Creating great rapport with your clients and prospects requires doing several different things effectively. Perhaps you have already studied and been trained in the techniques of matching and mirroring, which form the basis for creating great rapport with people. Whether you have or have not done this, there is one distinctive area of matching and mirroring that you may find very simple and effective to focus on when building rapport with your clients and prospects--that of matching and mirroring their voices.

In commercial/industrial real estate sales, your voice is a very important part of building rapport with your clients and prospects. While you definitely will have some face-to-face appointments with your clients and prospects, you will have many more phone calls with them than in-person appointments. During these phone calls, your voice is the only tool you have to build rapport with these people and have them feel that you are definitely the best agent they can possibly work with. And, your voice is also a very important factor in building rapport during your face-to-face appointments with them as well.

When talking with people, focus on matching the volume, tone, tempo, and timbre of their voice (timbre refers to the vocal quality of the person's voice, such as whether or not it is raspy).

Studies at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that only 7% of building rapport with people comes from the actual meaning of the words that we speak. The other 93% of rapport comes from our matching and mirroring of the other person's behavior, including the sound of their voice.

Since we spend such a great amount of time talking with our clients and prospects in real estate sales, matching and mirroring their voices during our conversations with them can be a very effective way to build the great rapport we ideally want to have with them.