Tip #7: Establish rapport with sources.

Here's a tale of two interviews:

For the first, the executive delivered a 30-minute presentation, steamrolling my attempts to interject questions and salvage the interview, and pausing just long enough to ask, "Does that help you understand?"

For the second, sufficiently steamed by the first, I seized control at the outset, engaged the executives (there were two) in dialog and offered a personal anecdote that elicited one of the best quotes of the day.

The moral? Even the most high-placed people respond to relevant banter in a way that enriches the conversation about the topic at hand.