How To Balance Between Building Rapport And Getting Friend-Zoned
When you’re building rapport at the beginning of a sales encounter, your top priority is getting your prospect to like you, so you’re happy to banter somewhat aimlessly or follow your prospect off on a tangent. The goal at this point is not to be doing business, but rather to be building the relationship.
When it comes to the second half of the sales call, however, as you draw nearer to asking your prospect for the sale—the time for building rapport is over.
There should be minimal banter and you want to keep your prospect moving in the direction of the close.
Pauses should be embraced. When you pause, the burden of action is on the prospect. Your responses should be short and clear, e.g., “that’s correct” and “exactly right.” This way you can avoid giving too much information and “opening a can of worms” that might derail the closing conversation.
You build rapport to spend it, not to save it.
You should not be building rapport throughout the entire sales process.
There are difficult points throughout the sales encounter when you need to ask something of your prospect, whether that is volunteering their time to sit through a demo or handing over their credit card to close the deal.
These are the times for which you’ve built the rapport—when you need your prospect to trust you, especially when you are testing their patience or asking them to do something uncomfortable.
If you build too much rapport without keeping the interaction professional and moving the ball forward, you’ll end up in the friend zone where the prospect steamrolls your attempts to steer the conversation, banters at the opportunity cost of doing business, and misses your meetings and deadlines because they think you’re there just to be nice.
The key is to balance rapport like a barometer.
There are times when the sales encounter is necessarily high-pressure—this is natural when it comes to spending money.
The key is not to avoid these high-pressure moments. Instead, seek to win your prospect over in the low-pressure moments earlier in the call or meeting, when you’re talking about the weather or sharing a drink.
Then, when the high pressure comes, the prospect will be comfortable enough with your relationship to lean in, rather than clamming up just because it feels uncomfortable or like they’re “being sold.”
If you’ve built rapport correctly, your client will trust you enough to open up in these difficult moments and tell you their honest objections—then the real selling begins.