Bonding and Rapport

1Session at a glance

2Open (0:00, 4 minutes)

• Draw nothing yet except the two crossed axes, which should already be on the board. Do not label the four boxes until the styles block.
• Say what step this is. Session 01 put seven steps on the board: bonding and rapport, up-front contract, pain, budget, decision, fulfillment, post-sell. This is step one, and what it decides is whether the client is comfortable enough with you to tell you the truth.
• Say what it buys on Monday: the next client who says "sounds good" when they did not follow a word of it is a client who will not tell you their budget either.

3Concept (0:04, 22 minutes)

Why rapport is the first step (3 min)

• Define it before using it. Rapport is the state in which a client is comfortable enough with you to say a true thing that is not flattering to them. Bonding is the same state maintained across a relationship rather than inside one conversation.
• Give the chain in order and make the room say the last link: people who are like one another tend to like one another, people who like one another tend to trust one another, and people give truthful answers to people they trust.
• Do the consequence out loud, because it is the reason a technical room should care. Session 01 said steps three, four and five are qualification: what the problem costs, what they can invest, who decides. All three are answers a person gives you. An answer given by somebody who is uncomfortable is polite rather than accurate, and everything built on it is wrong in a way you will not find out for months.
• Kill the objection before it arrives. Rapport is a short list of behaviors: match their pace, use their words, restate what they said, stop talking, and drop our vocabulary. Every one of those is learnable and none of them requires being chatty.

The three elements of communication, and active listening (5 min)

• Name the three: spoken words, tonality, body language. Define tonality as the quality and character of the sound rather than the content, and break it into its five parts on the board: tempo, the rate or rhythm of speech; pitch, how high or low the voice sits; inflection, the change in pitch that puts the weight on one word; resonance, how much a sound is intensified or held; volume, loud or soft.
• Body language is the non-verbal part: facial expression, gestures, body movement, posture, eye contact.
• Make the phone point, because most of our client contact is a phone call or a video call. Tonality travels down a phone line at full strength. A fast talker at a slow client reads as impatience, and a flat clipped tone reads as being a nuisance to us, whatever the words said.
• Teach the two active listening moves by doing them. Restatement is giving their sentence back close to the way they said it. Paraphrasing is giving it back in a shorter form that shows you understood it, using their words for the important nouns. Ask a volunteer to describe one thing that annoys them about their computer, and run both moves on their answer in front of the room.
• Then teach the pause, which is the part people drop. After the restatement, stop talking and hold still. Count it out loud to the room the first time. The restatement invites a correction, and the pause is the only thing that makes room for one. Fill the silence with your next question and you asked for a confirmation and then prevented it.

Ego states and sensory words (4 min)

• Keep transactional analysis short and practical. Transactional analysis is a model of conversation that says each of us speaks from one of three ego states at any moment. Parent is the judging, rule-giving voice: you should have replaced that four years ago. Adult is the present-tense, factual, problem-solving voice: it is five years old, here is what it costs to keep it. Child is the reactive, emotional voice, which comes out either as apologizing or as pushing back.
• Give the one rule that comes with it and do not go further. Aim for adult to adult. A parent-voiced sentence from us pushes the client into child, and child gives you either an apology or an argument. Neither of those is information.
• Name the common version at a managed services provider (MSP) so it lands: "you have been running that firewall out of support for two years" is parent, and the client hears a telling-off. "That firewall stopped getting security updates two years ago, which is why I want to talk about it" is adult.
• Sensory words. People describe things in one of three vocabularies, and the practical instruction is to use the one they used. A visual client says show me, I see what you mean, looks right, and tends to speak fast, gesture, and dislike being interrupted. An auditory client says tell me, sounds right, talk me through it, and speaks in even tones at a steady rhythm. A kinesthetic client says it feels wrong, I need to get a handle on this, and speaks slower and lower while they work out what they think.
• Give the instruction as one line: answer a show me with a diagram or a screen share, answer a tell me with a walk-through, and answer a feels wrong with what will be different for their staff.

The four behavioral styles (6 min)

• Build the grid on the board rather than reading the table. Draw the two axes first and name them. Top to bottom is task-oriented against people-oriented, which is what the person leads with. Left to right is introverted against extroverted, which is how much they put out into the room.
• Fill the four boxes one at a time and ask the room to name a client for each before you move on. Dominant is task-oriented and extroverted. Influencer is people-oriented and extroverted. Steady relater is people-oriented and introverted. Compliant is task-oriented and introverted. The four initials give the common name for the chart, DISC.
• For each box give one identifying sign and one instruction, and no more, because section 5 of the Learner Guide carries the full table. Dominant: decisive and impatient, so be brief and lead with the result. Influencer: talkative and enthusiastic, so leave room for the conversation and let them talk. Steady relater: calm and patient and slow to commit, so build trust and take the commitment a step at a time. Compliant: precise and unemotional, so bring data and do not socialize.
• Say the thing the room will get wrong, and say it twice. There is no better or worse box. The mistake is treating your own box as the normal one and reading the other three as a problem to fix.
• Close the block with the accuracy warning, because it is what keeps this honest. Two minutes of conversation gives you a guess, not a diagnosis. Use the guess to choose how you open, then change it the moment the client behaves against it.

Being OK, and our own vocabulary (4 min)

• Define it plainly. A client is OK when they can stay in the conversation without feeling stupid, rushed or judged. Keeping them there is our job rather than theirs.
• Read the five behaviors that damage it off the board: rushing or pressuring, talking down, asking an intrusive question without saying why you are asking it, acting cocky, and speaking from our world rather than theirs. Then add the sixth, which is the one this company actually does: jargon, buzzwords and acronyms.
• Put the sixth one where it belongs. A client who does not follow you almost never says so, because saying so costs them their footing in front of their own staff. They say "sounds good", and you have lost the answer you needed.
• Read out the real sentences you brought from our own tickets, quotes and BTR decks, and have the room translate them on the spot. Do not soften them. The point is that we wrote these.
• Give the test the room takes away, and make it a rule rather than advice: if a term would not appear in the client's own trade, it gets replaced by what it does. Not explained, replaced.

4Show (0:26, 10 minutes)

1. Set the scene in one line. The volunteer is the office manager at a medical practice, the first call after they asked us about replacing a server. The volunteer has a style card the room has not seen. Nobody else speaks during a run.
2. Run it mismatched, two minutes. The presenter deliberately runs it wrong against the card: fast if the card is a steady relater, all small talk if the card is compliant, all detail if the card is dominant. Use our vocabulary freely. Take it to the point where the volunteer says something agreeable and non-committal, then stop.
3. Ask two questions before explaining anything. Which box is the client in, and what did the presenter do that a client in that box would dislike. Take answers from at least three people, including a technical seat.
4. Run the same two minutes matched. Same opening question, same recommendation, changed pace, changed vocabulary, and one visible restatement followed by a held pause. Let the pause run long enough that the room notices it.
5. Debrief against the board. Name the axis you moved on and the one behavior that did most of the work. Then ask the volunteer, in front of the room, which run they would have told the truth about their budget in. Their answer tells the room what the matched run changed.

5Do (0:36, 13 minutes)

1. Everyone names a real client. Someone they have spoken to in the last month. A technician uses whoever called them most recently. Write the name down, and write which of the four boxes they are in and the one piece of evidence for it.
2. Write the style read into one sentence. "This client is a steady relater, because they asked three times what the change would mean for their staff and did not commit on the call." Evidence means naming what the person actually did.
3. Pair off and run four minutes each way. One person plays their own client in that style, the other runs the opening of a conversation about a real recommendation. The person running it must use one restatement and hold the pause after it.
4. The listener scores three things out loud. Did they match the pace, did they restate and pause, and did any of our vocabulary get through untranslated. Thirty seconds, then swap.
5. Everyone writes their five. Five terms they personally use with clients every week, each with the plain sentence that replaces it. Use the table in section 7 of the Learner Guide as a starter and add the ones specific to their seat. This list is what they keep.
6. Two people read their five out. Presenter picks, one technical seat and one non-technical seat.

6Check (0:49, 7 minutes)

1. You ask a prospect what they had in mind to invest and they say "I would have to look into that" and change the subject. Session 01 called budget step four. What does that answer most likely tell you about step one, and what do you do next?

   Answer

   That step one is not finished. A person who trusts you says "more than I want to" or "about half what you are going to tell me". Changing the subject is discomfort rather than refusal, and it means the question arrived before the comfort did.

   What to do next is go backwards, not forwards. Restate what they have already told you about the problem, in their words, pause, and let them correct you. Ask about money later in the same conversation or in the next one. Asking the same question again harder gets you a number they made up, which is worse than no number because you will plan against it.

2. Name the two elements of communication besides spoken words, and explain how a client on a phone call can be made uncomfortable by something you never said.

   Answer

   Tonality and body language. Tonality is the sound rather than the content and has five parts: tempo, pitch, inflection, resonance and volume. On a phone call the words can be entirely correct while the tempo is twice the client's own, which reads as impatience, or the volume drops at the end of every sentence, which reads as not wanting to be on the call. Body language still matters on a call because it changes the tonality. Standing up, or turning away from a screen, is audible.

3. You have just restated a client's problem back to them. What do you do in the next three seconds, and why does most of the value come from that rather than from the restatement?

   Answer

   Stop talking and hold still. The restatement is an invitation to correct you, and the pause is the only thing that gives them room to accept it. Moving straight into your next question means you asked for a confirmation and then made it impossible to give, so you leave with your own version of their problem rather than theirs.

4. A prospect is precise, asks for documentation before the first meeting, does not make small talk, and sends numbered follow-up questions by email. Which behavioral style, and what is the obvious next move that is wrong?

   Answer

   Compliant: task-oriented and introverted. The signs are precision, a preference for written detail, and no emotional content.

   The obvious move is to read the lack of warmth as a rapport problem and fix it with more conversation, more chat about their weekend, more enthusiasm. That is wrong, and it is wrong in the specific direction that makes it worse. For this style the socializing is the thing that damages rapport, because it reads as avoiding the question. Rapport with a compliant client is built by bringing the data they asked for, answering the numbered questions in order, and disagreeing with a fact rather than with them.

5. A technician tells a client "we will get endpoint detection and response on all your endpoints and move you into the first patch ring". Expand every term, say what the client most likely does, and rewrite the sentence.

   Answer

   Endpoint detection and response is software that watches a computer for behavior that looks like an attack and can act on its own. An endpoint is any device a person uses: a laptop, a desktop, a phone, a server. A patch ring is a group of machines set to receive the monthly security updates on a particular date, so the groups are updated in sequence rather than all at once.

   What the client most likely does is say "sounds good", because asking would cost them their footing in front of their own staff. The recommendation is now approved and not understood, which means nobody will defend it when the invoice arrives. A rewrite: "We will put software on every computer and server that watches for attacks and can take that machine off the network by itself. And your computers will get their monthly updates before our other clients do, so when an update breaks something we find it on a few of your machines instead of all of them.

6. Why does the method make rapport a step with a job to do, rather than a personality trait that some people have and others do not?

   Answer

   Because it decides something specific: whether the client is comfortable enough to give a truthful answer, and every step after it is built out of answers. A step that decides something can be checked, and you can tell whether it is finished by whether the answers you are getting are specific.

   The second half is that it is made of behaviors rather than temperament. Matching pace, using the client's words, restating, holding the pause, and replacing our vocabulary are five things anyone in the room can do on the next call, including someone who would never describe themselves as a people person.

7Close (0:56, 4 minutes)

Work before the next session

• The practice steps in section 9 of the Learner Guide: two clients read against the four boxes with evidence for each, and the five-term translation list finished and kept somewhere they will see it.
• One live call where they restate once and hold the pause, and a note of what the client said into it.
• Chapter 2 of the Sandler Foundations workbook, in the reference folder, for anyone who wants the source.

Next session

03 - Up-Front Contracts. Agreeing before a conversation starts what it is for, how long it runs, what each side will bring, and what the possible outcomes at the end of it are, so that no meeting ends with "I will follow up next week".

Open items to settle

• Whether the style read on a client belongs in the Nutshell record, so the person making the next call does not start from nothing.
• Whether the translation lists from the Do block get combined into one company glossary, and whether that lives in Hudu, in Notion alongside the standard operating procedures, or in both.
• Whether the same translation rule applies to what goes into a Syncro ticket note that the client can read.

8Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 2, Bonding and Building Rapport: chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The three elements of communication, the active listening moves, the three ego states, the three sensory vocabularies, the four behavioral styles on the two axes, and the idea of protecting the client's sense of being OK are Sandler's. The jargon table, the medical practice and firewall examples, and everything about how this applies at Hermetic are ours. Transactional analysis and the parent, adult and child ego states originate with Eric Berne and are used here in the short form the course teaches.

9After the session