1Why this session is company-wide
This is your copy to keep. The gold Going deeper boxes go past what the session covers, for anyone who wants the fuller picture.
Session 01 put seven steps on the board: bonding and rapport, up-front contract, pain, budget, decision, fulfillment, post-sell. This session is step one, and what it decides is whether the client is comfortable enough with you to tell you the truth. Everything after it is built out of answers a person gives you, so an answer given by somebody who is uncomfortable is polite rather than accurate, and every plan built on it is wrong in a way you will not find out for months.
Most people here do not carry a sales number, and this session is still for everyone, because the people who run step one most often are not the two sales seats. The intake and triage seat and the technicians are on the phone with clients more times in a week than anyone else. This session covers what to listen for, two things to say back, four kinds of person and how to open with each, and the one habit of ours that costs us the truth most reliably.
The method here comes from the Sandler Foundations course. The examples, and everything about how it applies here, are ours. The chapter PDFs are in the reference folder of this program if you want the source.
2Why rapport is the first step
A client tells you a server is slow. You ask what it is costing them. If they are comfortable with you, you get "my billing person loses about an hour a day waiting on it and she has started staying late". If they are not, you get "it is just annoying". The second answer is what a person says when they do not yet want to hand you something they can be sold against.
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, which is the part the technical seats own after the sale.
The chain runs in this order:
- People who are like one another tend to like one another.
- People who like one another tend to trust one another.
- People give truthful answers to people they trust.
Session 01 called steps three, four and five the qualification steps: what the problem is costing them, what they can invest, and who decides and how. All three are answers a person gives you out loud. That is the whole reason rapport is first rather than nice to have.
The obvious objection is that some people are naturally good at this and some are not. Rapport is not a personality. It is five behaviors: match their pace, use their words, restate what they said, stop talking, and replace our vocabulary. None of them requires being chatty, and all five are in this guide.
3The three elements of communication, and active listening
The three elements
Read this sentence twice, out loud, putting the weight on a different word each time: "I did not say we would replace that server." Same eight words. The first reading denies saying it. The second denies that the plan was a replacement. Nothing about the words changed.
That is the reason communication is counted as three elements rather than one.
| Element | What it is | Its parts |
|---|---|---|
| Spoken words | The content: what was actually said | The words themselves |
| Tonality | The quality and character of the sound, separate from the content | 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 | Everything communicated without words | Facial expression, gestures, body movement, posture, eye contact |
Most of our client contact is a phone call or a video call, and tonality travels down a phone line at full strength. A fast talker at a slow client reads as impatience. A voice that drops in volume at the end of every sentence reads as wanting to be off the call. The words can be entirely correct while the sound of them is doing the opposite.
Body language still matters on an audio call, because it changes the tonality. Standing up is audible. So is turning away from the screen mid-sentence.
The instruction that comes out of all this is one line: match their pace. If they speak slowly and leave gaps, slow down and leave gaps. If they are quick and clipped, get to the point. Do it gradually rather than as an impression of them, so that what they notice is only that the conversation feels easy.
Active listening
A client says: "We have had three outages since February and the last one took out the phones as well, and honestly my staff have stopped telling me about the small ones."
Two ways to reflect that back.
| Move | What it is | Said out loud |
|---|---|---|
| Restatement | Giving their sentence back close to the way they said it | "Three outages since February, and on the last one the phones went down too." |
| Paraphrasing | Giving it back shorter, in your own frame, keeping their words for the important nouns | "So the outages are getting worse, and the part that worries you is that your staff have stopped reporting the small ones." |
Active listening is reflecting the message back to the speaker so they can confirm or correct your version of it. Those two moves are how you do it.
Then comes the part almost everyone drops. After the restatement, stop talking and hold still. The pause is in the speech and in the body: no nodding it along, no reaching for the next question. The restatement is an invitation to correct you, and the pause is the only thing that makes room for one to arrive.
What you get from the pause is usually the sentence that matters. In the example above, the client fills it with why the staff stopped reporting outages, and that is the thing you could not have asked for directly.
The pause feels much longer to the person holding it than to the person hearing it, which is why it collapses. A useful calibration on a call: count two full seconds after the last word before you say anything. It will feel long to you and it will not sound long to them, and it is longer than the gap almost anyone leaves without counting.
4Ego states and sensory words
Two short reads you run while you are already listening. Neither one is a diagnosis.
The three ego states
Compare these two sentences about the same firewall. "You have been running that thing out of support for two years." And: "That firewall stopped getting security updates two years ago, which is why I want to talk about it." The first one is a telling-off and the client hears it as one.
Transactional analysis is a model of conversation which says that at any moment a person is speaking from one of three ego states. Kept to what is useful:
| Ego state | The voice | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Parent | Judging, rule-giving, correcting | "You should have replaced that four years ago." |
| Adult | Present tense, factual, working the problem | "It is five years old. Here is what it costs to keep running it." |
| Child | Reactive and emotional, either apologizing or pushing back | "I know, I know, we never get to it." Or: "It has been fine for five years." |
One rule comes out of it. Aim for adult to adult. A parent-voiced sentence from us pushes the client into child, and child gives you an apology or an argument. Neither of those is information, and information is what you came for.
The words they use
People describe things in one of three vocabularies. The practical instruction is not to work out what kind of mind they have, it is to answer them in the vocabulary they used.
| Type | How they sound | Answer them with |
|---|---|---|
| Visual | "Show me." "I see what you mean." "That looks right." Tend to think, move and speak fast, use their hands, and dislike being interrupted | A diagram, a screen share, a one-page picture of the before and after |
| Auditory | "Tell me." "That sounds right." "Talk me through it." Speak in even tones at a steady rhythm, are comfortable with people who speak at their own rate, and go flat quickly if you drone | A spoken walk-through in order, with the rhythm kept up |
| Kinesthetic | "It feels wrong." "I need to get a handle on this." Breathe and speak slowly, lower pitched, and take their time to convey exactly what they mean | What will be different for their staff, and time to sit with it |
You will not always place someone, and it does not matter. The usable half of this is simply to reuse the client's own words instead of translating them into yours.
5The four behavioral styles
Two clients ask for the same server quote. One writes three lines and asks for the number by Friday. The other calls, talks for twenty minutes about their staff, and asks what you would do. Sent the same quote in the same format, one of them is satisfied and one of them goes quiet.
Four styles sit on two axes. Reading across the top, from left to right, is introverted to extroverted: how much the person puts out into the room. Reading down, from top to bottom, is task-oriented to people-oriented: whether the person leads with the job or with the people doing it. The four initials give the chart its common name, DISC.
| Style | Position | How to identify | How to communicate |
|---|---|---|---|
| D. Dominant | Task-oriented, extroverted | Asks for the quote in three lines of email and names the date they want it by. Cuts the background short in a meeting and asks what you would do. Opens a ticket with one sentence and wants a call back rather than an update thread | Put the number and the one recommendation on the first page and the reasoning behind it. Give one option you stand behind instead of three to choose from. On a ticket, say what you are doing and when it will be done, and leave the detail out unless they ask for it |
| I. Influencer | People-oriented, extroverted | Calls instead of emailing, and the call runs well past the thing they called about. Talks about their staff and their last provider before getting to the problem. Replies to a proposal with enthusiasm and no signature | Let the call run and take the notes yourself, because they will not. Ask what they think before telling them what you think. Send a short written summary of what was agreed and name the next date, because enthusiasm on a call is not a decision |
| S. Steady relater | People-oriented, introverted | Asks the same question about the change twice in different words, usually about what it means for their staff. Says they need to talk to a couple of people and does not commit on the call. Sits on a proposal without ever saying no | Walk them through what happens on the day of the change, in order, from their staff's point of view. Break the decision into stages they can agree to one at a time. Ask directly for the objection, because they will not volunteer one |
| C. Compliant | Task-oriented, introverted | Asks for documentation before the first meeting. Sends numbered follow-up questions by email and expects them answered in order. Reads the whole proposal and finds the one line that contradicts another | Bring the data and say where it came from, and answer the numbered questions in the order they arrived. Skip the small talk, because to this client it reads as avoiding the question. Correct a fact rather than the person, and say plainly when you do not know something yet |
The full identification chart these four styles come from is in the chapter PDF listed in section 13.
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. A client under pressure often reads differently from the same client on a good week.
There is no better box. The mistake everyone makes first is treating their own box as the normal one and reading the other three as something to be fixed.
The two clients at the top of this section are a dominant and a steady relater. The dominant wants the number and the recommendation on one page, with the reasoning available underneath if they want it, which they may not. The steady relater wants to know what happens to their staff on the day of the change, wants the decision broken into stages they can agree to one at a time, and will not say no to your face. Sending both of them the same quote in the same format suits one of them and not the other.
6Protecting the client's sense of being OK
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, and it is possible to take it away from them without meaning to and without noticing.
These are the behaviors that do it:
| Behavior | What it looks like at a managed services provider (MSP) |
|---|---|
| Rushing or pressuring | Pushing for the decision on the call because you have a report due, or answering their question before they have finished asking it |
| Talking down | "It is actually really simple." It is not simple to them, and now they cannot ask |
| Intrusive questions with no reason given | Asking what they pay their current provider without first saying why the answer changes what you would recommend |
| Acting cocky | Naming what the last provider got wrong, in front of the person who hired them |
| Speaking from our world instead of theirs | Explaining what the change does to the network rather than what their staff will experience on Monday |
| Jargon, buzzwords and acronyms | The next section, because this is the one we actually do |
Nearly everybody wants to feel capable in front of their own staff, and a client who has stopped following you almost never says so, because saying so costs them exactly that. They say "sounds good". The conversation ends on time and you leave without the answer you came for.
7Our own vocabulary
A buzzword is a term that is current inside a trade and carries no meaning outside it. Jargon is the broader vocabulary of a trade. Every trade has both. Ours is worse than most, because it is built almost entirely out of acronyms and out of words borrowed from ordinary English and given a different meaning.
The rule: if a term would not appear in the client's own trade, replace it with what it does. Replace, not explain. Expanding an acronym gives you the same term at greater length. A dental practice manager gains nothing from learning that MFA stands for multi-factor authentication.
| What we say | What the client hears | What to say instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Your tenant" | Something about a lease. Or nothing at all, and no way to ask | "Your Microsoft 365 account, the one that holds everyone's email and files" |
| "We will push it to all endpoints" | A word from a diagram. Vaguely something at the end of a wire | "We will install it on every computer and phone your staff use" |
| "We need to turn on MFA" (multi-factor authentication) | Three letters, and a sense that they should already know them | "When your staff sign in we will add a second step, usually a code on their phone, so a stolen password on its own is not enough to get in" |
| "It is a DNS issue" (domain name system) | An excuse. The IT version of the dog ate it | "The directory that tells the internet where to find your website and your email is pointing at the wrong place, and we are correcting it" |
| "You are in the first patch ring" | Something from a factory floor | "Your computers get their monthly updates before our other clients do, so if an update breaks something we find it on a few of your machines instead of all of them" |
| "We will get EDR on it" (endpoint detection and response) | More letters. The third acronym in two minutes | "We will put software on it that watches for behavior that looks like an attack, and it can take that computer off the network by itself before anyone gets to it" |
| "We are spinning up a server" | Something is spinning. Is that bad? | "We are building the new server this week" |
| "We will provision the user" | Supplies. Rations | "We will create her account and set up her email, her computer and her phone before she starts" |
| "Conditional access policy" | Two ordinary words that mean nothing together | "A rule about who can sign in, from where, and on what device" |
| "That one is covered by your SLA" (service level agreement) | A clause in a contract they did not read | "The agreement says how quickly we have to start on it, and this is one of the things it covers" |
| "We will remediate that" | Asbestos | "We will fix it, and here is roughly how long it takes" |
| "Your stack" | Nothing. A pile of something | "The set of tools and systems your business runs on" |
Notice what the right-hand column has in common. Every entry describes what somebody will experience rather than what the technology is. That is the test to use when you write your own.
Any process this touches, including how we word a Syncro ticket note that the client can read, belongs in the relevant Notion standard operating procedure rather than in anyone's head. Check whether one already exists before writing anything down.
8The whole step, in order
All of the above, in the order you would actually use it in the first few minutes of a conversation:
- Match the pace. Tempo and volume first, before you have any idea who they are.
- Read the box. Task or people, quiet or loud. Open accordingly: brief for a dominant, warm for an influencer, unhurried for a steady relater, evidenced for a compliant.
- Use their words. If they said "the system", say the system. Do not upgrade it to the server.
- Restate or paraphrase once, early. Then hold the pause and let them correct you.
- Stay adult. No sentence that begins with what they should have done.
- Translate everything of ours. Every term replaced with what somebody will experience.
You will know it worked when the answers get specific. "It is just annoying" becoming "my billing person loses about an hour a day" is the signal that step one is finished and step two can start.
9Practice
- Pick two clients you have spoken to in the last month. If you do not carry a pipeline, use the two people who called you most recently.
- For each, write which of the four boxes they are in and one piece of evidence: a thing they did or said, not an impression. "Steady relater, because they asked three times what the change would mean for their staff and did not commit on the call."
- Write your five. Five terms you personally use with clients every week, each with the plain sentence that replaces it. Start from the table in section 7 and add the ones specific to your seat. Keep this list somewhere you will see it before a call.
- On one real call this week, restate what the client said once and then hold the pause. Write down what they said into it.
- Write one sentence you have said to a client recently in the parent voice, and rewrite it in the adult voice.
10Check for understanding
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
11Before the next session
- Do the practice steps in section 9 and bring your two style reads with their evidence, and your five-term translation list.
- Run the pause once on a real call and bring what the client said into it.
- Optional. Chapter 2 of the Sandler Foundations workbook in the reference folder.
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".
12Glossary
- Rapport
- The state in which a client is comfortable enough with you to say a true thing that is not flattering to them.
- Bonding
- The same state maintained across a relationship rather than inside one conversation.
- Tonality
- The quality and character of the sound of speech, separate from the words. Made of tempo, pitch, inflection, resonance and volume.
- Active listening
- Reflecting a message back to the speaker so they can confirm or correct your version of it.
- Restatement
- Giving a speaker's sentence back close to the way they said it.
- Paraphrasing
- Giving it back shorter, in your own frame, keeping their words for the important nouns.
- Transactional analysis
- A model of conversation which says that at any moment a person speaks from one of three ego states: parent, adult or child.
- Primary sensory dominance
- The vocabulary a person describes things in: visual, auditory or kinesthetic.
- DISC
- The four behavioral styles named by their initials: dominant, influencer, steady relater, compliant.
- Task-oriented and people-oriented
- The vertical axis of the DISC chart: whether a person leads with the job or with the people doing it.
- Introverted and extroverted
- The horizontal axis of the DISC chart: how much a person puts out into the room.
- OK
- The state of being able to stay in a conversation without feeling stupid, rushed or judged. Keeping the client there is our job.
- Buzzword
- A term that is current inside a trade and carries no meaning outside it.
- Jargon
- The wider vocabulary of a trade, including words borrowed from ordinary English and given a different meaning.
13Sources
- 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.