Rapport is the most important ingredient in any successful business relationship. Without rapport, your customers will often feel annoyed, pressured, mistrusting, and not listened to or simply put off. By building rapport quickly with anyone and establish a positive ongoing business relationship, you will bypass the first and biggest obstacle faced by most salespeople.
Listen To The Podcast:
Resources:
- Take the first step on the path to finding the Missing Piece to Your Sales Success – click here to sign up for our free mini-course.
- Learn more about our Signature Course: The Missing Piece to Your Sales Success
- Ask Alen! Send me your sales-related questions and I will answer them in the upcoming podcasts – send your questions via Linkedin or fill the form here.
More about the Episode:
Without rapport, two people will simply not trust each other, and probably will not even hear each other correctly. We have all created rapport many, many times, when we are with an old friend or when we meet someone and it feels like we’ve known them all our lives.
People tend to think it just happens, but we can establish rapport deliberately. Remember, rapport is a process, not a thing. It’s something we do with another person, and there are things we can do to establish rapport.
Rapport is also responsiveness. You don’t have to like the other person. The nonverbal aspects of communication, known as paralanguage – voice, tone, body language – convey information about our relationship with the listener, and this forms the context in which the context of the words is understood.
If you don’t have rapport, you won’t get your outcome. And this is really important in sales: if you don’t have rapport, you will not get your outcome. In any conversation, neither of you will get anywhere until you have established rapport.
We can create the synchrony element of building rapport deliberately through a process called matching: physically matching the body language of the other person.
Physical and Verbal Rapport
There are two main groups of building rapport: physical and verbal. Physical is when you match or mirror your clients, and mirroring means, as the name suggests, matching someone as if you were their mirror image. Things you can match are body posture, breathing, voice tone, movement rhythms, and representational systems.
In order to have a rapport with your client, it’s essential to respect their model of the world.
One way to think about rapport is that this is what is necessary to get you to the next step. Without rapport, you will not be able to uncover their real needs, find their hot buttons or find out about their buying criteria, their values, and their beliefs.
Get in the habit of doing rapport all the time. There is rarely a time when this is not helpful or useful. Train yourself to do it in every interaction with your clients. It does not matter, is it over the phone or in a face-to-face meeting. Once you do that, then and only then you can go to the next step.
Leave a comment below:
Let me know what you think and what will you change regarding being better at building rapport with your customers, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know your favorite strategy or revelation you’ve had about building rapport. I can’t wait to hear from you!
Ask Alen!
Send me your sales-related questions and I will answer them in the upcoming podcasts – send your questions via Linkedin or fill the form here.
Other podcasts on this topic:
Communication Skills: Speak the Language of Your Customer’s Mind