گزارش سازی در تعاملات معتبر B2B Rapport building in authentic B2B sales interaction

1. Introduction Companies must acquire new customers to survive, yet initial customer encounters remain challenging, requiring increasingly deeper engagement. In response, firms are striving to initiate new business relationships built on credibility and trust for possible collaboration (Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987) while engaging in relationship marketing efforts to improve their relationships with business customers (e.g., Dwyer et al., 1987; Jap & Ganesan, 2000; Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Zhang, Watson, Palmatier, & Dant, 2016). Salespeople must approach the initial stages of interaction with long-term customer development goals in mind; then, they have to move the relationship forward from that initial meeting (e.g., Dixon, Spiro, & Jamil, 2001). Rapport building involves setting a foundation and engaging customers in new business relationships. Researchers define rapport as a harmonious relationship between participants; it involves a mutual connection and understanding or a perceived similarity to one another (Clark, Drew, & Pinch, 2003; Gremler & Gwinner, 2008). Rapport building includes the initial activities designed to move towards this connection and harmony. Rapport is a prerequisite of customer loyalty and engagement (Gremler & Gwinner, 2008). Meanwhile, the extant literature indicates that selling customized solutions requires a high level of customer engagement and solution co-creation (Rapp, Bachrach, Panagopoulos, & Ogilvie, 2014; Sharma & Iyer, 2011; Töytäri & Rajala, 2015; Ulkuniemi, Araujo, & Tähtinen, 2015). Rapport relates to the concept of trust: researchers have presented that rapport builds credibility, which leads to trust (Manning, Ahearne, & Reece, 2012). However, the two concepts differ in that rapport reflects a harmonious relationship between participants, while a customer’s trust is a belief that the salesperson will serve the customer’s long-term interests (Crosby, Evans, & Cowles, 1990). Therefore, rapport is the starting point for a relationship, while trust comes at a later stage in that relationship. As the foundation for relationships, rapport building is particularly important in sales contexts. Given its importance, it is surprising that empirical research remains scarce when it comes to rapport building in specific B2B sales interactions (Ahearne, Jelinek, & Jones, 2007; Evans, McFarland, Dietz, & Jaramillo, 2012). Within this domain, one of the most under-researched areas is the initial establishment of relationships (Evans et al., 2012). The few existing studies model the effects of rapport on sales outcomes. They also tend to focus on the B2C context and offer a limited perspective, the seller’s side of the dyad (Campbell, Davis, & Skinner, 2006). Rapport building and its related sales practices and skills remain overlooked despite being the foundation of customer relationship development. The present study addresses this research gap by shedding more light on rapport building techniques and skills in B2B sales interactions. We argue that (1) a more in-depth understanding of rapport building is crucial in improving customer engagement; (2) rapport building is a collaborative effort accomplished by the participants, thus requiring analysis of both salesperson and customer actions; and (3) B2B rapport building must be studied in its authentic naturally-occurring sales interaction context using a qualitative approach. In this paper, we present a multi-phase research project including three parts. Part I explores what salespeople say they do to build rapport in initial sales meetings through interviews and qualitative analysis. Part II uses authentic video-recorded initial sales meetings and multi-modal conversation analysis (CA) to study rapport building techniques and skills in real-life situations. Part III presents a follow-up study to understand the effectiveness of salespeople’s actions in terms of rapport building based on meeting outcomes. We conclude by synthesizing the results, proposing necessary tasks and skills while discussing implications for future research and practice.