What are the techniques you can use to build rapport in a business conversation?

The first trick is to keep things conversational. You can't build rapport if you're trying to use tips and tricks to magically get close to someone.

Using tips and tricks is for hucksters and I'm assuming that you're a genuine business person, so we have no need for that here.

Keeping things conversational means that we're having a simple honest chat with another individual.

However even though we're going to be having a simple conversation, we need to have a simple framework to guide the conversation.

If we freestyle the conversation we might end up talking about food, movies, music, politics, fashion, trivia and a host of other things.

There's nothing bad about this except that after such a fun three hour conversation, we might have found a new best friend and I suspect we're not looking for new best friends when having business conversations!

We need to have a simple agenda for the conversation.

Our goals usually in business conversations are 1. to promote our products or services to customers 2. fundraising and capital acquisition to develop a business idea, and 3. looking for business associates and maintaining relationships with stakeholders.

In other words, we use business conversations for networking and trading.

So the next question is going to be, "how do we have business conversations to promote our products or services to potential customers?"

That we will tackle in the next post!