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Welcome to "Be Human," the definitive podcast for B2B leaders ready to catapult their 7-8 figure enterprises into new realms of growth through digital marketing. Hosted by Danny Murawinski, a seasoned digital marketing maven and former professional snowboard coach, "Be Human" offers a unique blend of insights that merge the art of relationship-driven sales with the science of digital scalability.
In a world where authentic connections reign supreme, learn how to finesse the critical human experiences at the heart of your sales, amplifying them digitally to resonate with your Ideal Customer Profile. Each week, we dissect the anatomy of successful sales relationships, crafting offers that not only speak volumes but are poised to echo across the digital expanse.
Danny brings over a decade of experience, connecting B2B ventures with giants from Fortune 500 companies to professional sports teams. His consultative prowess, honed on the snow slopes, now aims to elevate your business strategy through deep dives into the humanistic elements pivotal to relationship-building, alongside cutting-edge digital marketing strategies, tools, and techniques.
Join us for conversations with executives who've mastered the art of growth, navigating their B2B companies to towering figures. "Be Human" is more than a podcast; it's a weekly masterclass in leveraging genuine relationships for exponential digital growth. Tune in, and let's redefine what's possible for your business together.
Danny (00:00)
What's up, what's up and welcome to Just Be Humans, the definitive podcast for business leaders who have built their businesses through relationships and are looking to digital marketing to scale those relationships and punch through the revenue ceilings. I'm your host, Danny Murawinski. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about a concept called the respect ladder. I'm going to show you exactly how you can go from a simple message,
to a customer who totally respects your business so much so that they send you referral business. This isn't some rocket science thing. It's very simple and straightforward. And there's about about 20 ish steps we're going to go through on the respect ladder. So with that being said, I'm going to jump right in and tell you exactly how you can get customers who send you business all the way down to the first time you contacted them.
All right. So what's the creme de la creme for all businesses? And I think we all agree that the best, strongest, highest ROI that you can get in any marketing strategy is word of mouth. Everybody knows word of mouth is the strongest thing that will send business to you that will is already qualified and ready to close. It's the Holy grail in sales and marketing. And there is actually a strategic path that you can take.
to ensure that every customer interaction that you do, naturally they will refer you business. And this is done through what I call the respect ladder. So we're going to reverse engineer this. Okay. We're going to walk backwards all the way down to when we first talked to the customer. So the very first part of this, right, is the customer respects your company.
so much so that they naturally refer the business. Now, how do we get to that point? Right? And you might be thinking like, it's because we did a great service or a product or they got ROI and dah, dah, dah. Yeah. All of those things matter. Right? You have to actually do good work by the customer. You actually have to care, right? To actually get someone that's naturally going to send you more business. It's not just something that you do some basic work, some, you know, low bar work for them. It's satisfactory. It doesn't blow them over the top. And then you just say, Hey, can you send me more business?
It doesn't work that way. And something we got to realize too, is that when it comes to referrals and when it comes to word of mouth, that is probably by far the most organic form of marketing that we could ever possibly do. And when we get into UGC, which is user generated content about your business, meaning that the folks that you actually do work with you or that do work with you are actually creating content on their own because they're so inspired by what you do. That's where this moves into scalability inside of digital marketing.
So how do you do that? How do you get someone to naturally refer you business? Well, why don't you guys think about this for a second and think about your own referrals, whether it be a family friend or it be someone in your family, someone close to you in your inner circle that you know of that does great work in a particular field. It could be a realtor, it could be a local coffee shop. It doesn't matter what it is, right? But think about when you refer somebody, any type of product or service,
or a new business, whatever the referral is, when you make a referral, why do you naturally make that referral? Well, because you've gotten so much value from that thing and that stuff that you feel so compelled to share your experience with other folks that also have ailments around that. This is very true when it comes to products. Look at Stanley cup. Why did Stan the Stanley cup blow up so much, right?
I mean, there is a bunch of really interesting things that happen with that, but one of the biggest drivers for it was referrals at scale with user generated content. Users and specific, a younger demographic started sharing about the Stanley cup over and over and over again. And that's where the growth to that business line blew up and hit record charts. It didn't come because Stanley was force feeding ads.
It came because they created a product and a relationship with the product to the consumer that the consumer naturally wanted to share referrals via word of mouth and doing that at scale. So you got to understand to get someone to respect your company at that point. And at that level where they naturally do this, you have to first understand that the customer respects the outcomes of your engagement. Okay. They respect.
the outcomes of your engagement. So what does that mean? Well, if you are, for instance, in our business doing lead generation, right? When we do lead generation over at exit built, our customers respect all the data that we bring them, all the leads that we bring them and all the pieces of the puzzle that equate to what is their pipeline moving forward. And they respect that whole outcome driven results. It's a very simple thing.
right? For the customer to be able to respect the outcomes, you and your company first need to respect the customer's outcomes. What does that mean? It doesn't mean that we take on customers to just simply do the bare minimum and push them over the finish line to get a result. It's to get them results much higher than what they were expecting to blow out their expectations.
over -deliver under promise, right? That is the foundation to respecting the customer's results. And that comes through expectation management, which I'll talk about here in a second. So once you are actually able to respect what the customer is trying to do and the results that they're trying to get, they're going to respect the results that they're getting. Thus, they're going to respect your company. Okay. So with me so far. So before us as the company that needs to respect the results, the customer,
has to respect your process. They have to respect how you are getting the results. So oftentimes we see these businesses that do work in a vacuum and they don't bring the customer into the process whatsoever. Well, they might still respect the results and the outcomes, but they've lost a chunk of rapport that they're building with the business and understanding the process because the process.
is where we find the stories where user generated content and word of mouth are founded founded on. Okay, so the customer has to respect your process. You can do that in a variety of different ways. In our business, we do it very transparently. We don't have a secret sauce. We don't have some proprietary IP or tech or whatever it is that we hide. We tell them exactly
what we're doing, why we're doing it and how we're doing it and how they can replicate it themselves. We do it so much so that we literally tell our customers that our intent and goal is that they adopt this process. They become so efficient at it that they don't need our work anymore. Do you understand? That is showing utmost respect for the process and the customer will respect that process. They will respect doing work with you.
And regardless of what you do, it could be accounting, it could be a legal firm. It doesn't matter what you are and what you do. Everybody has a process that makes us unique. We need to start to let our customers in on that process and they will start to respect it. And the rest of this value chain will work. So for the customer to respect the process, something has to happen before that. And that is the company, your company.
has to respect the customer's money. Okay. This is post close. So what does that mean? Well, oftentimes in businesses, we, and by the way, my company, we did this too. So we're not guilt or not. We're not, you know, better than anybody else. We did it too for the longest time, but we just switched it, which is typically when a company wins new business, the company celebrates.
We celebrate the win. We celebrate the revenue coming into the business. At Exitbuilt, we've restructured our company culture. We don't celebrate the win when the money comes in. We celebrate when the customer gets the result. That shows respect for their investment into our business. So you have to respect their money. Their money is quite literally
all the things that they did to build their business, all the steps that they took, the trials, the tribulations, who you don't know their story. You don't know if they went through a long period of time and significant debt and they had to fight through and grind through. You don't, you don't know that, but that money represents that time. So we need to give that money and their money.
as the utmost respect because literally they're transacting the time that they've taken to get to this point that they can afford to even give you money. And this is true, not just for the small companies out there, but all the way up to the fortune 500s. We need to show respect when it comes to the customer giving us the money. So prior to that, that's at the close, right? That's when we respect that. So once we win,
The mindset isn't celebrate we won woohoo. The mindset is, all right, we won time to get to work. That's the mindset. That is how you show respect through action and not just through words.
Prior to that, the customer needs to respect your core values. Okay. And the core values are demonstrated through the proposal. It's through how you're setting your expectations. You're that's your expectation management. That's where they're going to respect your core values. So that means that you're going to show them.
In the proposal prior to the close exactly what you're planning on doing and why you do it the way that you do and how your core values of who you are and who your business is bleeds through every single aspect of that. And they will show respect backwards. That's how the customer will respect the core values. That's done at the proposal stage. Okay. Prior to the proposal, typically we have some type of a meeting, right?
before the customer's like, yes, send me over a proposal normally. So we, the company, we have to respect the customer's time during that meeting. So what does that mean? How many of you have witnessed and seen that in the first meeting you go through and you vomit from the mouth about your features and benefits of your product? All too often we all do that, right?
So how is that really showing a respect for their time? Or we've also seen it too, where it's a value stack and a value add all the way up to the end where you finally tell them what the proposal is going to be and how much it's going to cost or a rough ballpark of it that happens at the end of the conversation. That also doesn't show respect for their time. They're there to do business with you that they're considering doing business with you. That's why they're taking time out of their day to meet with you because they're considering working with you.
So we need to show them the utmost respect and we need to be able to come out early in the conversation and ask specific questions that not questions to get them to necessarily divulge all their information, but specific questions that's going to help us better understand exactly what the customer needs so we can provide the solution backwards to them. That's done at the meeting phase.
Prior to the meeting ever happening, we get to the very foundation of this whole thing, which is the message. All right. And the customer has to respect our message. So how do you make a respectable message, whether it be a cold call or digital ad or an organic post or an SEO, it doesn't matter what it is on however you're sharing your content. Why would a customer respect that message? Well, if.
your message fits this criteria, they will ultimately respect what you have to say, which is that you need to respect where they came from. You need to show that in the message. We understand where you came from. We understand where you're at and respect where you're at and we respect where you want to go.
If you can boil that down into a concise message, when you first reach out to one of these prospects, ultimately they're going to 100 % gravitate towards you and respect that message, which is going to tee you up for the meeting, which is where you're going to show them respect of their time. So being sticking to the time constraint, if it's a 30 minute meeting and that's how you guys are doing it, end it at 25 minutes, respect their time.
give them time back on their calendar. If you can do it sooner than that, great. Don't drag it out. Don't oversell it. Respect their time in the meeting. That's going to tee you up to where they're going to give, okay, cool. We respect the meeting. We respect your core values. Why don't you send over the proposal? Now when you send over the proposal, that's where you need to, the customer is going to have the chance to start to respect your core values. So that needs to come out very clear.
inside of the proposal of why you do it. And that's where you start to tee up the actual process, right? Your process of why you do it. And you need to tie each part of that process back to your core values. It's where we're going to set expectation management. At that point, the customer will either like the proposal or they won't, but likely we're going to move to the close.
By the time we move to the close, the customer has already demonstrated respect for your core values and they've shown respect for your time. And by the time we moved to the close, we're already showing them that we respect where they've came from, where they're at, where they're going, and that we respect their time. And now we move into respecting their money. So once it closes and money transacts back to your business, you do not celebrate.
And I get it, most of you sales folks, when you win something, you want to celebrate because oftentimes there's commissions associated with it. And depending on what you do inside of the sales world, it could be a very significant commission. But we haven't satisfied the customer's needs yet. So why on earth are we celebrating that? Because it helps us and our bottom dollar, there's the wrong methodology and it shows lack of respect.
And that lack of respect may not be present to the customer because you're celebrating behind closed doors, but that's part of this ethos that they will eventually sniff out. And that's why it's so important and so imperative that we respect the clothes and respect the money that's being transacted. We do not celebrate then. We don't celebrate when we get home with our family and our wives. We live and breathe.
this respect and all things that we do and it will come out authentic because it is authentic. That's the catch here guys. So at the close money's transacted. We don't celebrate then we respect that now we need to get to work. So that's where the next phase comes, which is the onboarding phase. Okay. After the close, now it's onboarding. This is where we have a chance to set.
very clear expectations, communication cadences, everything else that we're going to do. This is probably the most important step to make sure that the remaining of this respect ladder is met. And that's on the onboarding, making sure we're transparent with our process, our clothes, so on and so forth. If we have a successful onboarding,
The customer will respect your process and they will respect the past performance that you've had because they're going to have trust that what you're doing is going to work and it's going to solve their ailment. And the next step of this is going to tee up exactly how you're going to continue to nurture and communicate with that prospect as time goes on. We just made this mistake and I can speak from my own example. We lost the deal. It was the only deal we lost after the deal had closed.
because we didn't put extra emphasis on the onboarding. Because what happens is, is if you don't set up regular communication and cadence with customers, they're left with their own minds and the data that they have to come up with their own conclusions as to what's actually happening. And where little things can fester into bigger things, we can calm that storm through regular communication and nurturing of the client. So how do you do that?
Well, maybe depending on what you're selling, maybe within the first month you meet weekly. As you move into month two, you meet bi -weekly. As you move into month three, you meet, you know, monthly. And then you eventually can even meet quarterly down the road, depending on what you're selling. But you need to set that expectation upfront on onboarding because that's where you're going to demonstrate to them that you respect the outcomes of their engagement.
It's done through the onboarding because that's where you're going to be able to regularly communicate with these folks and have these folks tell you in the process because there's inevitably going to be moments where they're going to second doubt. They're going to have buyer's remorse. They're going to second guess what's going on. It's just inevitable with any transaction. It happens all the time, regardless of the business that you're in, regardless of what you're selling. It happens even with things like super cars. As a matter of fact,
One of the investors I know went out, bottom McLaren and immediately regretted it on the drive home. It's like, I don't need it. Very wealthy individual, but that's my point, right? It's the respect of the onboarding and the process of that part. So where we set up our regular nurturing campaigns, when we're doing the nurturing and the regular communication cadence, we absolutely need to hit that to a T if not over communicate within the first 30 days.
You're not going to get dinged on over communication if all of your communication is driven by the fact that you are trying to make them a success. You're not going to get dinged on that.
That's the next step as far as the nurture and the cadence. At that point, now we're getting into the actual works performed. So now we're actually executing on the project, whatever that project is. And as we execute on that project, we have to keep the customer at the center of the entire process. Every decision that's made is customer centric. And every decision is made is
backed by real data that you're mining through your process that supports the customer centric direction. That's when we're executing. When we execute, we don't execute based off of what we believe is right. We execute based off of what the customer believes is right. And we use our processes and our systems to help move them along because that's why they're hiring you.
They're hiring you to jump the learning curve. They're hiring you for your expertise. They want to see results fast. There isn't a business out there that doesn't want to see results fast. So if you don't have the time, the appropriate time to deliver the actual tangible ROI results, then you need to take the time and the works performed to educate them through the process, to keep them on track and on board with where you're heading. And you need to clearly display,
your KPIs along the process, your key performance indicators that are indicating that this in fact is going to be a success. If you do all that, the customer will start to respect the outcomes of the engagement.
At that point, we deliver the results, the engagements done, and the customer will have the utmost respect for your business, for your process, for every bit of the communication, the whole nine. They're going to have respect for you and they will naturally start to give you referrals. That's the breakdown. I hope this finds that. I hope this is insightful for you guys.
I'm not sure if you're thinking about it like this. This is something that we're actively doing here in exit built and my other company. and we're seeing really great results by focusing in on how do we better respect our customers and how do we better respect their out, their customers, their outcomes. That's the core of what we're trying to do. And like I said, we're seeing a huge influx of positivity, both with our relationship with our customer.
as well as our relationship with their customers and so on and so forth. And their relationships are increasing. And it's one of those things that again, we see it all the time where we need to, as the business that's doing business with these other customers, we need to demonstrate through the way that we behave and act the way that our processes live and our values live. And naturally via osmosis, they will start to adopt those as well. And they will see the results transpire and you're going to go from.
creating a basic ROI on a campaign to actually instilling change management across the organization where they might actually change the way that they do things for the better. And that is where you get this level of utmost respect and referrals back to your business. So I hope again, you guys found this insightful. As I look into the next episode that we're going to record, it's going to be heavily focused on SEO and taking this human centric approach to SEO. Why does it matter?
And you're going to hear me talk a lot about this respect concept as I continue on. So I hope you guys found this interesting. Again, this is Just Be Humans, the definitive podcast for business leaders who have built their businesses through relationships and are looking to scale those relationships through digital marketing. I am your host, Danny Murawinski. And remember, just be humans.