You have to play to win….but you also have to win to play 

-Michael Scott

The question of building rapport with prospects is a big one in sales

There is a perception that you can “friendly” your way into a customers wallet.

I call this the Michael Scott Method of Selling.

For those of you who don’t know, Michael Scott is a character from the show “The Office” (the US version) who is a regional sales manager of the Dunder Mifflin paper company.

He is a well-meaning but hugely incompetent leader who rose to his current position because of a highly-personal style of sales which focuses on rapport building.

Michael Scott’s deep-seated need to be loved by his employees leads them to walking all over him. He constantly overlooks violation of the rules committed by his supposed underlings, (e.g. one of them, the unhinged Dwight, committed arson in the office to test its emergency preparedness).

When he finally does decide to come around and lay down the law, Michael will be as coy about it as possible, going so far as to cry when he has to call out an employee for repeated insubordination.

There is an entire culture of “Michael Scott Selling” in the sales and marketing world, to the determent of everybody.

A “Michael Scott” salesman would try to find common ground by talking about something inane, like sports.

They might try to build rapport with something like this “So, John, I noticed on your profile that you like to go skydiving. I love skydiving lol! One time I was diving over somebody when I had a really full bladder…”

Look, I’m not saying that remembering peoples names, maintaining solid lower body posture while being animated in the upper body, repeating back to people what they said in summarized form to show that you understand, and showing some vulnerability are bad things.

They are not.

These are all things I learned from a Dale Carnegie course several years ago and there is a place for them.

You just can’t rely on these rapport-building skills as the basis of a high-stakes lead-generation or sales strategy.

it makes buyers uneasy as to why you feel the need to kiss their “azzes” so much.

Same principles can be carried over to marketing.

When I first started out as a fresh-eyed copywriter, my sales copy was so glib and “hypey”, your eyes would have rolled more than a teenage girl’s.

“Overly-friendly” sales copy has things like “You deserve this!” and tries way too hard to read your mind instead of conveying things like status and expertise.

P.S. My book shows business owners and entrepreneurs the exact steps for using creativity to make lots of money. It costs around $30 everywhere else, but if you join my daily email list by clicking the link below, you can have a digital copy for free.

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