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The Importance of Matching Your Clients'
Voices
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 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. 
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