Sales: Building Rapport with Potential Customers and Clients

By startupprincess | Published December 15, 2008

Building rapport is one of the most critical aspects of sales. You will surely repel those whom you desire to have as your customers if you are unable to build rapport. There are many different approaches to rapport building. You can do it by having an advertisement that resonates with your target market. You can build rapport with your tone of voice, the language that you use, with your appearance or with you body language. One of the most important rapport building concepts is that of mirroring and matching. This post was written by Fairy Godmother Annette Pieper, life and business coach.

Mirroring and matching means that you need to pay attention and be totally present with your potential customer. Whether you are meeting with them in person, on the phone or by email, you must pay attention. Let me break this concept down by the different methods of contact.

•    In Person: When you are meeting someone in person, pay attention to their body movements and match and mirror those. For instance, if they are folding their arms, you should fold your arms. Now you must not do this in a mocking type of way, just be natural. If they are sitting with their legs crossed, you should mirror that crossing your legs in a casual way so it is not obvious. If you are walking, match their speed rather than have them trying to match yours. Also match their tone and speed of speaking. If they are speaking soft and slow, you will turn them off if you speak loud and fast.

•    By Phone: On the phone you will be specifically paying attention to tone of voice, language and breathing patterns. You want to match tonality and speed of speech, breathing. Be sure to match and mirror their language. If they are using language that tells you they are moving away from something then you will match that. For example, if they say “I am so sick of this refrigerator, I just can’t live with it any more”, they are moving away from something. If they are moving towards something, then you will want to match that. For example, if they say “I am so excited about the idea of having a refrigerator that has more space” then they are moving towards something. You want to be sure to mirror their tone and voice volume.

•    By Email: You will be paying special attention to their language in an email. You will also be using your intuition to “read between the lines”. What are they really saying? You will be matching the tonality of the written word and again paying attention to their language usage and patterns then match and mirror those.

I encourage you to practice mirroring and matching with your family and friends and develop these skills. Really work to perfect them. It’s fun work as well so you can enjoy yourself in the process.

©2008 Annette Pieper is a Harmonic Life Specialist, popular motivational speaker, personal coach and mentor and CEO of Harmonic Life Institute, a company offering private and group consultations, webinars, workshops, seminars and educational material to inform and inspire you to create harmony in mind, body, heart and soul. Sign up to receive her Jewels of Life Ezine and get your free tips on starting your day with joy and harmony at http://www.annettepieper.com

Annette Pieper
Embrace the Power of Possibilities

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2 Responses to “Sales: Building Rapport with Potential Customers and Clients”

  1. Jan Gray on January 28th, 2009 12:28 am

    These are great hints. It was helpful to learn that adjusting our email style is a good idea. I was also interested in the idea of language moving away from and moving towards something. This makes sense and I hadn’t heard that concept before. I’m interested to have some examples of what one might say in relation to mirroring the above examples. Would one stay with the refridgerator theme etc? Thanks for the interesting and helpful post

  2. Greg Woodley on February 13th, 2009 2:57 am

    Kelly, I can understand why you reposted this article from Annette. She knows her stuff about rapport. I used rapport to great effect in my B2B sales career. Another hint for your readers is to match the sentence length of the person they are talking to or responding to via email.
    Greg

    Greg Woodleys last blog post…Just a Woman

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