Instant Rapport - A Basic Primer

In it’s simplest terms, rapport is fundamentally a relationship of responsiveness. We’ve often heard that in order to sell an item, product, or even an idea to someone, you have to establish rapport. Notwithstanding, depending on the situation and what is being sold, the degree of the rapport may not be as critical to someone selling a pair of jeans vs asking the girl you love to marry you. The level of trust has to be appropriate for the type of “sale” that one is hoping to occur. When someone is in rapport with another person, they respond to each others requests, answer communications timely, and do favors for each other. This is a reciprocal relationship between two people; a relationship of responsiveness. Webster defines rapport this way:

There are benefits to having a strong rapport with someone. Besides being a reciprocal relationship, strong rapport opens up a sense of trust. This trust means that everyone believes that others will do what they say and that they have a mutual interest in something. Additionally, psychologists say that one of the conditions all humans crave whether we realize it or not, is to be understood. Strong rapport does this. With strong rapport comes ability to feel comfortable in conversations. The benefits were a two-way street.

In sales, generally, a lower degree of rapport is needed. As the price or value increase of a product, the degree of rapport needed will rise. Such is the case lets say between a clothing salesmen and a real estate agent. With a real-estate agent, there more than likely will be multiple contacts, meetings, and communications. The degree of rapport will need to be much higher. These differences in degree can be categorized by two types of rapport, wide rapport versus deep rapport. Wide rapport topics are generalized topics such as the weather, sports teams, news of the day, or things you like. These are the items generally described as small talk. On the other side of the coin, “deep” rapport topics are ones that are personal in nature. They usually target one topic specifically. They also are usually topics that both of you feel comfortable talking about. These are going to be things like, goals in life, how something makes another feel, or other topics that could make someone feel vulnerable. Deep rapport definitely requires a high level of trust in each other, and is something a person won’t generally tell everyone they meet.

So in the course of everyday living we all have built rapport with others and they with you. It was some inherent thing that made you click with that person. These were natural ways that rapport occurred. More than likely you became friends to some extent. You both benefited. There was no specific timeline and it occurred in its own timeframe, and naturally.

But in a sales setting we recognize that having rapport can certainly be beneficial, to both of you. The sale can bring a commission to a seller and the product can give the buyer something of value. But in a sales situation, time is very limited. Wouldn’t it be nice to speed up the process that occurs naturally? So to do that, we need to break down what rapport is and incorporate the naturally occurring items into everyday communications and life. The outcome would be, whether in personal or business relationships, an aura of self confidence, of expectations, of response, of friendliness, and of attraction. In a nut shell, people would want to hear what you have to say, be around you, follow you, and friend you. Let’s start learning how.

So to build rapport with someone, it is predicated on understanding that first and foremost you are seeking responsiveness between you and another person. The area where one can interact with people requires that you be genuinely sincere and have good heartfelt intentions. You really can’t fake sincerity. So if you’re in it to take advantage of someone, they’ll smell the insincerity right away. Now this may be feel counter-intuitive, especially in a sales situation, but you’ve got to approach rapport building without expecting an outcome. So the idea of goal setting to achieve outcomes goes right out the door. Instead, you need to live in the moment and the process. You need to understand that not all encounters with others will lead to establishing rapport. When you can master living in the moment, you will come across much more genuine, sincere, honest, and interesting. Your interaction’s goal should be to simply seek responsiveness and enter into it with the idea that it’s going to be fun and interesting. There won’t be any downfall.

When seeking responsiveness, the cardinal rule is to avoid resistance. You want the interaction to flow smoothly. Do not blatantly disagree with someone. This puts up a barrier almost immediately. To avoid disagreement, you only need to acknowledge the other person’s view point, and continue along your own path. By doing that you’ll be able to maintain a strong sense of rapport.

The are four concrete components to help avoid resistance and create rapport.
Number one is “Shared Goals”. If both of you have a common goal, the only sticky part should be, is how to go about pursuing it. By keeping the conversation with that in mind, it will lower resistance.

Number two is “Common Enemies”. If you can find a common boogey man to criticize it will bring comradery to you both with an “us versus them” mentality. The weatherman, government, a company, etc. come to mind. But be careful to over over-criticize.

Number three is “Shared Experiences”. Doing something together creates a tighter bond between you. The real work of business gets done on golf courses and supper clubs.

Finally, number four is “Strong Emotions”. By having a common goal and a common enemy, this certainly will bring strong emotions. These components will strengthen any bond, and help avoid any resistance that may come about. These can be brought up in most circumstances, or clarifications of understanding by paraphrasing.

Now some of the techniques and understanding about the way people interact and think definitely involves a bit of psychology. Now these are just generalizations, so they are not always true for everyone. There can be circumstances not know by you that can effect the outcome of an interaction. But as I pointed out before, not all encounters will lead to establishing rapport. So these following concepts aren’t fast and hard but should be base guidelines to follow.

One of the first ways to build rapport is to cultivate curiosity. Why? Well people love it when others are curious about them. They enjoy when others ask what they do, where they’ve been, where they’re going, what they are passionate about, and what’s important to them. What we see in most conversations is people talking about themselves all the time. By giving them the green light to do so, you will build rapport. Have a genuine curiosity. Just be sure that your questions are sincere and brought up in a comfortable way.

To stay in the comfort zone, you need to naturally steer the conversation to hit the questions of curiosity that you have. You should be able to come away with their goals, something they fear, names of family members, or other miscellaneous facts. The simple fact that you’ve asked theses types of questions will definitely make you stand out in their mind, and rapport can almost be built within a couple of minutes. At first the other person may be surprised because no one has taken interest in them like this before, but as long as your body language isn’t leaning in on them or seeking any kind of approval, they will be more apt to share that information with you. A simple acronym AAJ that stands for Aims, Ambitions, and Joys are simple easy to remember points of conversation that will build rapport.

So I earlier asked the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice to speed up the process that occurs naturally?” We have at our disposal, several ways to accelerate the rate at which rapport can grow. These of course are not things that should be used all at once. You will need to firstly, know what they are, how they work, then through experience and seeing which works best for a situation, mix and match a few of them and see what works for you.

There is a principal of psychology that says when someone acts a specific way towards someone, they in turn will take meaning from it to determine how they feel about them. This principal is called “commitment and consistency bias”. The implementation here is to offer a favor of some kind and follow through. Sometimes, the mere act of offering will work, but if accepted, you best follow through.

When you hear someone confess something, don’t you think to yourself that that person is honest, open, and sincere? What you confess doesn’t have to be a really heavy deep thing either, just something to let others know that you’ve shown yourself to be honest and not perfect. Many times others see in people that they couldn’t ever be like someone they admire. The truth is, that we can aspire to be anyone. No one is perfect, and showing a glimpse of vulnerability demonstrates that we all really are the same.

Sharing secrets is a technique that will accelerate rapport building. For many of the same reasons as confessing, sharing tidbits of information about yourself or a topic will compel other to share a secret about themselves or something they know. Figure out a few personal secrets you have about yourself and put them in your back pocket.

When we are exposed to something repetitively for more than a few times, we will start responding more positively to it. This is known as the “mere-exposure effect”. This doesn’t mean to over-expose but works when there are multiple exposures over different medium.

An age-old technique is one by none other than Dale Carnegie, is to recognize them uniquely or in a group setting. The way it works is to remember or take a mental note about one unique thing about them the first time you meet them. The next time you see them, ask them a question about that specific thing. If that thing is an accomplishment, find a way to slip in that accomplishment into conversation with others in a group setting. That’s a genuine way of recognizing them.

Reciprocity is something where others will do something when we do it to them. If you do something kind to someone, they will tend to want to reciprocate. One of the easiest ways is to simply smile at them. Try it sometime. Gift giving works as well.

And we will finish off with a rapport technique that you can use, but have to have to be careful with how you use it. This one on the surface may seem counterintuitive. This is simply making fun or jest in a friendly way. Before trying this one, master the ones above. Then try slipping this one in. Also make sure that it is done in a friendly way, not in an insulting manner.

Building rapport quickly can open doors of establishing new relationships and business partners. You will gain abilities to persuade and influence. You will establish yourself as a leader. However, using these techniques does require you to practice them. You will have to train. The difficult part of using these techniques to gain rapport, is, as I talked about above, not expecting an outcome. When you expect an outcome, the other person will notice and your attempts may seem phony and insincere. So training yourself will consist of practicing a few of the techniques and as you get better at them, adding and learning the others.