Build Rapport With Your Customers and Watch Your Sales Take Off !

"All lasting business is built on friendship."

Alfred A. Montapert

Part One - What is rapport?
Think of the ingredients in a recipe. There's usually one main ingredient isn't there? If you are making a cake, it's usually flour that you have to have, with an omelette, its eggs, and so on.

When making a sale, you also need to have all the right ingredients:

• A customer
• A product or service
• A competitive price relative to your competitors
• A unique Selling Proposition, (features and benefits that apply to your product/service that make it stand out from the opposition)

Plus, the main ingredient, rapport with the customer.

You can have the best product in the world, at the most competitive price, but if you don't engage with the customer you won't sell it, (unless, of course, you are operating in a space where there is little or no competition and the customer simply has to buy it from you - most of us, regrettably, don't).

OK, so we all agree that we have to have rapport, but what exactly is it?

How can we establish rapport with someone that we have only just met or to whom we are speaking on the telephone?

We need to deal with these scenarios separately  When speaking to someone in person you have the benefit of being able to see their faces and reading signs, indications as to the attitude, frame of mind and level of interest being shown by the customer.

Most people are aware of the classic, "I'm not that interested" signs, looking at a watch or clock, eyes straying away from you onto other things in the room, yawning, (really bad - probably time to go), fiddling with papers or a pen perhaps. All of these are ways of telling you something that you don't really want to hear and which your prospect is too polite to actually tell you.

Some estimates place the level of communication between two people as being as high as 93% non-verbal, i.e. body language.

When speaking on the telephone, however, you cannot see any of those things, but that does not mean that you can't assess the other persons level of interest by the things that they say and the way that they say them.
For this reason, when speaking to someone on the telephone, especially for the first time, it is essential to make the best impression you can in the first few seconds. In a person to person situation it can be your appearance that gives people their early impression of you. On the telephone, however, it is your voice, and your tone that will create that vital initial impression.

I would suggest that the first task you have to set yourself in establishing rapport is to observe. Observation of your contact at the earliest stage will give you most of the information you need in order to quickly build up rapport.

It is easy to observe someone in person but, surely, you can't do that on the telephone. Well, yes you can actually, but the signs you are looking for will be different as will the way in which you observe them.

Of course, what you cannot do is simply stand and watch your contact for 5 minutes, or just listen on the telephone without speaking for a similar length of time, in order to build up a picture of who and what they are so that you can build rapport with them. This brings me to my first technical tip for establishing rapport, whether you are with them in person or speaking on the telephone - develop a "Question Bank."

What's In A Question Bank?
This is one of the killer tools for establishing rapport and, in its extended form, for making sales. Rapport building questions are different from fact-finding ones. You need to ask fact-finding questions in order to establish whether your product or service is the right solution for the client, if you don't you run the risk of proposing something too big, too small, the wrong capacity, etc. This comes a little later though, for now we are just trying to establish rapport so that we have a better chance of making a successful sales pitch later on. The client will feel happier about giving us the information you need if you get along with him or her.

I'll be discussing the Question Bank technique and how it can be used to help with observation, in my next post, out soon. In the meantime, please comment or contact me if you have questions.

Write Killer Proposals & Triple Your Conversion Rate

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Confucius, (551–479 BCE) Chinese philosopher and teacher.

Speaking with customers is, as we all know, a crucial part of a salesperson's job. Whether the conversations take place in person, or over a telephone, the opportunity to speak with the decision maker, to fact find and to make your pitch, is a vital part of the sales process.

Very few people would disagree with the above but, the bad news I have for you is this - a lot of what is said during such a conversation will be forgotten quite quickly.

How can we combat that?

The answer was realised all those years ago by good old Confucius, confirm everything in writing.

Your client may well forget much of the conversation that you had with him but a well written follow up can often help to seal the deal.

All of that brings me nicely to my main message for this article - the power of the proposal.

Exactly what is a proposal?

To my surprise, a lot of the salespeople I talk to don't really know.

"Surely, its a quote, an estimate" is the most common misconception.
A proposal will almost certainly include financial details and may well include  a quotation but that is not the sole purpose of a proposal, its not even the main purpose of it.

The main purpose of a proposal is to do the talking that you cannot do in person.

If your contact is in a board meeting at which one of the agenda items is to discuss the purchase of the product of which you are a supplier, you are not there, at that meeting, to provide details or to make a case for purchasing the product from you.

Your contact may remember some of that which was said at your meeting or during your telephone conversations, but can you rely on that?

If, on the other hand, he has a document to hand which provides not only pricing, but a well considered argument as to why the product is right for the job and, more importantly, why it should be purchased from you. Pictures of your product, preferably showing it in use, are also valuable sales aids.

My proposal to you is that you should always have a template proposal ready to send to every client you meet. Within days, if not hours, this should land on his or her desk, send it by email by all means but always send a printed, bound, copy as well - emails can end up in a spam folder or can easily be deleted whereas a printed, bound, copy of a well presented, well argued proposal will survive at least for a while.

Now, I can't write your proposals for you but I can give you my template for what has, for me and for lots of people who have worked with me and used this structure, been a successful formula for making sales.

In one recent project that I was involved in, conversion ratios increased three-fold for cases where a proposal was sent over as against those where one was not sent.

I'm going to publish my proposal template in the next few days, I'm just making a few adjustments to it and will post it here as soon as I can.

In the meantime if you have questions or comments please contact me.