The Transparency Trap: Balancing Honesty and Boundaries

Transparency in business: essential or overrated?

In this episode, Ashlie and Whitney look at the nuances of client communication and the importance of transparency in building trust and effective relationships.

They discuss the pros and cons of being fully transparent with clients, including the potential for creating dependency and the importance of setting boundaries and realistic expectations.

They emphasize that while transparency can lead to better client education and trust, it is crucial to balance honesty with maintaining professional boundaries to avoid over-dependence.

They also touch on the broader aspects of effective marketing strategies, highlighting that a multi-faceted approach and a strong, cohesive team are vital for success.

Listen For:
03:18 - The Pros of Full Transparency
07:58 - Setting Boundaries with Clients
09:17 - The Evolution of Client Expectations
20:45 - The Consequences of Misaligned Expectations

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Transcript

Ashlie Marshall (00:00):

It functionally did create a relationship where they were like, oh, well they can take care of that. They can do that for me. They can do that for me. And like you said, it creates that unhealthy boundary where Yes, I'm always accommodating. Yeah, I'm always accommodating. I'm always available. I can always support whatever it is you need.

Whitney Ramirez (00:26):

Hello?

Ashlie Marshall (00:28):

Hello. Hey, y'all. C Sweet chicks.

Whitney Ramirez (00:33):

Back at it.

Ashlie Marshall (00:35):

Back at it.

Whitney Ramirez (00:36):

Ashley had a birthday, so she was celebrating last week

Ashlie Marshall (00:41):

I did have a birthday and then I caught a cold. So you're getting sniffly me today, but it's all good.

Whitney Ramirez (00:49):

Too much fun.

Ashlie Marshall (00:51):

I wish that was the case. We've got an interesting topic to discuss today, guys. Whitney and I have been in this client facing client communication realm, building relationships and whatnot for a couple years now. And we have discovered over the course of the last few years that there can be this layer of dependence that gets built up because we choose to be fully transparent and educational in all of our conversations. We aim to make sure our clients know everything that we can teach them about what it is we're doing for them and how we're doing it and why it works and why it's helpful. And because we are transparent and because we try to educate in every conversation, it lands us in this space of sometimes our clients being a bit dependent on us for information or education that falls outside of what we're technically doing for them. So because we've run into that, go

Whitney Ramirez (02:12):

Ahead. And it's like we have a range too. We have a very scope of clientele. We have some clients where they're solely dependent on us, and then we have other clients who were just a small piece of their puzzle. And so it's like we've seen all various combinations of what that could look like.

Ashlie Marshall (02:40):

So we just kind of want to talk more so about the transparent side, why one is being fully transparent in communication when it comes to client, vendor or client vendor relationships. And knowing everything, you know, have to choose either to be transparent or not. You can't just be slightly transparent and tell them some stuff because it's not going to work. No, it's

Whitney Ramirez (03:12):

Not going to work. No, they don't get the full That's right view. They're just kidding. That's

Ashlie Marshall (03:18):

Right, a hundred percent. So let's talk about the pros, right? I think some of them are pretty obvious, but maybe they won't be to some of our friends listening. But the pros to being fully transparent with our communication with our clients. Well and with our team, I feel like we're the same level of transparency. We build trust. We don't do it to build trust. We do it because we're good people and we're honest and we want to be as honest as possible at all times. So it builds trust, it helps us to, I think it helps you tremendously in the sales realm.

Whitney Ramirez (03:57):

It does, because it's a very low pressure way for me to educate someone without them feeling like they have to buy.

(04:07):

Because I mean, that's just my opportunity right then and there to tell them what I know, how I can set realistic expectations with them. And there are times where even though it could be a great client for us financially, they're not ready for our service and I have to tell them no. And I have to tell them what to work on so that we can work with them in the future. And that alone, any other vendor that just is trying to hit goals financially, they're just going to take that client, get the money out of them that they can, and then they're going to have an unhappy client because no expectations or boundaries are set.

Ashlie Marshall (04:54):

Right? Exactly. And then when they do, because there have been multiple times where you and I in the past have said, I'm not really sure this is the best option for you to invest in these services. And you give them that list of things that they can work on and tell them how they can work on it. Those people always return to us, whether it's to ask a question or they're ready to use our services. They have always come back and it plants a seed and builds a relationship because you can't have any type of relationship, business or personal without a level of trust. And the trust is being honest even when the honesty is ugly or it's not necessarily the picture you want it to portray,

Whitney Ramirez (05:51):

You

Ashlie Marshall (05:51):

Give it to 'em anyway.

Whitney Ramirez (05:54):

And if you are in sales, it also is a way to organically build your network too. Because with every person you speak to, there's something that you can leave them with that is going to benefit you in the future. And sometimes it's just giving them enough knowledge to where they feel comfortable recommending you to a friend, even if they don't use your service and maybe they feel comfortable enough to ask you a question or maybe it's they feel comfortable to connect with you on LinkedIn or say hi to you at an event. And then they're like, oh, this person's talking to this person. What do they know? Are they good? Do you use their service? And so it always can lead somewhere.

Ashlie Marshall (06:40):

Yeah. So that's a huge pro to being transparent. It builds the trust that can lay the foundation for a great relationship professionally. And in my opinion, and there are people who agree with this and don't agree with this, it's the right way to do business. It is the only right way to do business is to be transparent with the people that you are providing a service to. And I think that it's sadly something that's fading in our society, but hopefully if there's enough of us out there, we can bring it back and make it cool again. But maybe we can talk more. And how that turns around and becomes later on, it builds the relationship. It plants the seed and the people that we're working with know that we're honest and true. They also know that we continue to educate ourselves. And sometimes with certain types of people that can make us their crutch, they lean on us a bit too much in areas that maybe we shouldn't be leaned on. Yeah,

Whitney Ramirez (07:58):

Yeah. Sometimes. So yeah, I mean you would think like, oh, okay, always being transparent and available and accommodating. That's always a good thing. But then when you really think about it, people are always looking out for themselves. And so if they know that they have a resource that they can just continue to come back to without also pouring into, then they will do that. And so I think that's why it's important to set boundaries and healthy expectations, but it also can lead to some issues in terms of feeling like the service that they paid for is connected to that relationship. And they're very different because in our service we outline everything we say we're going to do and we're very clear. But when people continuously ask questions and want to know, I want my business to grow more and we're not getting enough from you guys, and then you find out that we're the only piece of their puzzle, that's very hard. So you

Ashlie Marshall (09:17):

Said a word that we're going to elaborate on more an expectation. I feel like there's an evolution of the expectations that were set with our clients. And I kind of want to unpack that just a tad bit because super important. I'm experiencing watching my husband go through the business that he works for and watching the expectation that's set in the sales realm and then how that falls on his department and other departments to produce an expectation that may have been unrealistic and may have been improperly set up. They were set up to fail basically from the get go.

(09:58):

So yes, not having a connection between what the expectation was when they were spoken to in the sales realm and then understanding that what they're leaning on us for is not necessarily what falls in our category of services that we can offer. I think that in the past, you and I were kind of, oh yeah, we can do that. Oh, not you and I were that way, but we were being trained to say, yes, we can do that. Yes, we have somebody who can do that. Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do that. Say yes to everything. And it was a part, it functionally did create a relationship where they were like, oh, well they can take care of that. They can do that for me. They can do that for me. And like you said, it creates that unhealthy boundary where dependency, yes, I'm always accommodating.

(10:48):

Yeah, I'm always accommodating. I'm always available. I can always support whatever it is you need, but that also was not scalable, which was something you and I had to kind of reign in a little bit more. And the way in which we communicated, yes, we can handle that for you, but that's not a part of your services. That was the change in our verbiage that kind of helped with retraining our clients to understand that yes, we can do those things, but it's not a part of what we're handling for you right now. And it's outside of that realm. And I don't think that we had anybody really push back on us for that, but we had to make sure that we were doing things that we could still support doing if we had a team to support and people to pay. And so we had to make sure that we were properly handling that another.

(11:44):

I think we have seen it give grounds for confusion. Oh yeah. I think in this same realm, we have seen clients get very confused as to what information or what service they're actually paying us to do or what information should we and should we not have. There has been a lot of confusion in regards to that, but because it's in our nature and I feel like it's in the nature of our team as well, we always try to seek out whatever questions they have. We try to seek an answer, we try to find it. If we don't know it, we try to find it. Definitely. And I think that has created the grounds to cause some confusion and sorry about my sniffles guys.

(12:36):

And I think our team has done a really good job of learning how to provide the answer, but make it very clear that this is as far as I can take you, right? This is the information I can give you and I can give you the resources to continue to research it on your own. But this is as far as I can take you. And I personally have learned that a lot from our team. I see them do that and I see them set those boundaries with the clients. And it has been amazing to watch them do that. And it's very good. I've heard a lot from that. Yes, extremely good.

Whitney Ramirez (13:13):

But also I think it helps to reiterate to the client or anyone you're talking to that there is so much information out there if you just look. And also some information that we digest is very relevant and easy for us to understand our sources. But then clients who are very unfamiliar with technology and they're new to social media and they're new to advertising, a different source might be more informational and easier to understand than information we're providing. And it also helps them to educate themselves at the same time. And that's never going to be a bad thing is even better when we have educated clients because then they can get excited with us about improvements being made or problems being solved or celebrating wins with them. That's the best.

Ashlie Marshall (14:20):

I agree with that wholeheartedly. When we have had a large array of clients and some, I'm really proud to say they came in not knowing a lick of anything, and we've been able to help them understand, steer them in the right direction, offer education, explanation, so on and so forth, to where now they really have a good understanding. And so they know what it is we're doing for them. And when we communicate different changes that are happening or different things that we're learning, they get it. They understand it, they know how we're either pivoting or continuing to pour into something to continue to get good results. So that has been awesome to watch those relationships blossom into that. But then I think too on the other side of this is that they tend to expect that the digital marketing side is the only thing that they need to pour into in terms of marketing or sales in general. And that is a huge false. It's huge

Whitney Ramirez (15:22):

False. It is. And I think I just had this conversation with one of my clients where she's unhappy with a large corporation making not the best decisions when it comes to her website, but she says, you know what? We have everything else going for us though. We have digital marketing, we have a good sales team, we have a good marketing team. Our team culture is so much better now we have new management and things are going in such a positive direction. Our website's actually a tiny piece of that. And so

Ashlie Marshall (16:07):

It's

Whitney Ramirez (16:07):

So true. It's very hard to grasp that and know that that's what it takes, but it really is what it takes. And I know from experience, because when I started at the print shop and I came into that mess,

(16:24):

I We'll talk about that one day. Yeah, we'll talk about that for sure. But I quickly realized all of that has to be going at the exact same time and everyone has to be working towards the same goal of getting our name out there and doing cold outreach and having good social media marketing and having good local conversations and attending events and having good SEO, having paid advertising, all of that has to happen at the same time and getting, it's a lot of work. I'm getting a ton of reviews. We had 30 reviews when I started and we have 131 today. The

Ashlie Marshall (17:11):

Only reason why any of that was successful though, is because you realized you were only one person and you implored the action from the team. You cannot go at it alone. And you cannot only have one source of incoming inbound, anything it all has to do at the same time. There's way No, not at all.

Whitney Ramirez (17:33):

And you know what else? The craziest thing that I've learned and have tried to offer this advice to our clients when they're struggling is there are people out there that need your services right now and just don't know about. That's right. And so what's your cold outreach look like? Are you actually getting in front of people? How are people supposed to know about you?

Ashlie Marshall (17:57):

A hundred percent.

Whitney Ramirez (17:58):

So sometimes you have to come to them.

Ashlie Marshall (18:01):

That is a really great explanation of why they need social media.

(18:08):

Social media is not for service-based businesses is not necessarily where you are going to get a large portion of jobs. However, you're reaching the eyeballs of the people who will need your service one day. And if you content is memorable enough and if it's consistent enough, they will remember you when they need you. And that is huge. That's huge. But again, it's not the only piece to the puzzle. You have to have all the pieces. They have to all be fit in together and they have to all be working towards the same goal. And that's not just all the things, it's all of the people on your team. You have to have a true team that is ready to work and fight, heading in the direction you're heading in. And that's the other gigantic missing link for a good portion of our clients.

Whitney Ramirez (19:02):

Very true. And so it's easy to get, I think people go to marketing as the first thing to cut or get upset about. But I think a good takeaway from this is if you feel like one thing is not working, look at every other thing and see if that's working too.

Ashlie Marshall (19:24):

Yep.

Whitney Ramirez (19:25):

That's great. Piece of advice. Life. It's a huge puzzle. You can't just blame one little piece of it if nothing else is working.

Ashlie Marshall (19:34):

And most of the time, the one that is the most obvious or the one that you are lean towards, this is the problem. It's usually not the problem.

Whitney Ramirez (19:44):

Yeah,

Ashlie Marshall (19:46):

It's usually not where your problems lie. It might be lacking in some areas or it might need a boost, but you're absolutely right. It's usually small things in every area that you have to clean up and polish and keep polishing. But let's kind of circle back. So we talked about the pros and we talked about the cons. And even though the cons are there, I don't think that there are anything a company can't work through. I feel like we've definitely worked through a lot of challenging relationships where people have become very dependent or clients have become very dependent, but we continue to use the education and the transparent communication to help them understand where they can lean on us and where they can't. And so it just kind of reiterates why being transparent is so important, but discussing the expectations a little bit.

(20:45):

We saw a massive, as a company when we let go of an sales component individual that was not selling our services, the selling that was occurring was definitely not what we were offering as a service. And so the expectation of what the clients were going to receive was not going to be anywhere near equivalent to what we were giving them. And again, that's that transparent communication and also continuing your own education. I think in that realm, making sure that whoever you have working in sales, whoever you have, speaking to prospective clients, they have to be fully educated in. If it's a service you offer, if it's a product you're selling, whatever it is, they have to be completely 100% well versed or have a team of people they can lean on when they don't have an answer or they don't know for sure. And those answers need to be equivalent to what will actually be provided. Otherwise, you have this person over here who's expecting to get this lovely gold polished box, and what they get is this brown rock. And then you lose your clients, then you lose your reputation, then you lose a whole lot of what you've worked so hard to build. So making sure that your transparency is not only coming from you, but it's coming from everybody on your team.

Whitney Ramirez (22:23):

Yeah,

Ashlie Marshall (22:24):

No,

Whitney Ramirez (22:24):

Definitely.

Ashlie Marshall (22:25):

You can only train that from action. You have to be transparent in order to train people how to be transparent. It's not always easy either, is it? Well,

Whitney Ramirez (22:34):

People learn from what they see more than from what they hear too.

Ashlie Marshall (22:39):

Exactly.

Whitney Ramirez (22:40):

And so it's way better to just lead by example than say, well, you didn't see me do that. You do this.

Ashlie Marshall (22:48):

Well, it's like the old saying, you heard do as I say, not as I do. No, no, no. That's not how it

Whitney Ramirez (22:53):

Works. And I think from a customer or a potential customer standpoint, if someone's telling you something that sounds way too good to be true, it probably is. It

Ashlie Marshall (23:08):

Probably is.

Whitney Ramirez (23:11):

Yeah. No one's going to get you 500 new clients overnight. One's going to get you 500 calls to your phone in the next two days. I don't even know. There's some kind of wild, wild things that get thrown out there when people really want to make a sale. And I get it. Some people's jobs, that's all they're relied on for, especially in a very large corporation where if you don't hit quotas, then you're gone. So you're just sometimes selling unethically. But from a customer standpoint, you have to know what you're investing in. And sometimes it's not the right investment. Sometimes it is, but it's just best to know, okay, this is what I'm getting myself into. My expectations are lining up with what they're offering. We'll give it a go for this amount of time. I'm going to make sure that I know I'm getting what I pay for and see the value in it. And if you don't, don't move forward. But if you do, then great. You built a new relationship, you have a solid vendor and you get to continue building that from there.

Ashlie Marshall (24:31):

But if you feel like you have a solid vendor and it's a great relationship, don't mistreat them. Don't talk down to

Whitney Ramirez (24:38):

Them.

Ashlie Marshall (24:40):

Don't yell at them and email them in all caps. Those things that just be appreciative and show kindness. And if they're treating you well and they're continuing to be educational and doing everything they can to provide the best service possible, don't mistreat them.

Whitney Ramirez (25:03):

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point.

Ashlie Marshall (25:08):

But again, if you do, it says more about you than it does about your vendor. So we'll talk about that one day character. But in all of the things that we've talked about, it definitely leans onto it is always better to be transparent and honest as opposed to not. And it's not always easy to be transparent and tell the truth, especially when the results aren't saying what you would like for them to say. But I said this not too long ago in one of our board meetings, numbers tell a story as do your results. Digital marketing results are analytical. They tell a story and they do not lie. And if you are educated enough to be able to analyze what the numbers are telling you and understand all the factors that go along with that, then you'll be able to see the story. And if you're not, then you lean on somebody like us who can help you understand it. Whether we give you this service or not, we will go through it with you. We will try to educate you. We will try to teach you how it works and all the things that go along with it. But while we are in the marketing industry, we don't do everything in the marketing industry. So if you have a good thing,

Whitney Ramirez (26:30):

Because digital marketing is a wide scope, and there are some companies that heavily specialize in specific things, and that's good. You want someone that has a small amount of services that they specialize in versus we do everything, what do you want? You never want that, but you want someone that's very knowledgeable in what you're interested in getting from them.

Ashlie Marshall (26:59):

Right. In my experience, the digital marketing companies that try to do all of it and everything all at once, yeah, the quality sometimes is lacking because they're not focused in any one area, or they haven't focused in any one area long enough to have the best quality. So vet your vendors, not just your digital marketing, all of 'em, vet them, ask for all kinds of resources, examples. And I mean, before I worked for our company, I worked for somebody trying to vet digital marketing companies, and I vetted the crap out of them

Whitney Ramirez (27:42):

As anyone should because even in sales, I'm never expecting to meet with someone and them trust me right away. I actually expect the very opposite. I expect them not to trust me, and I sometimes will even say that in a way on the call where I'll say something along the lines, regardless of you in working with us or not, this is what you need to focus on. So that way it just gives them little pockets of I might be able to trust her. I might be able to tell her what's actually going on, and that way I can know whether I can help them or not. Because it's hard to go into a conversation with someone where they're just, they got to wall up right away, got to break that down a little bit, see if we'll work with them well or not, and then figure it out from there.

Ashlie Marshall (28:42):

Yeah. Gosh, you've had a couple of those big wall, stony face, rude tone, and it's like, Hey, we're just having a conversation. You don't have to be man of steel and try to convince me that you don't need me. If you don't feel like you need me, you don't need me, but I'm still going to give you as much information as I can.

Whitney Ramirez (29:08):

Exactly.

Ashlie Marshall (29:10):

Yeah. Those have been interesting experiences.

Whitney Ramirez (29:15):

Definitely. I hope this is helpful.

Ashlie Marshall (29:20):

Yes. Hopefully it is helpful. Transparency and communication. Whitney and Ashley's vote is yes, always a hundred percent honesty and integrity go much further. And it just is the only way to do business, right?

Whitney Ramirez (29:39):

Yeah, it is. And if you do good, good will come back to you.

Ashlie Marshall (29:46):

Absolutely. Right. A hundred percent. Well, we hope you liked our tidbit, and if you did, leave us a review, drop us a note, and also share with your friends. Thanks for listening to us today.

Whitney Ramirez (30:02):

Thanks for listening. Bye.