AI and Building Rapport

The World Economic forum predicted AI machines will replace 85 million jobs by 2025. How many will be in Sales?

Salespeople have empathy, emotional intelligence and can connect with potential customers in this way. Many people struggle with emotional intelligence now, so who is going to train AI’s? In the meantime the salespersons advantages…

Building Rapport

One of a salesperson’s first goals in a future relationship is to build rapport. Due to the online presence most companies now build many salespeople have not developed the ability to do this effectively. Ask a salesperson what rapport is, and you will get many varied responses and few match one another exactly. Rapport is based on the grey line between personal and business that we have often seen salespeople struggle to understand.

Rapport is built from verbal and non-verbal cues. Sometimes it is a ‘gut’ feeling as to why we ask a certain question. The fractional delay in response, or facial flicker is all a salesperson skilled in reading people, needs to formulate the next response. And the next response is the key to the relationship. Get this bit wrong and your 90 seconds is over!

90 Seconds to Win or Fail

We say you have 90 seconds to create the impression that allows another person to want to interact with you in a future business transaction. Let’s not dispute the actual time, suffice to say it’s quick! The face has 43 muscles that can combine to make 10,000 expressions of which 300 are specific to our emotions and that’s without thinking. Again, please let me know if someone with AI assistance has recalculated the figures. The point being it’s quick and on a sub level that we all react to.

The reason you can blow the opportunity is usually because your response, not necessarily your question, failed to touch or resonate with the other person. We can all say or ask the wrong thing at the wrong time, accidently, however we need to recognise that and act appropriately. A question that caused the recipient to remember something they would prefer not to is made worse if the person asking fails to recognise the signal and presses on with their pitch regardless.

Experienced Salespeople

Better to not ask the wrong question in the first place! That’s where good salespeople, and/or experienced salespeople tend to gain the rapport needed and salespeople with lesser experience fail. You need to learn how to build rapport. Accepted some people will be naturally good at it and some bad at it. You still need to understand what you are doing in those first 90 seconds.

Can AI Build Rapport?

So, are we saying AI cannot do this? Probably AI can’t, not yet. But the challenge is going to be that we (people) can prepare for those first 90 seconds, but we can’t plan it. Until you meet that person face to face via zoom or in person, or they answer their phone you don’t know what is going to happen. That thrills some of us and scares others. How to teach AI to be scared or thrilled seems like a challenge enough without trying to define the grey line that rapport building takes place on.

On Going

Demonstrating ‘real’ needs and objection handling are topics for other time. Closing sales also has similar challenges as a plan can be prepared but may need to change on the fly in response to the customer input. Rapport building can be made or lost in the first 90 seconds of contact. Understanding the potential clients personality certainly helps in building rapport.

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