Rapport Building In Sales: There's a Good Chance You're Doing It Wrong

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Virtually everyone agrees that, situation permitting, the first thing you should do is develop as much rapport as you can as quickly as you can in a sales process.

I put the qualifier "situation permitting" in there because, in today's world, a great deal of your selling will be done virtually, and developing rapport virtually is significantly more difficult than it is in person.

Nevertheless, don't stress too much. Based on industry research, experience, and Neil Rackham, there's no correlation between how one opens and builds early rapport and whether a sale will ultimately be made.

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Do what you can, but always keep it natural. If you happen to be one of the minority who still sells in person, here are a few things you can do. You can also use some of them virtually. You just need to be a little bit more intentional about how you pick your spots.

A generic approach for rapport building suggested by Jim Collins, author of the classic business book Good to Great, suggests, "Where are you from?" as a good opener.

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Your buyer may answer in the past tense about where she grew up: "I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan." She may give a current-tense organizational answer: "I'm part of purchasing."

Both offer an opportunity for lots of follow-up questions where you can especially look for commonalities in your experiences.

A similar question I personally like to use is, "Are you from this area originally?" It's a little bit more specific, but often lends itself to lots of follow-up questions as well.

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A bit more specific approach can be around major events happening in people's lives. These may be macro events tied to an area or micro events tied to that person's life.

For example, there are major weather events like hurricanes, blizzards, days and days of rain, and so forth. These fit the macro category I am speaking about.

Questions you can use are things like, "Are you in a place where that is impacting you personally? Is it impacting your commute? Or is it impacting your general routine?" Anything like that.

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Quite honestly, asking these types of questions of people when they even remotely might be being impacted is simply part of being a good person and caring about others.

They virtually always open up a good conversation whether they've been personally impacted or not. To not ask about these things when they're relevant can actually create negative rapport, if there is such a thing.

Note that I've said major weather or other events. Just asking about the weather where they are is time-filling and does not do anything to build rapport.

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On the personal side, maybe you had to postpone your initial meeting because your buyer had a family emergency, maybe the birth of a baby, whatever. Check on how things turned out with that micro event.

People notice when you take time to ask about what is important to them personally.

Often, you can build rapport around sporting events and teams. You need to handle the sports-related questions with care and make no assumptions about a buyer's fandom or that he is following a certain major event.

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You can often introduce it as casually as, "It looks like there's a lot of activity around the men's basketball Final Four being in your town next week," or the college team from your area having an amazing football season. "Is that impacting your world?"

I'll never forget an in-person call I made with one of my reps in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about 10 years ago. As we were driving to the meeting, we passed a preseason practice that was going on for the local professional football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.

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When we arrived at our destination, the two women we were meeting with asked us if we had any trouble finding their office. We answered that we had not and that it had been fun driving past the practice facility, which launched these two, unbeknownst to us, superfans into about a 20-minute gush about the upcoming season and all the things they were worried about for their team.

Thankfully, one of us followed professional football closely enough that we were able to keep the conversation alive and engaged.

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Which leads us to another point about rapport building. Had we not had that level of knowledge about football, it would have been better to have said that upfront.

Don't ever try to fake it. Be genuine about what you do and do not know.

If you still want to pursue a topic like this one when you don't have the knowledge, it often works extremely well to ask them questions about that thing they are so excited about. People love teaching others.

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With rapport building, the key point in today's world, as it always has been, is to use it naturally.

When you call on someone in person, these are good questions to fill the silence as your buyer walks you to a meeting room or while you're waiting for others to join once you get there.

They can also work quite well while you're waiting for another person to join you virtually for a group video or a group phone call. Be sensitive to things that might be impacting their day-to-day lives and use those things.

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Now, what about politics, religion, and other sensitive topics?

Obviously, you should stay away from potentially charged topics such as those closely tied to politics or religion.

My next example is of neither, but it also fits in the "you're best to avoid it" category.

A few years ago, I was helping judge a sales competition involving students from several major universities throughout the United States. In his role-play assignment, selling to a salesperson of one of the sponsoring organizations as his role-play buyer, one of the students I was judging was trying to make sure he got rapport building in there for the judges to see and to hear and to grade him on.

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As I remember it, the first minute or two of the call went something like this.

Student: "Thank you for meeting with me today. How are things going?"

Role-play buyer: "Just fine. How about you?"

Student: "I'm doing well. I'm looking forward to spring break next week. Going to party and probably drink a little bit," with a smirk on his face. "What's your favorite drink?"

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Thankfully, it was a role-play where the student could learn from his mistakes. But even still, there was an extremely awkward pause from the role-play buyer.

There were all kinds of assumptions the student made that could have dug him a deep hole in a real selling environment. He had no idea if his buyer drank alcohol or what a personal family background might be with such a thing.

Stick to easy, non-controversial conversations.

There's one more nuance I'd like to add here that has to do with geography.

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For example, certain regions of the United States, but not all, have unwritten codes for how much personal conversation should take place before you get down to business.

I'll never forget the first time I joined a call in the Deep South of the United States where my rep had been born and bred in the area. It must have taken us a good 20 minutes to check on everything, from how the fried Twinkie party went the previous weekend—for those of you unfamiliar with the South like I was, this is a real thing—to seemingly how Aunt Martha's bunions were doing.

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It took forever. Only then could we begin our traditional selling. And to be clear, this is one of my best reps who sold a lot of business. He knew what he was doing.

Now, contrast that to meetings I was in more than once in New York City, especially early in my career, where the first thing my buyers wanted to talk about was that my price was too high.

Often, they did not yet even know what my product did or what the real price was going to end up being, but they liked to negotiate from the beginning.

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I always thought of it as a sort of dance I needed to go through to prove my worthiness to work with them. And of course, you could show no give in those early conversations or you could lose the respect of your buyer.

I always felt like that was a sort of rapport building of its own kind.

Regions and, more importantly, people have their quirks. Roll with them.

To wrap up this lesson, let me quote the ever-present Neil Rackham from his foreword to the book The Challenger Sale:

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"Personally, I believe that a customer relationship is the result and not the cause of successful selling. It is a reward that the salesperson earns by creating customer value. If you help customers think differently and bring them new ideas, then you earn the right to a relationship."

Research over the years has borne out that not only was Rackham correct, it's exactly how top performers approached their craft.

People like to buy from people they like, but it's just not enough on its own. Rapport building can't hurt, but just don't get too caught up in the details.