Are you a CSI researcher about your message? Ferrazzii

You Need to be a CSI Researcher

Posted on October 15th, 2012 by admin

Mark Magnacca, the author of So What? How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience, has a no-nonsense, practical approach that helps people tailor their messaging to ensure people will care. It's all about relentlessly focusing on how what you do benefits whomever your audience may be. In his Social Capitalist interview, Mark explained why it's so important to do your homework before meeting a prospective client.

One of the fundamental ideas that I believe in, since way before LinkedIn existed, was the concept of what I refer to as CSI research. In CSI research, you spend just a few minutes preparing before you walk in to meet someone for the first time. Too often I find sales people who are unaware of this idea. They’ll walk in into a meeting and their CSI research is looking around the office and seeing the picture of the family on the desk and trying to quickly wing it. What they should do is go on to LinkedIn or Google the person just to get a few things: where they go to school, what’s their background, where they worked before. I have a philosophy on this that is initially somewhat radical for some sales people – but ultimately after they’ve tried nobody has come back and said, “It doesn’t work.” My philosophy is: Tell the truth. Do your homework, and tell them you’ve done it. So I train people to say, for example, “I don’t ever want to take for granted until I know what’s most important to you. I did some homework before we got on to this call and one of the things I found most interesting about you, was the work that you did at Inc magazine.” So you do a little homework and just being able to get a little bit of engagement going back and forth, the natural reciprocity often kicks in. The person may want to know a little bit about you, and then the sales person needs to be able to say, “You know, I really appreciate your sharing that information. What I’d like to do now is go and shift gears and ask you few of those questions.” So we don’t burn up 40 minutes on pleasantries, we spend just a couple of minutes on it. That’s the relationship building process – but then we were able to move off pleasantries and transition into business.

Click here to get the MP3 and full transcript from Mark's Social Capitalist interview. How do you conduct your CSI research? Has it made a difference in how quickly the relationship develops?

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