Building Rapport: How to Win the Sales Marathon
- Akeem Aman
- Jun 23, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 25, 2024
The process of building rapport in sales is paramount in defining your success in converting leads into generated revenue for your company. In "Rapport Building: Bond Like James" we went over the general beginning of an over-the-phone cold call to a prospect.
We are going to be looking at longer sales cycles, which are primarily used in industries such as: Software As A Service Sales (SaaS), Engineering Software Sales, Business To Government Sales, Business to Business Sales and other such industries.
The products and prospective buyers of these sectors typically use a team to make the final decision and are niched down as well meaning there isn't as many prospects as there would be for cellphones in the retail industry as an example.
Building Rapport & Sandler
In my personal experience in Software As A Service Sales or SaaS, building rapport as a technique was practically using the Sandler Method of Selling. In the last blog we went over how the beginning of the call may sound like and tips to get around that.
In a long sales cycle automated email cadences, call backs and follow ups of older contacts are much more common than what they would be in the retail industry which is business to consumer. A lot of leads will be cold in this process as it takes a while for most to make a final decision for their companies. As this is the given reality lets take a look on how to effectively engage cold prospects you or the company already presented to but was no longer engaged in order to re-open the doors for a sale.
The Five
Lets go over five different strategies you can use to help engage cold prospects.
A great way to build trust with cold prospects would be to add them on social media. That move promotes social trust, its automated and its easy to do. It is also becoming a lot more common for business uses as well.
At the present moment, social media has grown by over 7%+ in the past 15 months which may not sound like a lot however it accounts for +320 million new users and will continue to grow.
Alignable, LinkedIn and Facebook
There is a very good chance that the people your trying to get a hold of may also be using one of several social media platforms. Three that would come to mind for our goal would be:
Alignable is comparable to LinkedIn except they focus on helping you connect to small businesses across your local area through virtual events, real events and simply just connecting with their network.
They do not have bots as profiles like other social media networks. In that SaaS experience I was mentioning earlier, this platform came into play when trying to connect to Diesel Repair Shop Owners as did the other two but I was surprised about how effective it was. Learn more about Alignable here.
2. LinkedIn - 1 Billion Users Worldwide
LinkedIn is the largest professional platform in the world and also does not have bots as profiles. With so many users you have a chance of connecting and messaging people whom you've tried to contact, or have contacted in the past to help keep communication open. Its remains a very active tool in building rapport.
3. Facebook - 2.9 Billion Monthly Active Users
Coming in at third and the biggest platform would be Facebook. At this point Facebook is well known by everyone and giving them credit where credit is due they have reduced their bots on the platform by an impressive 827 million according to the Q3 2023 report. Although you will hear about how "nobody uses Facebook" there are a lot of people who still do and also people who use Instagram who Facebook owns.
In the situation where you are following up with a prospect the email cadence or how many days between the time you contacted last, will depend on their engagement level, their timing etc. You may already have an email cadence you use in building rapport right now however may I suggest modifying it so gives the colder prospects more time between contacts?
This will help refresh the conversation and gives them time to give you a new update to note down in their sales pipeline profile as you jog further in this sales marathon. If you need more help on this message me on Instagram.
Coming right behind the email cadence would be those friendly touch point calls. The tonality is important and we will discuss it later in this blog. What the objective is revolves around starting a conversation about their current issues. Your looking for a longer duration in these calls so to extract emotional needs if provided and noting them down. By doing so it enriches your positioning with them as an effective listener, builds trust and separates you from the hundreds of other salespeople who are also trying to close them on something.
If you cannot tell already I love taking notes. Note taking in sales is a cheat code that leads you to the marathon finish line. Whatever is said that you deemed noteworthy, jot it down!
Lastly and most importantly its not what you said, or what you know but how you said it in the arena of sales. Training yourself to ahve a pleasant tone through practice and just working and getting experience will definitely help. The key thing to look for are filler words as well. If you can cinsider the prospects position for amoment, they may not know you very well and you saying "you know what I mean?" at the end of the sentence may not bold well on building rapport for every instance. It does however work with some prospects as it helps you sound natural. How it is said will be critical.
No matter how you engage a cold prospect it is a difficult task to do just like running a marathon. Use these tips and tricks to help build rapport and look out for future blogs on how to close these long sales cycle deals.
Have more questions? Book a call with me or leave a comment to dive deeper into the areas that weren't covered.
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