Trust-Based Selling by Kerry Johnson

Author:Kerry Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&D Media
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Breaking Rapport

Establishing and gaining rapport is important, but breaking it may also be necessary from time to time. For example, have you ever had a salesman in your office and felt like telling him to leave, but you didn’t because you felt it was not polite? Or in the middle of a nonproductive meeting, you felt like leaving, but you felt it would be gauche for you to say, “I’m not interested in this anymore. Time’s up. I’m leaving.” What if your prospect becomes too talkative, going off on tangents while you’re trying to sell him? He wants to discuss politics or religion. You would probably find it difficult to say to him, “Let’s go back to the subject at hand,” or, “Hey, let’s stay on track.”

How do you break rapport with people without appearing rude? By now it should be apparent how easy this would be. You can break rapport without someone even realizing that you have terminated the conversation or redirected the topic.

For example, I spoke to a prospect recently. We were talking about sales training, and the prospect suddenly started discussing other problems he had with his staff. His problem was that the secretaries were demanding more money from him. He underpaid them. I had initially gone to see him about doing training for his sales group. He wanted to talk about getting his secretaries to work harder even though he underpaid them. I realized this was a dead-end street. We could have been there for three hours and without fulfilling my agenda for this meeting. So, I decided to break rapport.

He and I were both sitting forward, talking about his staff, when suddenly I sat back and went so far as to break eye contact. He kept talking but realized unconsciously that my interest was waning. He hesitated and paused. I redirected the conversation back to sales training and thereby kept him on track.

This may sound to you a bit abrasive or rude, but this gentleman did not sense it. He only perceived that the conversation was being redirected. He did not consciously realize that I broke rapport.

One of the best ways of break rapport is, plainly and simply, to mismatch body posture. Do not mirror. If they cross their legs, uncross yours. If they lean back, you sit forward. If they talk slow, speed up.

I once knew a manager who knew exactly how to break rapport with telephone salespeople. During the conversation, he didn’t feel as though he wanted to be so rude as to say, “I’m busy, call me some other time.” Instead he tapped the telephone with a pencil while the salesperson talked. Obviously, this distracted the telephone salesperson so much that they became unnerved. The manager told me that this technique was almost 100 percent effective.

Rapport breaks are often used by businesspeople to sabotage meetings. For example, in the middle of a meeting between a salesman and several key business executives, one or two of the executives will purposely mismatch and break rapport after it has been established.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.