Relate to Your Costumer

The critical skills of questioning, listening, positioning, and checking are the know-how skills. But the skill of relating—which includes rapport, acknowledgment, and empathy—is the feel-how skill. Building rapport is often connected to the opening of a call. But there are also other powerful ways and times to relate throughout the call. Many salespeople get into sales because they “like people.” As critically important as rapport is, it is only one part of relating to customers.
Rapport is the “like people,” chitchat part of relating. Many salespeople who are good at rapport limit their ability to connect with customers to that part of relating. They don’t reap the benefits of using acknowledgment and empathy throughout the dialogue. In a training session, a group of salespeople were confronted with an objection exercise in which an irate senior-level customer said, “Your people are always spouting formulas as if we know what to do with them!” They were asked to respond with empathy. They said, “What is it you don’t understand?” and “I’ll go over the process again” and so on. No one initially came up with an empathy statement. It took a while to arrive at “We certainly don’t mean to do that. I’m sorry we have not been clear. What specifically …?”
Acknowledgment and empathy are powerful skills. Although questions can be empathetic in tone, questions don’t replace empathy or acknowledgment. For example, if a customer mentions a problem, a good salesperson might ask, “How did you handle that?” A superb salesperson is likely to introduce the question with empathy to convey concern and, most important, encourage a more complete response—for example, “I’m sorry to hear that that happened,” followed by the question. Both acknowledgment and empathy are very important to an active dialogue. Empathy goes a step beyond acknowledgment in showing concern for the customer and, when used effectively, it can help form personal bonds.
Empathy is not easy for some salespeople to express. They may feel empathy, but are not comfortable communicating it. Verbally expressing concern and caring can help you reduce customer defenses and make you more persuasive. Especially when a customer is emotional or the topic is sensitive, it is very helpful to respond first with an expression of genuine empathy, to make the customer more receptive to your response. Empathy needs to be genuine, because phony empathy is usually transparent to today’s savvy customers.
Many salespeople are more comfortable using acknowledgment because it is more neutral. Using acknowledgment is also an effective way to connect with customers.
Here’s how to broaden your relating skills:
Acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge : Verbally indicate you heard what the customer has said.
Empathize: Express genuine empathy when your customer is disturbed, excited, or emotional.
Rapport: Develop your rapport skills by preparing how you will build rapport. Rapport is the first step in building a relationship.

Source : The Sales Success Handbook. Linda Richardson.2003