If you have personal experience working in a technical field (or even if you don’t), it’s likely that someone at a social event has asked ‘So, what do you do?’ In this moment, you’re forced to decide whether to explain what you actually do or to over–simplify.

While you may be less than enthusiastic to explain the ins and outs of predictive modeling or financial derivatives to a distant relative at a holiday party, you may be more likely to give the real answer to someone like you. Someone you can trust to understand, who will make you feel seen and heard.

Therapists and counselors will be the first to tell you that if you want someone to reveal a personal truth about themselves, they must first trust you. Any revelation has the potential to make someone feel vulnerable, so to encourage the person you’re talking with to share meaningful truths, you must first build a rapport.

How can you build rapport in a B2B interview context?

In our experience, when it comes to B2B interviewing this rapport must be grounded in respect. If a participant does not respect the moderator’s ability to listen and understand what they have to say, they are unlikely to share how they really feel.

Beyond subject matter expertise and knowing the right places to drill down and ask insightful follow-ups (in case you missed part 1 - more information here), empathy borne from shared experience is also a crucial aspect to building participant trust and respect.

However, it’s not just about using buzzwords, but connecting with the experiences and challenges behind the buzzwords to better understand someone as a human being. In order to be effectively empathetic, it helps to understand what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes, and tap into the level of transparency that trust and respect creates.

But building a rapport with highly technical audiences can be tricky…

Software engineers, data scientists, cloud technologists, and other technical audiences are part of a community where peers are trusted insiders, and non-technical outsiders may spur skepticism. To successfully build rapport, these participants must believe moderators can speak using language they are familiar with, and understand not only the language, but also the meaning behind it.

Preparation and practice go a long way, but these additional principles further build trust:

1. Be confident, but transparent – Acknowledge your researcher role and any industry concentration you may have (e.g. “I speak with IT decision-makers like yourself about a variety of technologies...”). Don’t mislead or position yourself as an industry peer but give them permission to use real language to describe their actual problems.

2. Don’t underestimate the ‘getting to know you’ phase - Those introductory questions that get the participant engaged are also a tool for the moderator to participate in small talk to build a connection before diving into more detailed questions.

3. Treat your participant as more than a representative of their organization – While B2B interviews are often about understanding what decisions a company makes, understanding both the perspective of the organization and the individual will lead to better research insights and ultimately – business outcomes.

But what does it look like in real life?

In a recent example, we had a participant mention using programming languages and technologies that did not seem well-suited to the tasks they were describing.

The TL;DR moderator recognized the mismatch and asked them to explain further – why those technologies instead of more typical ones? The participant perked up, excited that the moderator had noticed the oddity. He agreed enthusiastically that his company was not using the right set of technologies and that he’d been making that same argument for some time internally. In the rest of the discussion, the participant animatedly explained what his company does, what he wishes they would do, and the barriers that exist in-between.

This tête-à-tête provided a much deeper understanding of adoption barriers and the potential limits of this audience (developers) to influence the technologies used in this context in a way that a typical discussion would not, vastly improving the resulting insights.

As evidence to the special bond that can be formed when talking to like minds, the interview concluded with a question from the participant that we didn’t expect, “It was so great chatting with you, so how long have you been a developer?”.

This type of kinship and trust is essential to getting to the heart of customer journeys and challenges. If a participant doesn’t think that the moderator can appreciate their truth, they are less likely to share it.