How can I find out whether anyone at my company already knows someone at a target account?

Why this is harder than it looks

The question sounds like a lookup and is actually a search across three things nobody has in one place:

1. Who every employee has worked with before, going back through their career.
2. Who every employee currently talks to, and how often.
3. Who at the target account matters for this deal.

A 200-person company holds tens of thousands of professional relationships. Any given account probably has four or five real routes in. A sales rep can name zero of them from memory, because the relationships belong to engineering, customer success, the exec team and the board.

The three methods

LinkedIn, manually. Open the target company, filter to your connections and shared connections. Free, and it answers a different question than the one you asked: it shows who is connected, not who actually knows whom. Three hundred mutual connections where nobody has spoken in eight years is noise, and LinkedIn cannot tell you which is which.

Your CRM. Search the account and read the activity. Honest and narrow: it holds only what a rep chose to log, which is contacts on open deals. The CFO's old colleague at the target is not in there, because the CFO has never opened the CRM.

Relationship intelligence. Software that reads interaction metadata across the company plus public work history, scores how strong each relationship actually is, and returns ranked routes. This is the only method that reaches relationships formed before anyone joined your company, and it is the one that finds the paths nobody knew about.

What a good answer looks like

Not "you have connections at Acme". Something a rep can run on a Tuesday:

Target: Dana Osei, VP Revenue Operations at Acme

Route: Priya Raman, your VP of Engineering

Why: worked together at Datadog 2018-2022, same team; exchanged email three months ago

Three things make that actionable: a named person at the target, a named colleague, and the evidence that makes the ask reasonable. Drop any one and the rep is guessing again.

The step people skip

Having found the route, most teams then ask badly. The connector gets "can you intro me to Dana?" and has to do the work: remember who Dana is, guess why it matters, and write the note.

Send a forwardable two-sentence message instead, written for Dana rather than for your colleague, with one specific ask and an explicit way to say no. The failure rate on introductions is mostly a writing problem, not a willingness problem.