"You will make more friends in a week by getting yourself interested in other people than you can in a year by trying to get other people interested in you." --Arnold Bennett

Not too long ago I added an additional facet for members of my elite coaching club--one-on-one calls with my advanced student. The subject matter of these calls is dictated by the members themselves and can vary from deeply personal matters to advanced persuasion strategies where my students can focus on their individualized struggles or blocks.

Another reason I love these calls is because sometimes students come up with fascinating questions. As I come across them, I am going to (anonymously) integrate these questions into these articles. The work I do with my students is strictly confidential.

Recently a student said he had always thought of the process of criteria elicitation as part of rapport building but that he had gotten some contradictory information as a result of a comment I made or posted.

Actually, criteria elicitation and rapport building are intrinsically, inextricably linked. The reason I break them into separate pieces and say, "here are the elements of rapport, here are the elements of criteria," is that people get good at doing both sides of it.

Criteria elicitation requires that you have at least a small amount of rapport to begin with. If you have no foot in the door, so to speak, there's no way the door is going to open all the way. In order to acquire your prospect's deep, core values, you must have a modicum of rapport built up.

This goes for any prospect, but we focus on your high-net-worth prospects (why bother with the others when you could be making the multi-million dollar deals?) and the following is most certainly true with those individuals... Gain rapport first through the use of my strategies, then get their criteria. Only when you have established enough rapport will your prospect offer up their criteria. In the eliciting of criteria, that's where rapport will be dramatically strengthened.

Knowing how to gain rapport will guarantee your success in eliciting criteria from your high net worth prospects, and in turn you will feel yourself become a powerful persuader as you close the sale.

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Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.