LinkedIn for Building Products Sales Professionals. Part 1 of 7.
I deleted over 1,000 LinkedIn connections about a year ago. More than a quarter of my network. Gone in a single afternoon.
My engagement dropped off a cliff. Impressions halved. Took months to claw back. Still not fully where it was.
I'd do it again tomorrow.
Not sure where to start? Take the 5-minute readiness check.
Why your connection count is working against you
LinkedIn is a business tool. Not Instagram. Not Facebook. Not a place to collect connections like trading cards.
But most people treat it exactly like that. Accept every request. Never remove anyone. Watch the number go up and assume it means something.
Here's the problem. The LinkedIn algorithm shows your content to a sample of your network first. If that sample is full of people who have nothing to do with your industry, your posts get shown to the wrong people. Low engagement from the wrong crowd tells the algorithm your content isn't worth pushing further.
So your carefully written post about specification sales in building products gets shown to your mate from uni who works in fintech, your old hospitality colleague in London, and a life coach in California who added you three years ago.
None of them engage. The algorithm buries it. The Sales Director at a building products manufacturer in Melbourne who would have found it useful never sees it.
Your oversized network is actively hiding you from the people who matter.
The simple test every connection should pass
Before I started deleting, I went through my connections and asked three questions about each one.
1. Can I do business with this person?
2. Can they do business with me?
3. Is there a genuine reason we're connected?
If the answer to all three was no, they went.
That's it. No complicated scoring system. No spreadsheet. Just a simple filter that separates "might actually matter" from "added me at a conference in 2019 and we've never spoken since."
Who I kept (and why)
I'm not pretending my network is perfectly curated. I've still got a few people who don't pass the test.
Old colleagues from my hospitality days. It's nice to see what they're up to. A couple of content creators I find interesting, not because of what they sell but because watching how they market is genuinely useful for my own strategy.
But I know who they are and why they're there. They're the exception, not the rule.
Everyone else needs to be in or around building products, lighting, or architecture and design. Candidates I might place. Clients I might work with. People with mutual connections where there could be a benefit down the track.
How I actually did it (the quick way)
I didn't sit there going through connections one by one. That would take forever.
Step 1: Filter by country.
I started by filtering my connections by location. Every overseas connection that had zero relevance to the Australian building products market got removed. That alone cleared hundreds in one sitting.
Step 2: Filter by industry.
Next I looked at industries. Anyone in a sector I'll never recruit for or sell to. Fintech. SaaS. Retail fashion. Gone.
Step 3: The "do I know you?" pass.
After the bulk filters, I went through what was left and removed anyone I genuinely couldn't place. If I looked at their name and profile and had no memory of how or why we connected, and they weren't in my target market, they went.
The whole process took a couple of hours. Not fun, but not the nightmare I expected either.
If a job change is the trigger for the cleanup, the LinkedIn checklist for after you accept a new sales role walks through the duplicates audit, notification settings, and connection-building in the order to do them.
The flip side. Add people promptly.
Cleaning up is only half the equation. The other half is being deliberate about who you add and when.
When you meet someone worth connecting with, add them straight away. After a meeting. After a call. After an industry event. After a good conversation at a trade show. Don't wait a week. The longer you leave it, the less likely it happens, and the less likely they'll remember the context.
Here's a practical tip most people miss. Once you're connected with someone on LinkedIn, you can often see their phone number and email address on their profile. Not everyone has this visible, but plenty of people do. That alone makes the 10 seconds it takes to send a connection request worth it.
Get in the habit. Good conversation? Connect before you leave the venue. Quick call with a candidate? Send the request while you're writing up your notes. It costs nothing and the compounding benefit over time is real.
What happened after the cull
The short version: engagement dropped, then recovered, then improved.
The first few weeks were rough. My impressions tanked. Fewer reactions. The vanity metrics took a hit.
But over time, something shifted. When I posted content about the building products market, a higher percentage of the people seeing it were actually in the building products market. My Ideal Customer Profile engagement went from around 30% to consistently above 40%. Some posts hit over 50%.
Smaller network. Better conversations. More of the right people seeing my content. More of those people recognising my name when I call them.
The real metric that matters
Your connection count is not a flex. Nobody has ever hired a recruiter or bought a product because the salesperson had 10,000 LinkedIn connections.
What matters is conversion. How many of your connections could realistically become a client, a candidate, a referral, or a source of useful industry intel?
If the answer is "not many," your network is a liability, not an asset.
Clean it up. Be deliberate about who you add. Watch the quality of your conversations change.
Quick action checklist
If you want to clean up your LinkedIn network this week, here's where to start.
1. Filter connections by country. Remove anyone overseas with no relevance to your market.
2. Filter by industry. Remove anyone in sectors you'll never do business with.
3. Go through what's left. If you can't remember why you're connected and they're not in your target market, remove them.
4. Start adding people promptly after every meaningful interaction.
5. Check your "People You May Know" suggestions. After a clean-up, LinkedIn gets better at suggesting relevant connections.
It'll take a couple of hours. Your engagement might dip short term. But the people who matter will start seeing you more often.
And that's the whole point.
I'm a specialist recruiter for the building products industry. James Bowesman runs Specified Select, a boutique recruitment consultancy based in Melbourne.
If you're a sales professional in building products thinking about your next move, or a hiring manager looking to build your team, get in touch at james@specifiedselect.com
This is Part 1 of a 7-part series on LinkedIn for Building Products Sales Professionals. Part 1: Clean Up Your Network | Part 2: Your Profile Should Sell You Twice | Part 3: What to Post and What to Stop Posting | Part 4: The Phone Still Wins | Part 5: Stop Broadcasting, Start Engaging | Part 6: When to Take It Offline | Part 7: LinkedIn for Job Seekers | Part 8: After You Accept a New Sales Role