Rapport is About Listening to Their Words

Recently, I was coaching a sales person who could not understand why she was losing so many sales opportunities. She explained to me how see used the same sales process, basically the same techniques and methods, yet, she had major differences in her sales results.

Then she said the major words relative to her issue. She stated that sometimes everything flowed with no issues, while on other occasions – she felt a block to anything she said or the prospect would just look at her as if she was speaking a foreign language. This is important part. Even if you are both speaking the same language, if you using difference representational systems there can be total misunderstandings.

Here is what I’m talking about. People have three primary representational systems – visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Actually there are two others, yet, there are rare except for certain jobs. Getting back on track here, if you are speaking in visual terms and the other person is auditory – you can be mismatching and yes, you will have difficulty in understanding what is being said.

There are two primary methods to discover which representational systems are being used.

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Gain Rapport with Four Nonverbal Sales Techniques

Gaining rapport is one of the most important sales skills. It is the starting point for building trust and a relationship with another human being.

The research continues to indicate it is critical to gain rapport with a prospect or customer as fast as possible. Reason? The prospect decides if they like you in the first 30 seconds of the meeting. Then after only four minutes, they lock in their feelings about you in their mind.

If they like you in the first few minutes then the rest of the time they are looking for ways to do business with you – including working with you to solve issues or differences between what they want and what you have to offer. Interesting, only four minutes to set this up. The flip side to this information – the dark side if you may – is if they feel they don’t like you, then they are listening for the first excuse or reason to say “no” and get you out of their office.

Since everything counts in selling, gaining rapport quickly is a key factor in your ultimate sales success. While there are many things you can do for better rapport building techniques, I will focus strictly on the nonverbal rapport building techniques. As a reminder, it is critically important for you to learn the power of word usage, behavioral style recognition and improved questioning techniques for total rapport building with others.

Let’s get back on track, nonverbal selling techniques you can use immediately include…

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The Best Question to Ask a Customer or Prospect

Through the years of training sales people one topic comes up on a regular basis – How do I get the Customer/Prospect to talk to me? In reality, this is the most important thing that a Salesperson has to do – get the customer or prospect to tell them about things. In response, they is a question that when used properly has the power to get customers and prospects talking about their situation. I have referred to it as the “million dollar question” because it is so effective.

Okay, here it is:

“Mr/Ms Prospect/Customer, I’m fully prepared to talk about X, yet, first I would like to understand your perspective on what is important to you and this will allow me to not waste your time discussing things that are not important to you.”

It seems corny, yet it works like a charm with even tight lipped buyers. How does this work? Well, it is due to the three parts of the question. Each part has a “meta talk” that is important to the customer and gives the salesperson more credibility.

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