The Importance of Creating Rapport
We’ve written the proposal and now it’s time to meet the client and show all our great ideas. It’s going to be great. We have the best ways to get the right answers! They are going to be impressed If we can just get them to listen to all we have to say, they’ll be convinced.
So goes many a team chat before the pitch presentation. And so goes many a great idea out the window and down the street, unbought. What could have possibly gone wrong? We had our cleverest people in the room, they showed the latest thinking, our unique technology, our years of experience.
Well according to Amy Cuddy in her book, ‘Presence’, there’s a step clients need to take before being impressed by your offer. The client needs to trust you. If they don’t trust you, they don’t buy from you, even though you’re awfully clever.
The client needs to feel that you have understood their position, their problems, their aspirations, and that you can empathise with how they feel and then understand how your solution will help them with this.
But more than that, the client also needs to feel in sync with you. The stronger the connection, the more likely she is to want to work with you, not only because she’s more likely to trust that you’d respond as she would, but also because we spend so much of our lives working, it’s just so much better for quality of life/workday if we enjoy the people we work with.
Importantly, that doesn’t mean being super-friendly. Some clients are extrovert, others introvert. It’s as important to tailor your approach to being self contained as it is to being that bouncy ball of enthusiasm.
Observation and a little low key mirroring pays off when you can build rapport with your prospective client. You not only communicate on the same wave length but it helps you understand how you can meet their needs better too.
