Sales Success Key #8 -- Building Rapport

Twenty-five years ago I was on a canoe trip pondering a name for a new sales model. I came up with “One Mind Selling”. It was meant to highlight the need for a salesperson to establish such finely tuned rapport with a customer that the two of them would become one. Their values would be aligned, their conversational direction would be mutually satisfying, and their pacing would match up perfectly. They would hum right along with the tune of the transaction.

Ultimately I dropped that name for the model because it sounded like hooey.

But it’s been in my heart ever since.

I think I also gave it up because of a deep frustration that when you teach someone a beautiful way of "being", and it sings for them, it eventually gets normalized and devolves into a simple technique. That’s a real problem.

It’s one thing for rapport to flow naturally from multiple dimensions of commonality; it’s another thing for somebody to be "doing" commonality on purpose. I have the same problem with the notion of "making friends"; if you try to make friends, then it's just not natural.

I swear on my life the resolution of this problem in the world of sales comes from integrating – not balancing – one’s self-interests with a genuine interest in helping the other.

Not that scientists can actually touch motives yet, in terms of motives being measurable, observable thingys, but it seems to me that motives define one’s integrity. For what it’s worth, this notion gives me hope in the possibility of commercial authenticity.