Want to build rapport with clients and customers extremely fast? In this video, we go over 6 proven ways to build massive rapport with current clients and potential clients.
Becoming a master at building rapport will be an invaluable skill to you in business and in your career. Many successful people I’ve ever met are excellent at rapidly building genuine relationships.
Building rapport with your clients and customers is absolutely crucial to be able to make sales and retain great clients long term.
Life’s much easier when you are great at rapidly building genuine relationships with anyone you meet.
Good news is – anyone can learn how to build massive rapport in a short period of time. It’s not something reserved only for extroverts or sociable people.
- Mirror the client – People naturally like people similar to themselves. You don’t have to fake it, but you can bring out certain sides of your personality more to build affinity with people faster. This is used frequently in sales scenarios where quick rapport building is essential.
- Be a good listener – An easy way to erode rapport is to talk too much. People who are excellent at rapport building are always very keen listeners. They’re asking questions, listening carefully to your answers and feeding that information back to them to confirm they understand everything. People appreciate this and it stands out a lot.
- Be competent – An easy way to build rapport with clients and customers is to simple be good at your job. Trust and respect happens when people feel like they can count on your to deliver what you say you will.
- Be reliable – If you say you’re going to call at 2pm, call at the exact minute you should. If you say you’re going to send an email at a certain time, do what you said. This is super important for clients and potential customers/prospects.
- Do the right thing by them – If you establish yourself as someone who consistently does the right thing by your client or customer, you’ll establish such a strong level of rapport and trust that your client will feel much more comfortable working with you. They’ve seen you prove yourself multiple times to them.
- Be positive and have a can do attitude – This is something not mentioned often but in a sales situation, being a positive person and having a can do attitude is very attractive and contagious – it can help you soften people who are skeptical when done right.
Hope you find that video useful.
Let me know in the comments which tip is your favourite, and if you have any tips of your own I’d love to hear them.
Ray
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Transcription:
Good day there, Ray Corcoran here. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about how to build rapport with clients and customers. Building rapport is a hugely important skill, and the reason that we’re talking about this on this channel, where we talk about making money, saving money and investing money, is that it’s a huge money-making skill.
If you can build a rapport with other people systematically and in an authentic way, it’s going to open up so many doors for you and opportunities and all that stuff that comes off the back of that. Building rapport is all about building a connection with another person. And we want to build that connection in a rapid but genuine way. So we don’t want to just be too fake and just rush all into it. We want to build a real connection with someone because when we have that connection, then we have trust. And when we have trust, all opportunities open up from there.
And the good news is that anybody can learn this stuff. Anybody that tells you otherwise, they’re wrong. You can learn this skill. It might take practise, but it is a skill that you can learn. Building quick rapport with people and rapport that is also long lasting is a skill that you can learn. And it’s going to be very, very profitable for you. Whether you have a job or you have a business, and also even in your personal life, if you can… In our life, we meet thousands of thousands of people. So if you can start to get good at building rapport with people in a rapid way, the number of opportunities that you can get out of it is just ridiculous.
And the thing I love about rapport building is it’s a skill that you can use for your entire career. It’s not like say in my marketing agency stuff like Facebook ads, for example, that platform may not be very popular or effective in 10 years time, it might not be still around. Whereas, stuff like rapport building, it’s an evergreen skill. You can use it for the rest of your career. So it’s something that’s worth investing in and learning.
And when you get good at rapport building, you can go into any room, speak to any client over the phone, any potential client over the phone or in person and you’ll be able to build that strong relationship much faster than everybody else. And when you can do that, the chances of you making that sale or building that connection, setting up partnerships in business, getting introductions to people that could potentially mentor you. There’s so many opportunities that you can get off the back of learning this skill.
So the first skill that we need to really master when it comes to rapport building is mirroring the customer. Now, this is something that has been very, very popular in retail sales for many, many years. If you go into a department store and you speak to one of the sale, if you… These days, you can’t even find any of those sales reps to help you because they have one staff member per 10,000 square metres of floor space. However, if you do find someone, they’re trained, and they don’t even use that technique to be honest, but they’re trained to mirror the customer.
So if you have a very dominant personality or you speak really quick, they encourage you to be like that, speak like that. And if you have someone that’s maybe a bit more softly spoken, you might slow down your speech and speak a bit more softly.
The reason why mirroring so effective is that we craft our own personality based on what we like and what we think is the right way to be. So when we meet someone that has similar qualities, we instantly have a natural affinity for that person. And we start to build a bond. We naturally don’t unfortunately like people that are very, very different to us. It’s not that they’re bad or they’re worse, but people generally like being around people that are similar to themselves.
So the way that you can use this is, take notice of how, whether it’s a customer or a client or a potential client, look at how they speaking, look at what they focus on, look at what they don’t focus on, but you want to copy the way that they are. So for me, if I’m on a phone call to someone that’s a bit more blokey and maybe a bit more of a direct and dominant personality, I’m not spending 15 minutes at the start of the phone call or the interaction talking about how their day was. These are people that want to get into stuff, get stuff done, and they want to get straight to the point. They value and appreciate when people do that for them.
The flip side is, if you have someone that’s a bit more emotional and they’re a bit more, maybe hyper active and love having a chat and that sort of stuff. I would do more of that in my own way. And you can do that as well. So if you meet someone a bit like that, you can start bringing that side of your personality out. We don’t have to fake being like them, but we do bring out that aspect of our personality.
Your personality is really based on a number of different traits, and we’re turning up certain traits and maybe turning down other traits so we can build more affinity faster. I’d really encourage you to practise mirroring when you’re even in very minor social situations, even at the coffee shop, whether you’re on the phone to a friend, try it out in non-work or business related situations and start to practise it. You’ll be surprised with how much of a relationship you can build with people and really build bonds with people. And it’s a great skill to know.
Number two is being a good listener. It is crucial in terms of building trust and rapport with people that you are a good listener. People that talk and talk and talk, obviously I’m talking because it’s the video, but if you’re always talking and never listening, it’s impossible. You are closing the doors for you to have any kind of rapport with this person. Listening and asking questions is crucial to building rapport. Most people do a crap job of listening to other people. So if you can be someone that listens more than most, you’re going to find that you build rapport better than most. As the old saying goes, “You’ve got two ears and one mouth. So use them accordingly.”
You want to make sure that you’re always listening. One thing that I always do if I’m in a business situation, if I’m on the phone, I’m writing heaps of notes about even little details of things that they say, because one thing that you can really surprise people with and build a good bump in rapport with them is by mentioning something that they may have mentioned as an offhand comment, in the previous call or at the start of the phone call, if it’s a longer call. The fact that you noticed it, heard it, remembered it and could feed it back to them later in the call or the conversation or the next time you see them, it shows that you actually were listening. And while this sounds like a very simple thing. Nobody does it. So when you do do it, it does stand out massively.
Number three is be competent. So if you’re looking to build more trust and build more of a relationship with customers and potential customers, you need to understand that you need to be very, very good at what you do. You need to know your domain inside out. If people are coming to you for domain expertise, even if you worked in a department store, you need to understand the products that are available. What’s not available. What’s in trend. I don’t know, if you need to know the specs of the technical products, if you’re selling them. You don’t understand that.
If you don’t know your stuff, when it comes to dealing with people, they’re not going to respect you. They’re not going to be interested in dealing with you because you can’t offer them anything. So you need to understand that you need to know everything about your domain. When you know what you’re talking about, you can be someone that they can trust and count on to be useful to them.
Number four is you got to be reliable. It’s very, very important if you want to build trust and rapport with customers. Especially potentially difficult customers that you will come across that have… They’re either just hard to deal with, in a negative way, or B they’re great people, however, they’re extremely demanding and have very, very high expectations. Potentially customers that have very, very high spend and deserve a rural top-level of service.
So what we want to be doing is making sure that you are reliable. So this means usually a lot of micro things. So, if you say you’re going to call at 1:00 PM, call them to the minute at 1:00 PM. This is something that a lot of people don’t do and are very casual about in a business environment. This is something that I started doing just because I liked being punctual. But one thing I didn’t expect was how much my customers and clients loved it. They love that they know out of all their meetings, their phone will ring when it’s our meeting to the minute, on time. And it almost becomes a bit of a running joke about how the calls are always on time.
And while it’s a bit of a laugh, it’s actually a very serious reason behind that because people love certainty. They love people they can count on because they are few and far between in work, in day jobs, and in business. So you stand out a lot and you can build a lot of trust by being someone that they can trust.
And it doesn’t just come down to punctuality. It’s very, very important that you do what you say you will do. So if you say you’re going to send an email, I don’t care if it’s 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM, you had a big day, you’re tired. If you said that you would send that email by the end of the day, you need to send the email. If you don’t, will anything happen tomorrow? Probably not. But the customer notices. You might not think that they would care or notice, or they might not even say anything to you, but they do notice. And if you keep letting yourself off, you will start to build a bit of a picture that you are someone that can’t be counted on.
Another really important thing when it comes to building rapport with your clients and customers is doing the right thing by the customer. Now, Atlassian, which is a massive tech startup success story out of Australia, and one of the biggest companies in Australia. They have a bunch of company values and one of their values, I don’t know if it still is today, but at one point they’d had one of the company values which is, don’t F the customer. And what that means is basically do things in their best interests always. Now, I think every company could implement that in their business and it would be very, very beneficial for them.
It’s important to build a habit and a style where you are someone that does the right thing by them at all times. And especially when they’re not looking, or they may not ever find out whether you did the right thing or not. Doing the right thing, even behind closed doors, even if the customer may not personally know that you did or didn’t do something, if you always consistently are someone that is honest and does the right thing, then your customers… Some days they may find out that you did or didn’t do something. And you might’ve thought that they would have never found out whether you did it or not. They find out, and all your trust and rapport gets eroded instantly. So it’s very, very important that you conduct yourself and be honest and do the right thing by them.
And don’t try and cut any corners, because it will come back to bite you, whether it’s this customer or the next customer, or a hundred customers down the track, you always want to conduct yourself as if people are watching, because it’s such an easy way to lose a lot of rapport and it can take… It’s like, I think it was Warren Buffet had the quote, “You can spend years building up a reputation and only seconds to destroy it.” So that’s very, very relevant when it comes to rapport building.
The last one’s maybe not as much of a common one, but when it comes to building rapport and trust with customers, sometimes just having fun and being a positive person can make a big impact in how much trust you can build, because being positive and happy and hopefully not fake happy, but like genuinely happy and positive, always being in a positive frame of mind and a can do attitude. It’s a very attractive quality for people.
So if your customers, they can feel that on you, they can sense that when you’re being a positive person. So, it can build a lot of trust and a lot of rapport and likability, when you’re a happy person. If you’re always negative and can’t do this because… And you can never get stuff done, it repels them. And it doesn’t help you build the kind of rapport that you need.
So that’s the video for this week. Hope you found that useful. Let me know in the comments below, what was your favourite tip? What’s something that you’ve done before that has worked really, really well? I would love to hear it. And give the video a like, if you want. And other than that, I will see you on the next video.