It’s no secret that a trusting relationship is a key part of any sales process. Building rapport is a great way to show your prospects that you’re knowledgeable about your product or service without coming off as a pushy salesperson.

The problem most salespeople take with building a relationship, however, is that they wait until they are actually talking to the prospect to do it. They are missing crucial opportunities to build a relationship with their prospects digitally before they ever talk to them.

Before social media, it was nearly impossible to build a relationship with someone without taking out personal ads. Potential clients could be aware of a company name, but the actual people working for that company would be relatively unknown to them.

This would mean no matter how well known your product or service was to a prospect, you would still have to build rapport with them from scratch. Nothing is initially wrong with this, but it can be time consuming and disingenuous. You can only talk about the weather and music for so long before it gets tedious.

With the creation of LinkedIn and advanced targeting, there are more ways than ever to reach the right kind of prospects without having to spend an overboard amount of money on advertising.