Building Rapport With Your Prospects (Video 9/30)

If you ever wanted a great wife or husband, would you ever go up to someone attractive that you have never met before in your life and ask them to marry you? That wouldn't go too well would it?

That's essentially what you're doing if you're trying to get sales in marketing without building rapport with prospects.

You will not make any money if you just straight up go to random people and ask for sales without giving them a reason to trust you. Building rapport will get people to like and trust you, therefore resulting in people being comfortable buying products or services from you.

What Is Building Rapport?

It's basically building a relationship that doesn't necessarily have to be personal with your prospects. It builds trust and pre-frames you as someone they may want to do business with in their minds, making selling a lot easier.

For example, lets say you're looking to buy some kind of information product on how to do something. Would you rather buy from a complete stranger you've never heard of or a person who you have been getting newsletters from and you know is a master at teaching what you want to learn?

This is the way you must look at you business and you must earn the trust of your customers. If you can show them your expertise and create a good impression through building rapport with your prospects, you will get much better results, no matter what the business.

Ways To Build Rapport With An Online Business

1. Email your leads regularly. Value based marketing through email is a good way of building rapport actually. It educates and informs people on the subject they're interested in, while still saving the best information for when they transition from a lead into a customer.

Sending emails to people is still one of the most effective ways to communicate and get sales in today's world. If you can build rapport and trust with this, you can impact more people at the same time than if you were to try and message or talk on the phone with one at a time.

2. Personally message prospects on social media. Many people are successful using the email method, but just as many are also doing well by taking a more personal approach. Personal messaging and starting conversations on sites like Facebook and Twitter or even Linkedin is a great way to get to know your prospects better.

It helps you develop more of a friendship and personal trust, but takes much longer than using email services without that much of a difference in conversions. But, if you are on a low budget, I suggest you start out building rapport on social media while you develop your lead generation to a point where it can take over full time.

3. Talking to prospects on the phone builds rapport very well. Although this is the most time consuming and probably least efficient way of building relationships with potential customers, it will probably create the best connection.

As long as you are talking to someone that is very willing to talk on the phone with you, it can work very well. Usually you have to start out with a few emails back and forth or social media messages though, before they may trust you enough to talk on the phone.

If you come out of nowhere and start trying to call random people that didn't give you permission to call them, that is called “cold calling” and is definitely not something I recommend. It doesn't work and all does is turn you into a telemarketer (we all know how people feel about them).

4. Talking to people in person can build good rapport. If you go to a business event or happen to run into someone in a public place who may seem interested in an online business, you can meet them somewhere and build rapport with them face to face.

While this does work, it is very inefficient, even more so than calling people because you actually have to meet them somewhere to do it. Although, it may be easier to talk to more people at one time than calling because you can arrange a small hotel or home meeting. This is kind of a last resort and a very old school way of doing things, but it can work.

Conclusion

When trying to build an online business, you have to build a relationship, as well as trust with the prospects involved. Buying products tends to be an emotional decision for most people and therefore, if they don't know who you are or what you even bring to the table, they won't buy from you much.

If you start getting good at building rapport with your potential customers by practicing everyday, eventually you will master it and be able to easily create online sales on demand.