Is rapport really just friendly small talk?
Not according to the research designed specifically to test that assumption. A multi-phase study published in an industrial marketing research journal combined interviews with salespeople, direct video analysis of real initial sales meetings, and a follow-up study on effectiveness. The researchers explicitly frame rapport as something accomplished jointly by both salesperson and customer — not a technique one side performs on the other — and argue it has to be studied in real, naturally-occurring sales conversations rather than in the abstract.
A related qualitative study, based on interviews with Japanese business professionals, breaks rapport-building into three distinct phases across a B2B meeting: establishing, developing, and leveraging. The finding worth sitting with: only the final phase — leveraging, which comes after rapport has already been built — is where the research identifies genuine opportunity to discuss future business. In other words, treating rapport as something you "do" at the start and then move past to the "real" sales conversation may be working against the actual structure the research describes.
Does any of this show up in harder performance numbers, not just interview transcripts?
The closest, most quantitatively-tested cousin of rapport in the sales literature is adaptive selling — adjusting your approach in real time based on cues from the specific customer, rather than running the same script regardless of who's in front of you. This has been meta-analyzed at meaningful scale: one analysis combined 155 samples covering more than 31,000 salespeople and found that adaptive selling behavior and prior selling experience had a larger effect on performance than customer orientation by itself. A separate meta-analysis synthesizing decades of research (1982–2013) found adaptive selling mediates — sits causally between — both selling orientation and customer orientation on their way to actually affecting performance.
Read together, the qualitative rapport research and the quantitative adaptive-selling research are describing the same underlying skill from two different angles: paying close enough attention to a specific person to adjust to them, rather than executing a fixed script.
Why does this matter for how sales conversations should actually be run?
A few things follow reasonably from this body of research:
- > Rapport isn't front-loaded and done. The research on phases suggests treating the first two minutes of a call as "rapport" and the rest as "the pitch" misreads how rapport-building research says it actually plays out — it's closer to a thread that runs through the whole relationship.
- > Being genuinely responsive to the specific person outperforms a fixed script. That's the throughline of the adaptive-selling meta-analyses, and it has one of the more directly measured links to performance in the sales literature.
- > This is exactly what breaks down when you don't have context on a relationship. You can't adapt to someone, or pick a relationship up at the "leveraging" phase, if the last conversation's details aren't in front of you — which is a straightforward argument for why conversation history matters more than most CRM adoption pitches make it sound.
Key takeaways
- > Research on recorded B2B meetings describes rapport as three phases — establishing, developing, leveraging — not an opening icebreaker.
- > The leveraging phase, which comes late, is where the research locates the real opening to discuss future business.
- > A meta-analysis of 155 samples and 31,000+ salespeople found adaptive selling behavior outweighed customer orientation on its own.
- > Adapting to a specific person requires knowing what happened last time; without that record, there is nothing to adapt to.
Sources
- > Rapport building in authentic B2B sales interaction. Industrial Marketing Management. sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019850117302183
- > Pullins, E. B., & Hosoi, K. (2023). Rapport building in B2B sales interactions: the process and explananda. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 44(2), 177–195.
- > Franke, G. R., & Park, J.-E. (2006). Salesperson Adaptive Selling Behavior and Customer Orientation: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(4), 693–702.