Ep. 395: 4 Essential Tips for Building Rapport with Clients

Building Rapport with Clients

Who should listen: If you’re someone seeking guidance on how to build a good rapport with clients in ways that encourage them to know, like, and trust you, then you’ll benefit from today’s discussion.

Key idea: Building rapport isn’t something that can be scripted. You need to be authentic, but it is something you can learn.

Building rapport with clients is far more than simply “getting along.” Rapport is a statement about relationships that are characterized by agreement, mutual understanding, and empathy. People who enjoy a close and harmonious relationship have rapport with one another, and it allows parties to communicate well with one another.

As such, being able to establish rapport involves genuine effort and is a fundamental sales skill because it’s indispensable to developing trust.

Developing rapport doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does require a bit of skill. This is good news because skills can be learned, practiced, and improved; however, rapport isn’t something you can fake. Insincerity when trying to build rapport will get you nowhere and most likely damage beyond repair any budding relationship with a prospective client.

Four ways to build rapport

Remembering that your efforts to build rapport must be authentic, you can practice these four skills to encourage people to feel comfortable with you and eventually agree to do business with you:

Match and mirror behavior. You don’t want to be a mimic, but do attempt to match your prospective clients’ demeanor and presence. As we describe in the episode, you don’t want to be overbearing and loud with someone who is more demure. Be yourself, but temper your body language, tone of voice, language, and other aspects of communicating so that you are more aligned with your counterparts’ behaviors.

Engage in active listening. To demonstrate active listening, you’ve undoubtedly been told to sustain eye contact, nod, ask questions, and show empathy. These are all excellent tips, but you also want to avoid ego speak where you appear to be listening but are actually thinking of the next thing you want to say. For example, it’s off-putting to appear to be listening to a client only for you to take the first opportunity to launch into your pitch.

Focus on understanding your prospects’ needs. We all speak with intent and are driving to our own goals. The key here is to adopt a mindset where you aren’t concerned with the transaction as much as you are with trying to help.

Draw on common experiences. We tend to connect more readily and easily with people we perceive to be like us. Find that common ground and draw on it. It could be as simple as where you live, having the same number of children, or being a fan of the same sports team. Social media makes it exceptionally easy to find areas of commonality between yourself and a known prospect, so make good use of it and look at their page before meeting.

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