I once had a conversation with a salesperson we were coaching

She had sold into Gatwick Airport and wanted to connect with the CIO on LinkedIn

Her connection request read:
"Our company are suppliers to Gatwick Airport, and you are one of my accounts. I would like to connect with you."

She couldn’t understand why the CIO never accepted her request

Here’s the problem: what you write and what your buyer reads are often two very different things

She wrote:
"We are suppliers to Gatwick Airport and you are one of my accounts. I’d like to connect with you."

But what the CIO read was:
“We are your suppliers, and I want to connect so I can sell you more”

From the CIO’s perspective, that’s threatening

Why would any executive voluntarily open themselves up to a stream of pitches? The answer: they don’t

And I experience this daily myself

Just yesterday, someone selling “personal branding” sent me a connection request

I hit ignore. Why?

Because I knew the pitch would follow immediately after

The same goes for:

The person selling remote PA services from the Philippines

The coach promising to “help CEOs scale their business"

Anyone whose connection request is just a thinly veiled sales pitch

Ignore. Ignore. Ignore

Too many people treat LinkedIn as a sales network

But here’s the reality: LinkedIn is a social network, not a sales network

Conclusion

If your connection requests are constantly being ignored, it’s probably because you’re pitching instead of connecting

Executives don’t want more pitches, they want meaningful connections

Stop treating LinkedIn like a cold-calling platform and start treating it like a community

Build trust first, and sales will follow

To give an example, we would expect a 60 to 80% acceptance rate for Linkedin connection request, when you stop being random and start having a strategy