What is Rapport Really?

What is this mysterious thing called rapport? Some people seem to connect effortlessly and some make deep like-long connections. Most business people struggle to connect with new clients.

Mike Bosworth, author of the 1994 classic b2b sales textbook Solution Selling says that until recently it was thought that rapport-building could not be taught. Mike came to appreciate that sharing personal stories was a way to initiate rapport. And also to exchange information about your credibility and authority in an easy-to-accept format.

Shared experience is the key ingredient for rapport building. That can be physical such as the experience you share with class-mates and work-mates, or it can be purely mental which happens when you share experiences through story. From a cognitive perspective the experience can be just as real from a story as from a physical experience.

Good stories can transport us in time and space and allow us to absorb the sensual and emotional aspects of the story plot.

In our RAPPORT AND CONNECTION story workshops we teach and develop three types of connection story (we call then Hook stories, from the fishing analogy in Seven Stories).