How to Properly Use the LinkedIn TeamLink Filter in Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has become one of the most powerful tools for B2B sales teams. Among its most effective features is TeamLink, a filter that reveals how your internal network can facilitate introductions to new prospects. Yet, few professionals truly understand its potential.

What is LinkedIn TeamLink?

LinkedIn TeamLink is a strategic feature integrated into Sales Navigator Advanced (formerly Sales Navigator Team), LinkedIn’s mid-tier solution dedicated to B2B sales teams.
Priced at approximately $159 per month per user, this plan includes up to 10 seats, allowing multiple team members to share their networks directly within the prospecting interface.
The concept is simple but extremely effective: when a salesperson conducts a search in Sales Navigator, TeamLink analyzes the connections of their team members.
If the prospect being searched for is already connected to one of them, a “TeamLink Introduction” label immediately appears next to their profile. With one click, you can see which colleague holds this connection and then request an introduction to the target contact.
This mechanism transforms a cold approach into a direct relational entry. Instead of sending a generic InMail, you request an internal recommendation, which humanizes the interaction and strengthens the credibility of your message.
👉 In practice, this means that each member of your team no longer works in isolation: they benefit from the collective strength of the company’s global network. Barriers between contacts dissolve, and each first-degree connection can become a gateway to new business opportunities.
In other words, TeamLink turns your colleagues’ network into a strategic prospecting asset, leveraging an often underutilized capital: the trust already established between your coworkers and their own contacts.

How TeamLink in Sales Navigator Turns B2B Prospecting into a Relational Lever

In an environment where decision-makers receive dozens of LinkedIn messages per week, standing out without being intrusive has become a real challenge. This is where TeamLink acts as a relational accelerator.
Rather than multiplying cold outreach attempts, TeamLink allows you to leverage the power of existing relationships. The tool highlights cross-connections between you, your teammates, and potential prospects. In other words, it reveals invisible links that could facilitate a natural and credible introduction.
Specifically, this approach helps you to:
• Identify prospects already connected to your extended network, allowing you to focus your efforts on contacts reachable through recommendations;
• Spot key colleagues who can open the door to a target company;
• Personalize your prospecting messages by mentioning a mutual contact, instantly increasing trust and receptiveness;
• Reduce the conversion cycle, as the trust relationship is partially established from the first contact.

Internal LinkedIn data confirms this effectiveness:
➡️ A TeamLink introduction generates up to four times more responses than a standard InMail.
This is explained by a fundamental human principle: we are more likely to trust someone recommended by an acquaintance than a complete stranger, no matter how relevant.

In short, TeamLink transforms a prospecting platform into a collaborative introduction network, where each connection becomes a potential relay for new business opportunities.

How to Use the TeamLink Filter in Sales Navigator

Using the TeamLink filter in Sales Navigator may seem simple at first glance, but to fully leverage its potential, it must be integrated into a genuine relational prospecting strategy. The tool doesn’t just highlight connections-it helps you identify human levers that turn a search into a concrete opportunity.

Access the filter from the search engine

Start by opening Sales Navigator and searching for prospects using your usual criteria: industry, role, company size, geographic area, or hierarchical level.
Once the basic filters are applied, scroll down to the “Shared experiences and activities” section, where the “With TeamLink intro” option is located.
By checking this box, you limit your results to profiles with at least one mutual connection with your team-in other words, people already linked to your internal network via colleagues or teammates with a Sales Navigator account.
👉 This smart filtering does more than refine results: it reveals the most accessible prospects, those for whom a natural introduction is possible. This allows you to prioritize “warm” contacts, more likely to respond to your outreach.

Analyze available connections

Once the filter is activated, Sales Navigator automatically displays the total number of profiles with a TeamLink connection.
This number may seem trivial, but it actually represents your immediate relational potential: each contact identified via TeamLink is a lead whose approach can be humanized and validated by an internal connection.
By clicking on this category, you access a list of prospects already linked to your team. LinkedIn clearly indicates, for each profile, the colleague or team member who holds this connection.
This provides a strategic view of your network capital: who knows whom, at which company, and at what relationship level.
Tip: It is often useful to export this list for specific tracking. You can then segment your TeamLink leads by relationship type (potential client, partner, recruiter, etc.) to tailor your messages.

Request a relevant introduction

This is where TeamLink really makes a difference.
From the list of profiles connected to your team, click the “TeamLink Introduction” label to see which colleague can facilitate the contact.
At this stage, effectiveness depends on how you approach the request.
Avoid overly direct or impersonal phrasing: the goal is not to delegate prospecting, but to create a trust relay.

Example message you could send:
“Hi Pierre, I noticed you’re connected to [Prospect Name]. We are currently targeting companies like theirs to help them [solve a specific problem]. Could you introduce me? I can provide a brief summary of our approach if needed.”
This type of message is short, precise, and respectful of your colleague’s time.
It shows that your request is relevant and contextualized, not opportunistic.
Once the introduction is made, remember to thank your intermediary and keep them informed of the outcome. This maintains trust and encourages future introductions.

🎯 In summary
The TeamLink filter is not just a sorting tool: it is a gateway to collaborative prospecting.
When used correctly, it allows you to:
• Target prospects already connected to your internal network;
• Prioritize contacts more likely to respond;
• Strengthen the credibility of your approaches;
• Build a team dynamic focused on cooperation and trust.

It is both a simple and strategic method to turn your professional network into a genuine collective business lever.

Which Sales Navigator Plans Include LinkedIn TeamLink?

LinkedIn TeamLink is not bundled with every Sales Navigator subscription, and this is the single most common reason a team cannot find the filter at all. TeamLink ships with the Advanced and Advanced Plus plans. The entry-level Core plan does not include it, so a rep sitting on a Core seat will never see the option no matter how they search.

Two consequences follow, and both are operational rather than theoretical. First, if some of your colleagues hold Core seats, their connections stay invisible to everyone else: the pool is only as wide as your Advanced seats. Second, Advanced Plus layers CRM synchronisation on top, which matters if you intend to write relationship data back into your CRM instead of leaving it inside the search interface.

Pricing is published per seat rather than per team and it moves, so treat any figure you read, including the roughly 159 dollars per user per month quoted earlier on this page, as an order of magnitude. Confirm the current number in your own account centre before you build a budget around it, and cross-check it against our breakdown of Sales Navigator pricing across plans.

Quick eligibility check

• Sales Navigator Core: no TeamLink, no TeamLink filters, no Extend.
• Sales Navigator Advanced: TeamLink, the three TeamLink filters and TeamLink Extend.
• Sales Navigator Advanced Plus: everything above, plus CRM synchronisation.

The Three LinkedIn TeamLink Filters You Can Actually Use

Most walkthroughs stop at the single With TeamLink intro checkbox. In practice the feature exposes three distinct lead filters, and they answer three different questions. Knowing which one to reach for is the difference between a list of 400 vaguely warm names and a list of six you can act on this afternoon.

1. TeamLink connections

The default option. It returns every lead who is a first-degree connection of at least one licensed teammate. Use it when you want the broadest possible warm surface across the team, typically at the start of an account-mapping exercise, often paired with a Sales Navigator company search to frame the account list first.

2. Executive TeamLink connections

This variant narrows results to leads connected to a teammate at Director level or above. Reach for it when a deal needs air cover: an introduction coming from a director carries visibly more weight with a VP or a C-level prospect than the same note relayed by a junior rep. It is a smaller list, and a much better one.

3. TeamLink connections of a named colleague

Here you type one specific colleague's name and see only the leads that person can introduce you to. This is the filter to run before a one-to-one with a well-connected teammate. You walk in with a short concrete list instead of a vague request for help, which is why this variant produces far more accepted introductions than the other two. Combine it with boolean search operators to tighten the underlying list before you filter on TeamLink at all.

In short: the three LinkedIn TeamLink filters are the standard team-wide view, the executive-only variant restricted to Director and above, and the per-colleague view that isolates a single teammate's network.

TeamLink Extend: Bringing Colleagues Without a Licence Into LinkedIn TeamLink

Standard TeamLink only pools the networks of people who hold a Sales Navigator licence. That is a real ceiling, because your best-connected colleagues are rarely the ones who need a prospecting seat. They sit in delivery, in marketing, in finance, or they are the founders.

TeamLink Extend closes that gap. It lets an administrator invite employees who hold no Sales Navigator licence to contribute their LinkedIn network to the team's TeamLink pool. Those colleagues carry on working exactly as before; they simply become visible as a possible introduction path when a rep runs a search.

Three details matter once you actually roll it out:

• It is invitation based. The colleague receives an email invitation and can accept or decline. Nothing is switched on behind anyone's back.
• It is reversible. Anyone who accepted can change their mind later from their LinkedIn Settings & Privacy page.
• It requires Advanced or Advanced Plus. Extend does not exist on Core.

The teams that get the most out of Extend are the ones who invite founders and customer-facing staff rather than only the sales floor. A five-person sales team that pools ten non-licensed colleagues will often double the number of target accounts showing at least one warm path, without buying a single extra seat.

TeamLink Groups: Pooling Relationships Across Organisations

The third expansion mechanism is the least documented of the three. TeamLink Groups lets several separate Sales Navigator contracts combine their networks, so relationship paths stay visible across entities instead of stopping dead at the edge of one contract.

It exists for companies that are not one clean organisation on paper: a group with several subsidiaries, a business that grew by acquisition and still runs separate contracts per entity, or a parent company that wants regional teams to see each other's relationships without merging everyone into a single seat pool.

Unlike the filters and Extend, this one is not self-served from the interface. It is configured with LinkedIn directly, so treat it as a contract-level conversation with your account representative rather than a setting you will find by hunting through menus. If your goal is simply to get relationship data out of the interface and into your stack, a Sales Navigator CRM integration is usually the faster route.

How to Set Up TeamLink as an Administrator, Step by Step

Using the filter is a rep's job. Making that filter return anything useful is an administrator's job, and it takes about ten minutes.

1. Sign in to Sales Navigator with an administrator account.
2. Open Admin, then Account Center.
3. Go to the People section and open the Users tab.
4. Under TeamLink Extend, click the available licences.
5. Enter the email addresses of the colleagues you want to invite.
6. Set permissions and groups if your organisation uses them.
7. Click Approve to send the invitations.

Then chase the acceptances, because this is where most rollouts quietly stall. An invitation nobody accepts adds exactly zero connections to the pool, and the default LinkedIn email is easy to mistake for noise. One short message in the company channel explaining what the invitation does, and just as importantly what it does not do, converts far better than the automated email on its own.

One technical note for larger organisations: if you provision accounts through SCIM, managing both full Sales Navigator seats and TeamLink Extend licences requires a separate SCIM application.

LinkedIn TeamLink Privacy: What Your Colleagues Actually Share

This is the question that decides whether people accept the invitation, so it deserves a direct answer rather than a footnote.

What TeamLink shares is the existence of a connection: the fact that your colleague is a first-degree connection of a given prospect, so a teammate can ask them for an introduction. What it does not do is expose their private messages, their conversation history, or hand anyone a downloadable copy of their address book.

One caveat deserves to be said out loud rather than discovered later. For Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus users, TeamLink Extend overrides the usual network privacy setting. A colleague who normally keeps their connection list hidden will still surface as an introduction path once they accept the invitation. Say this up front. Teams that gloss over it collect opt-outs a month later, and an opt-out is far harder to reverse than a question answered honestly on day one.

Exporting and Using Your Results with Derrick App

To maximize the efficiency of your TeamLink searches on Sales Navigator, you can take an industrial and automated approach with Derrick App, a tool designed for lead extraction and management. This solution transforms your LinkedIn searches into a structured workflow, allowing you to move from simple prospect identification to targeted, measurable campaigns.

Export your results for quick processing

After applying the TeamLink filter to your searches, Derrick App allows you to retrieve all your results in just a few clicks.
Results land straight in your Google Sheet, ready to sort, filter and share, with no CSV round trip. Derrick is a Google Sheets sidebar: the work happens in the spreadsheet, not in an export file.
This lets you:
• Centralize all relevant prospect information;
• Prepare contact lists for personalized outreach;
• Avoid tedious manual entry while reducing the risk of errors.

This automation ensures data consistency and reliability, essential for rigorous B2B campaign tracking.

Retrieve professional emails

A major advantage of Derrick App is the ability to link each LinkedIn profile to its professional email address.
This allows you to:
• Combine LinkedIn prospecting with email marketing;
• Create coherent multichannel campaigns;
• Track the performance of each channel precisely.

The tool also identifies valid emails, limiting bounces and improving campaign conversion rates.

Segment your leads by multiple criteria

Raw export is just the first step. Derrick App offers advanced segmentation options to prioritize prospects based on:
• Presence of a TeamLink connection and relationship level;
• Role, position, or department;
• Industry or company size.

This granularity lets you prioritize the most strategic leads and define highly personalized messages, significantly increasing response rates.

Launch targeted multichannel campaigns

Once your leads are segmented, Derrick pushes the list straight into your sending tool, so the campaign starts from fresh data instead of a stale export. Derrick finds, verifies and enriches the data, then hands over: sending, sequencing and open-rate reporting stay in the outreach tool you already use, which is where those metrics belong. Your sequence can then be:
• Tracked in your sending tool with its detailed metrics (open rates, clicks, responses);
• Adjusted according to performance by segment or message;
• Optimized to reduce prospecting time while maintaining quality contact with prospects.

This approach builds a relationship- and network-centered prospecting strategy rather than relying on mass impersonal messaging.

Save time without sacrificing quality

By centralizing extraction, segmentation, and automation, Derrick App saves you several hours per week while maintaining the accuracy of relational information from TeamLink.
Time savings do not come at the expense of relevance: each contact can still be approached with a contextual introduction via your colleagues, preserving the essential human dimension in B2B prospecting.