Rapport is the all-important ingredient that determines how successful you will become in your real estate career. First you must have the unyielding desire to become hugely successful, and once you have this it's your ability to develop great rapport with people that determines your success.
Your clients and prospects want to do business with a real estate agent who they feel is someone very similar to themselves. They will be investing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars through you, and they want to know that your evaluation and decision-making criteria are exactly like their own.
Your clients and prospects begin evaluating whether or not you're someone similar to themselves the moment they meet you. The way you dress, the car you drive, your promotional materials, and the way you interact with them are all being evaluated to determine whether or not you are an agent they should work with. Most if not all of this evaluation, though, is being done at the unconscious level, with the end result being the feeling they will have about you.
While everything your clients and prospects observe about you is important, there is probably no more important component in your long-term relationships with them than how you communicate to them with your voice. This is because you utilize your voice in almost every single communication with them, and most of your interactions throughout your real estate career will be on the telephone.
This is why when you're talking with your clients and prospects, you want to do your best to match the speed at which they're talking, and the tone and volume of their voice, too. This alone will send a signal to them that you're someone similar to who they are. (If you really want to get good at this, you can also match the timbre of their voice. Timbre refers to their vocal quality, such as whether or not their voice is raspy.)
As an example of how powerful this can be, have you ever spoken with someone who spoke much slower, much faster, or much louder than you do? And when you experienced this, didn't you also feel out of rapport with the other person? I know with me personally, when I'm talking with someone who talks a lot slower than me, I feel as if I'm communicating at 15 miles per hour (MPH) in a 55 MPH speed zone. I want to go faster, there's no traffic ahead of me, but still I can only proceed at 15 MPH. At least nowadays I just have fun in slowing myself down and building rapport with the other person.
But if I were choosing between 4 or 5 salespeople to represent me, and two of those salespeople spoke at speeds and tones that were very different from my own, they would probably soon be eliminated from the possibility of representing me. I just wouldn't feel right when I talked with those people. And when you look at the friends and business people who you like to associate with, you may recognize that they tend to speak in a manner that is very similar to how you speak yourself.
This is the exact process that is constantly happening with your clients and prospects also. While you may or may not be fully aware of it, they are unconsciously evaluating how you sound to them. If they don't feel that you sound similar to them, you may get eliminated as a potential agent to represent them. And if when talking with them you don't feel that they sound like you, they're probably feeling the exact same way about you also.
When you learn to vary the way you talk to continually match the vocal qualities of your clients and prospects, you'll successfully enroll a higher percentage of them in working with you exclusively, and you'll continually make more money in your real estate business year-after-year.
