“Go my precious son. Go and learn the ways of the people from the east” The King told the Prince. “Listen and learn and bring back with you those things that will enhance our land. Bring back knowledge and technology. Bring back wisdom.” And with that the King bade his son goodbye and off the Prince and his entourage went to the kingdom of the East.

After 1 whole year the king had not heard from the prince and he so sent one of his courtiers off to the East to find him. After a few months the courtier retuned with grave news.

“Your Royal Highness, the prince has fallen in with the people from the East. Their customs are now his. He has changed and become like them. He says to tell you he does not wish to return.” The king was devastated and immediately dispatched a second and higher-ranking courtier to bring home his son. After a few months he too retuned with similar bad news. “Your Royal Highness, the prince has chosen to live with the people from the East. He has adopted their way of life and has asked me to tell you that he no longer wishes to come home”

Courtier after courtier the King sent in search of the prince in order to bring him home but still he chose to remain living with the people from the East.

Finally in an act of desperation the King offered a large reward to anyone in his kingdom that would bring his son back. The only stipulation was that the Prince had to return voluntarily. Years and scores of attempts later and still the Prince resisted all attempts at being persuaded to return home.

Then one day out of the blue the prince returned with a young man from one of the villages in his kingdom. On presenting the young man with his reward the King asked, “Son, how were you able to convince the Prince to return. So many before you had failed and yet you accomplished the seemingly impossible. Tell us your secret, please”

“Your Majesty, may I share a story with you?” the young man asked the King.” For this story will help you to understand how I was able to return with the Prince” “Certainly” replied the grateful sovereign.

“Many years ago in our village there lived a young boy who was known by everyone as “Chicken Boy”.” The reason he was called “Chicken Boy” was because he used to live naked in the village chicken coop with all the chickens. He would behave just like the chickens, sleeping where they slept, eating where they eat, and scratching where they scratched. Whilst his mother wept for her son’s plight the rest of the village laughed. The boy’s mother and family had tried all manner of means to break the boy free from his life as a chicken, but nothing worked. Neither bribes nor prayers. Nothing worked!

This went on for many years until one-day the boy’s wise old uncle came for visits. Having been told of his nephew’s predicament he made up his mind to free the boy from his “chicken cage”. The wise old uncle proceeded to remove all of his clothes and joined the boy in the coop with all the chickens. The boy’s mother wailed in dismay as now not only was her son mad but so too her brother.

Meanwhile back in the coop, the wise old uncle approached the young man saying. “Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Did you know that in parts of Africa there are chickens who stand and walk just like humans? We don’t have to be like this lot of ignorant chickens, why don’t we try walking like those chickens in Africa? Soon the wise old uncle and the boy were walking around the chicken coop just like humans. A day later the wise old uncle told the boy that there were a group of chickens in far Eastern Europe that wore clothes just like human beings and with some encouragement, telling the boy that they needn’t be like the chickens in the coop, both he and the boy donned their clothes. Later he told the boy about a group of chickens in South East Asia that ate food and slept in beds just like human beings and with his encouragement within a few days, the boy known as Chicken Boy was soon reintegrated into the village.

Your Royal Highness” The young man said completing his story, “That is how I was able to bring home the Prince. I lived with him, I did his life, I ate and drank and socialised just like him. Slowly I opened up his mind to the ways of our life in your kingdom and within a few weeks he was ready and willing to return”. “That’s a fascinating tale,” enquired the King, “But I’m curious, how did you know what the wise old uncle told Chicken Boy, to get him to leave the coop?”

“Sir”, replied the young man clutching his reward to his chest, “I was Chicken Boy!”

“Rapport is the collapsing of barriers between two individuals” Unknown

“ Can’t we just skip all this basic greeting stuff and get on to closing the sale, that’s where my people have problems selling?” a store manager interrupted during one of my training sessions on “effectively approaching the customer”.

“Its not about closing the sale…its about opening the relationship” I responded, “If the customer doesn’t like you or trust you they won’t buy from you. Sure there are those exceptions when people want something, and you have it, then they’ll buy it from you. However as we’ve said before, you didn’t sell it, the customer bought it! If we want to increase our sales volume, if we want to increase our conversion rates, if we want to increase our multiple sales percentages, then we are going to have to sell. We cannot simply rely on the customer to buy. If we are going to sell more we must learn how to open the sale effectively and establish the trust and rapport necessary to get the customer to open up and answer our questions so we can find out what they need and want. Lets make sure that we are opening well before we worry about how we close.”

To open well we must learn how to develop rapport as it is the fundamental element of successful communication, and for us to be effective in engaging customers; we must understand the principles and tactics of how to create it.

So what then is rapport? Most of us are able to recognise rapport when we have it and we are also able to discern when we don’t have it. The question many of my students ask is how do you create it when there is none to start off with?

How do we get it? Is it something we can create or is it something that just happens naturally? How important is rapport to the sales process? These are some of the questions I will be answering.

The dictionary defines rapport as “the relation of mutual understanding or trust and agreement between people.” It is explained further as, “ being of common perspective, being in "sync", being on the same wavelength as the person you are talking to.” When there is a rapport the barriers between two individuals have been collapsed, they’re on the “same page”, and they are in that “me too” space.

In his formative book on the establishment of rapport, the author Michael Brooks frames it this way, “Being in rapport is the ability to enter someone else’s model of the world and let them know that we truly understand their model.”

So how does one establish rapport?

The first thing to do to begin your deeper understanding of this very powerful means of communication is to “sensitise” yourself and become a “rapport observer”. We need to recognise what rapport looks like so that we can begin to duplicate it.

The key is to see and understand that rapport is not a “state”, i.e. a mental or emotional condition. We need to observe rapport in progress seeing it as a process, i.e. a series of actions, changes, or functions that bring about a result.

Imagine that you were asked to film and direct a documentary on rapport. You would most likely go to a place that was busy with people and film people “doing rapport.” You would capture friends and sweethearts relating to one another, you would film mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, brothers and sisters and anyone else whom you saw in rapport. Being a retailer you might even capture a rapport between a customer and a sales person or a waiter.

Then because you would want to show contrast, you would also film people reacting to one another where there is no rapport or where you see rapport coming unglued. This is your task today. Today your goal is to see how people "do” rapport. Observe yourself and those around you capturing what works and what doesn’t.