Smiling and wagging your tail (metaphorically speaking), can be a good start for rapport! Deepen it by matching your clients' rep systems.

So, you're back at work now.

Perhaps you've tested your rapport, and discovered that you do already automatically match people's body language when you like them.

Maybe you caught yourself matching something else (the pitch of someone's voice, their accent, even the words that they use "see what i mean?").

If you'd like to get a handle on your own rep system preferences, see what it means, and discover new sounds for yourself, then please try out the diagnostic in this pdf. The notes are there for you as well, just in case you want to refer to them.

Here are some questions you may like to work on:

1. Which representational system is your preferred one (V A K Ad?)

2. Which rep systems have you noticed in your colleagues? What did they do or say that made you think this?

3. How have you used matching of body language to get into rapport with a customer?

4. What additions have you made to your repertoire to incorporate rep systems (eg new visual aids, new turns of phrase, change to how you walk the customer through the process?)

Rapport is about sameness: but you don't have to take it to extremes!

breakfast meetings (or any place with food) are great places to build rapport - everyone eats and drinks at the same time

I'm always creating new resources to make business with people easy. Here are some other articles on rapport:

• Meeting new clients and dealing with tricky ones...Building rapport with your client
• Hypnotic selling techniques
• Working with your client's way of thinking to make life easier: Helping your clients make faster decisions and Sell and manage clients using their own decision making strategies
• When you've answered their question a hundred times, but they ask it again...What to do
• I got empathy - now what?
• Giving feedback people hear

And you may be interested in some of these articles too:

• Getting recognised, appreciated and promoted - published in Executive Excellence March 2003
• Let me give you the big picture - with the i's dotted and the t's crossed - Dealing with detail people - published in Executive Excellence September 2004
• Getting the client briefing process right

I'm adding more things all the time (between clients!). Follow this link for the full list.

If what you want isn't here, please feel free to suggest an article.

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