John Geraci on how to prepare for better customer conversations

John Geraci of CI2 Advisors joins Vishnu Prithiv on The Connector’s Table to discuss communication, leadership and the practice that happens before a meeting. The conversation includes a warehouse leadership story, the connect-understand-inspire model, and the importance of revalidation.

Vishnu: Hi, everyone. My name is Vishnu. This is John here. Welcome, John. How are you?

John: I’m doing great. How are you?

Vishnu: Doing well, doing well. If you don’t mind introducing yourself, talking a little bit about what you’re working on, who you are, please.

John: Sure. My name’s John Geraci, and I have a communications consulting and training company called CI2 Advisors. The short story is that I went to West Point, spent six years in the military, and have always focused on leading teams and people. I was in industry for some 30 years, and the last two jobs I had, not that I’m an important guy, but I was the president of two public companies.

When I left, I saw that the world of work was changing dramatically, and there were kind of two factors, macro factors, driving the change. There’s multiple generations in the workforce, and we significantly had different perspectives. I’m a baby boomer, and how I think and act about some things are completely different than a millennial or a Gen Z, particularly. It makes communications difficult.

The second factor was technology is moving at such a rapid pace that people are pinged so much on technology and chat and AI now, and all of those things, which was causing pace of work to move faster, and people to be out of time.

What I knew as a senior executive that when I was really successful, I had a strong relationship with my team, my leaders and my team, and we were communicating effectively. I was worried about that. The genesis of CI2, I started it with a lady who’s a behavioral psychologist, and we studied. We did a lot of research on psychology and communication and those two factors.

For us to be effective in sales and marketing and communication, we’ve got to really understand our customers, both as a corporation, if you will, a company, and as individuals much more effectively. We found that human skills are really, really critical to this whole process. We’ve been on a journey based on that whole thing.

We built some models, something we call a dynamic communication and relationship model, because we think relationships are more dynamic. Then underneath that, we have two models of how do you understand people more effectively. We call it transformational listening. How do you tell stories, business stories, that inspire people to take action?

So that’s the genesis of our architecture, and we’ve been doing this for about 10 years. Now we’ve morphed down with an AI where we can service small companies. The idea really was that I knew that when I was successful, and I had many successes and many failures in business, those two things, strong relationships with the team and effective communication was key. And I saw that it was getting harder and harder. And so really, we’re a human skills, soft skills company that helps you apply things to your workflow to get business outcomes. So let me start with that.

Vishnu: Very interesting. Is it a one systems approach to the market, or is it multiple different systems depending on specific needs and purposes?

John: So we started out as a training company, and we would tailor our training to the cohort. If you think simplistically, you’ve got leaders, you’ve got customer service people, you have salespeople. And what is the same about all of them, they’re all trying to understand and communicate with people to get work done. So how do we get work with groups done?

And so what’s different about each of them is who they’re talking to specifically, who the specific stakeholders are, and what those stakeholders might need. So we started out with a two day training program, and we’ve morphed over the years. We’ve morphed to specific versions, and then we’ve morphed to an online on demand training portal. And two years ago, we built our first AI solution, which was really a reinforcement solution.

And today we’ve combined the AI portal and the on demand training and the AI tool, where it’s kind of two components, but that act as a system, but it’s really a component part of something else. We can link into workflows like Outlook or Zoom, so when people are saying, okay, I have this meeting, how do I prep? We help them with the human side of that prep. Do I need to understand you better? Do I really understand you? And if I have, can I tell you a story that inspires you to come along with me?

So it’s two component parts, but it really is a component part of other people’s workflow. So this is a component part, the human skills side, the storytelling side, how do you tell stories that matter? So we’re not a big system like a Zoom or Microsoft Office or HubSpot or those kinds of things. We fit into those as a component part that help your people be more effective when they’re communicating, planning, preparing, it’s all around people.

Vishnu: Very interesting. If you don’t mind going to maybe an example, let’s say if you have experience or examples of communication styles for sales teams and CSMs, we can dive a little bit deeper into those and what kind of systems and what kind of tech follows with those teams. That’d be useful and interesting.

John: If I can answer that simplistically, we have studied all kinds of personality profiles, and it doesn’t matter. When we use one, we use something called DISC from Wiley. It’s D-I-S-C. There are some really interesting ones out there. If you study them, most of them say, Hey, Vishnu, would you take this personality profile and I’ll understand how to respond to you. You can’t do that.

DISC is the only one we know where I can ask four questions about you and I can directionally understand what type of communication style you have. What our AI helps people do is think about how do I communicate naturally as a leader and how do you communicate naturally as a person? And then what am I trying to convey to you and what action am I trying to get? And then how do I personally morph my communication, my style more effectively to allow you, the receiver, to be able to hear it, comprehend it. And so it’s understanding people’s communication styles.

Have you ever taken a personality profile? Have you taken DISC at all?

Vishnu: I don’t recall if it was DISC, but I have taken a few, actually. I don’t remember, it starts with an M, I think.

John: Well, there’s a whole bunch of them. There’s one that’s hot out here now called Enneagram. That’s turned out to be very hot, and there’s one called Five Behaviors.

The general idea is that people have different communication styles, and you’ve taken whatever profile it was. And when I talk to people, I asked them, okay, what’d you do with it? And they said, Oh, I took it and I know what I do. I know what style I am. And I say, well, how do you use it? Well, how do you morph your style based on my style?

And so what we do, it’s a small component of what we do, but it’s understanding human nature. It’s part of understanding people.

You talked about Gen Z. I’ll tell you a quick short story. One of the first projects we did about seven years ago was with a classmate of mine who ran a big manufacturing company in Dallas. And I won’t tell you who it is, but he said, I’m really frustrated. I have all these Gen Z people in the warehouse and I can’t talk to them. And he said, they’re just nuts. I can’t understand them. I can’t talk to them. I don’t know what they do.

And I said to him, that’s interesting. I get that. I struggle with that too. I said, let me ask you a question. Who can you really talk to really well? And he said, well, guys like you, 50 year olds that had our life experience, et cetera. I said, Oh, that’s great. I said, let me ask you this question. How many of those are you going to hire in your warehouse? He said, none of those guys are going to work in a warehouse.

Do you want those warehouse people to really do good work and be effective and help you manage your inventories, et cetera? He said, yeah. I said, well, what I think I know is I have to change myself. I have to go learn. What do those people want? What do they need? I have to understand them.

We did a big project with him helping his leaders really start understanding people a little bit more and what they need, what they want, how to talk to them, et cetera.

Vishnu: That’s very, very cool. How does it play into the customer facing side as well? So this is leadership and employee kind of relationship where you have a longer term relationship. You are face to face more often. Whereas when you’re coming to, let’s say, a customer facing, a client facing, in some cases they are the relationship that keeps the other relationships happening, right? So how do you make sure that that doesn’t break, but also with minimal communication, because they’re not probably going to take a personality test to see how we’re going to have a conversation with them. But how do you train such teams?

John: So one of the components of our solution is something we call dynamic communication and relationship model. And some people look at it and say, this is not new. We have three spinning circles and it’s on our website. If anybody wanted to go to our website and download the model, but the picture, it says what we need to do as humans, we need to connect with someone. And if I’ve connected with you, and we teach people how to do that, then I’ve earned the right to understand you, ask you deeper questions.

If I understand you really well and I can validate, think about helping customers buy something. We know that people have to sell, but we think customers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be understood and come along the journey with you. But if you understand them really well and you can validate that, now the question is, can I really help them? And can I tell you an analog story of another customer I’ve helped, where you say, Hey, I want to come along with you. And now you become a co-collaborator in trying to get the solution to happen.

One of the main differences, you think about connect, you think about understand, and you think about inspire. And then we have arrows between those and saying, what you’re doing is earning the right. So I have to earn the right to understand you and then I have to earn the right to inspire you.

But what we teach is these circles are spinning at all times because people are being bombarded with other communications in their subconscious brain and their priorities are shifting dramatically. So you’ve constantly got to go back and revalidate in the relationship and in the project or in the sales cycle or in the customer implementation, or you’ve got to be thinking about where are these key stakeholders? Who are the key stakeholders? Where are they? And how’s my relationship going with them?

So we teach something called revalidation. And the people say, that’s not new. We say, I know it’s not new. The challenge is people tend to do it one time and not do it consistently. And what we teach is, I got off the phone with you two weeks ago, I’ve got to revalidate what happened last time. Where are we?

But the idea is that relationships are changing. And if you understand the model and you can assess where you are, you can morph more effectively. And now you’re going to be a lot more effective in getting people to take action to go along with you, right? Because think about it, leadership is getting groups of teams and people to do things. If I do it on my own, it’s not leadership. It’s inspiring people to come along with you.

And all of our models, let me say one of our models are based on some advanced psychology, some advanced neuroscience ideas, and also a big concept called behavioral economics, which is the science of decision-making. Think about what you’re doing in your practice, think about salespeople. You’re, in effect, you’re really trying to understand people and help them make a good decision.

So it’s all of that kind of mesh together, the idea is to help you get a better business outcome, get another lead, help a customer make a deal, implement, upsell, cross-sell, resale. But it’s all about people.

Vishnu: Pretty cool. How does tech fall into this, after, let’s say, the two day coaching session or two day seminar? And how does that implement?

John: Yeah, we do it differently now, so that two days is gone. We can do that, but we have a different model, more of a workshop model, an on demand learning and workshop model. But we just launched in November in agentic AI, and it’s really an application. We call it AI Story Flow and it is a messaging execution system.

So one of the things you do in your practice, you go in and you help founders figure out what’s their ICP, right? Who are the key people they’re talking to? What are the competitors? What are the major pain points that they have? What are those points of differentiation, right? And what should they be doing to position their business, their product, their service more effectively, right? So that’s an output that you have.

What we do is we would work with you and we would say, okay, now let’s take that output and we will build an arsenal of stories and teach your people how to tell stories that are much more powerful than your PowerPoint presentations or your Word documents, and we’ll make them personal and emotional. And this AI Story Flow is an execution system where the people can build them, assess them, and it can library them and then it can help you use them in preparation for calls, for meetings, for demos, for customer meetings.

So our AI tool is a messaging execution system, and it has the training built into it as well. So it can reinforce, it can accelerate learning. It can help you practice. There’s some really cool things in there. But it’s really designed to help people, how do I use this productively in my day-to-day work to be a more effective communicator and interact with whoever those cohorts are and learn to tell stories, practice telling stories, be prepared.

Because what we believe is if you’re customer facing today, you better be prepping and practicing before you go on the meeting. If you’re not prepping and practicing, today you lose a meeting or lose somebody, and they go on to something else. Particularly if you’re in sales. I have a friend who laughs and he says that every other professional sport or team that he knows practices before they go on the field, sales teams are the only people we know who think they can wing it. And in today’s world, you need to prep and practice. So that’s what the tool helps you do. The tool is an interactive tool to help you prep and practice and get ready.

Vishnu: 100%. At least spend five minutes before the call just to prep and research the prospect that you’re talking to, because that just adds so much value to the conversation. What’s next for your business? What’s coming next?

John: So we are in the throes, we’re trying to continue to improve the AI. And what I would like to do with the business is make the AI and the integration of the training so robust that people would not have to do the training. And I’m kind of struggling with this, and we actually have an implementation of our AI tool with voice. In one sense, with AI, you can do anything. In another sense, if you don’t know what you’re going to do and you don’t know how the AI works, you’re not really productive with it.

So I have a vision of people turning on the AI and it really helps them do all this stuff. But that’s the area we’re going. We have what I call two core modules and three advanced modules. We teach people how to have a value conversation. And we also teach them how to disagree agreeably and use transformational listening and storytelling in those conversations to really have a good conversation.

So there are other modules that we’re continuing to develop, but the main focus is all around integrating this. So it becomes more usable for people day to day and easy to execute. And so they can apply it and say, I got real value out of this.

Vishnu: You’re just transforming into more of a SaaS business, or are you thinking about hybrid?

John: Well, I’m not sure about that. What I believe is that AI is a transformational technology and that people have to learn how to use it. They have to learn how to apply it directly to their business, not just use it intellectually. You also have to have human skills because it’s not just going to be robots. Maybe that’ll happen a hundred years from now, but we’re still going to be interacting with people, leading people, managing people, trying to build relationships. So they’ve got to have those two skills. And what we’ve done is we’ve embodied our human skills where you can build those using an AI tool. So it’s pretty interesting.

Vishnu: Very, very cool. Where can the listeners find you, John?

John: You can find us at www.ci2advisors.com. That’ll give you a panel. If you’re an individual, if you go down three or four panels, you’ll see on demand training. And if you’re a corporation, we have a link to the high value corporate applications. And if you want, I’m on LinkedIn, John Geraci.

Vishnu: Perfect. It’s been a pleasure. And let’s keep in touch.

John: Thank you.