeamLink off for everyone. In Sales Navigator, click Admin, then Admin Settings, select TeamLink in the left menu and adjust the Turn on TeamLink toggle.

Help attaches a warning that is easy to miss: if you use these settings to hide yourself and your connections, your sales organization's network will also be hidden from you. The sharing is mutual at the account level, not one direction.

One more constraint for anyone planning a rollout on the road. Admin functionality is not available in the Sales Navigator mobile app, and LinkedIn Admin Center requires a desktop device.

How to use TeamLink Sales Navigator, step by step

The steps below assume you already run searches in Sales Navigator and want the warm paths surfaced reliably rather than by accident.

1. Confirm the plan and the account switch

   TeamLink runs on Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus, and an admin can turn it off for the whole account, so check the plan and the admin toggle before you build a campaign around it.

2. Get enough of the team onto one contract

   TeamLink reads the connections of license holders on your contract, so a contract with three sellers shows three networks. Decide who belongs on it before you judge the coverage.

3. Invite the non-sellers with TeamLink Extend

   An admin assigns TeamLink Extend licenses in LinkedIn Admin Center. Each person gets an email invitation and has to opt in, so follow up and explain what is shared.

4. Search leads with the Best path filters

   In Lead filters, open the Best path in category and select TeamLink connections, Executive TeamLink connections, or TeamLink connections of a named lead.

5. Pick the path, not just any path

   A badge means two profiles are connected, nothing more. Choose the colleague who has worked with the prospect recently, and check the account for a second path before you ask.

6. Ask once, then record the answer

   Send one short internal request, accept a no, and log whether the introduction happened and what it led to, so you can tell whether TeamLink is worth the team's attention.

Who TeamLink fits, and who it does not

TeamLink also pairs naturally with account-based marketing, where a named account list is fixed and the question is which door to knock on. Running the third filter across a target account tells you which colleagues already have a way in.

Choosing which path to use

When TeamLink returns several colleagues for one prospect, the temptation is to pick the first name. A short judgment beats the list order, because introductions fail on relationship strength, not on badge count.

If every path is weak, do not force it. A direct connection request or an InMail written well is better than an introduction your colleague has to fake, and the writing rules in InMail best practices apply either way.

Asking a colleague without annoying them

The fastest way to kill a warm intro program is to turn colleagues into a queue. Engineers and founders answer the first few requests, then quietly stop answering. A few rules keep the channel open.

• Do the work before you ask. Name the prospect, the company and why the conversation is worth their credibility, in three lines.
• Write the forwardable part for them. Give two sentences they can send as their own, so the ask costs them almost nothing.
• Make no an easy answer. Say plainly that a thin connection is fine and you will take another route.
• Cap the frequency. Agree a rough limit per colleague per month, and track it somewhere both teams can see.
• Never go around them. If the answer is no, the prospect does not then get a message mentioning your colleague.
• Close the loop. Tell the colleague what happened. People help again when they hear the ending.
• Thank them publicly, carefully. Internal credit is welcome, naming the prospect in a company channel usually is not.

Sales Navigator will also nudge you to reach out, and it can draft messages, but the judgment about which colleague to spend is yours. That is the part no feature handles for you.

Measuring whether TeamLink helps

TeamLink is easy to feel good about and hard to prove. Count the steps, not the badges, and compare against the accounts you work cold on the same segment.

If colleague response rate falls while requests rise, the problem is etiquette, not coverage. Fix the asking before you buy more licenses, and read the numbers next to your other LinkedIn lead generation work rather than on their own.

Where TeamLink fits in B2B outreach

A warm intro is one channel among several, not a replacement for the rest. Most B2B teams still need cold outreach to reach the prospects nobody knows, and TeamLink decides which accounts skip the queue.

• Sequence design: route accounts with a strong path to an intro step first, and send everyone else down the normal outreach track.
• Account research: the colleague who knows the prospect is also the fastest source of context no tool will give you.
• Multi-threading: one intro rarely covers a buying committee, so keep prospecting the other roles in parallel.
• Timing: an intro is worth spending when a real trigger exists, not because the badge happens to be there.
• Handover: once the intro lands, the conversation is yours. Do not make your colleague the relay for every follow-up.

Think of TeamLink as a routing tool sitting in front of your outreach, not a channel in its own right. It tells your team which door is already open, and your sequences handle the rest of the market.

Where TeamLink stops helping

• It only knows LinkedIn. A former colleague who never connected with your team on LinkedIn is invisible, however well they know your buyer.
• It cannot rank relationships. A ten-year working relationship and a conference handshake look identical in the results.
• It stops at your contract. Advisors, investors and partners are outside it unless they are on a TeamLink Extend license or in a TeamLink Group.
• Privacy settings hide people. Restricted profiles and limited connection visibility can remove a real path from the results.
• Opt-outs are invisible to you. You cannot tell whether a colleague has no connection or has simply left TeamLink.
• Coverage follows hiring. When a well-connected seller leaves, the paths they contributed leave with them.

None of that makes the feature weak. It makes it a shortlist generator that still needs a person to choose, ask and follow through. LinkedIn networking habits across the whole company are what fill the pool in the first place.

Common TeamLink mistakes

• Buying Advanced for one seller and expecting a team network.
• Assigning TeamLink Extend licenses without explaining what is shared, so nobody opts in.
• Filtering every search to TeamLink only, and never seeing good cold accounts.
• Treating a badge as proof that a colleague will vouch for you.
• Sending the same colleague an introduction request every week.
• Messaging the prospect anyway after the colleague said no.
• Forgetting to tell the colleague how the meeting went.
• Blaming the feature when the real cause is a restricted profile privacy setting.

The internal introduction request

The warm intro request below was written for this page. It is the internal note, not the message to the prospect: short, specific, easy to refuse, and it hands your colleague something they can forward without editing.

Subject: Quick intro to {{prospectName}} at {{company}}?

Hi {{colleagueName}},

TeamLink says you are connected to {{prospectName}}, {{prospectTitle}} at {{company}}. We are talking to teams there about {{problem}}, and I would rather arrive through you than cold.

If you know them well enough, could you forward the two lines below? If the connection is thin, just tell me and I will take another route, no problem.

"{{forwardableNote}}"

Either answer is useful, and I will not ask you about this account again.

{{senderName}}

Frequently asked questions