After more than a decade in business, one of my favorite things to hear is that our clients think our home staging consultation is fun! I love hearing this because I specifically designed our home staging consultation (we call our home staging consultation a Styling Evaluation) process to create fun and empowerment. And I did this intentionally.
When I first started my home staging business, staging was still new in my area. Most people had no idea what staging was or what the process looked like. This was great because I could carve my own path and I quickly learned that I wanted my home staging consultation to be a feel-good process for my clients. I wrote about the childhood experience that informs how my team and I talk to our clients here and here.
The reason I place so much importance on having a great consultation is all about energy. So much of what we do involves putting positive energy and momentum into the world. If we don't leave our clients feeling positive, they will be less likely to be successful. Just a fact. They will resist implementing their staging. So I cannot stress enough how important it is to protect our seller's energy and keep as focused as possible on bringing joy into the staging process. So let's dive into 4 ways our team accomplishes this!
Preparation
Because staging is still new to so many people and because HGTV doesn't help anyone truly have a realistic picture of staging, I wanted to prepare our clients for what they could expect during our time together. With each appointment scheduled our clients receive three very important documents.
Short Questionnaire
In order for our team to get to know our clients, even if we haven't had a direct sales conversation with them since 99% of our clients are referred to us by our real estate partners, we created a short intake questionnaire so the homeowner can share information about themselves and their house. This helps us understand what they think are assets and opportunities so we can lean into those things in our appointment. This is also where we get permission to use before images in our marketing.
Welcome letter
When a client pays for their appointment and schedules their appointment time, we send them a really nice welcome letter. To me, a welcome letter is a celebration and an opportunity to set our experience off on a positive note. Our letter introduces us and lets our clients know they are in good hands with our team. It lets them know we are experienced and we value protecting their return on their time, energy, effort and financial resources.
What to expect
In our welcome letter, we link to our document called “What To Expect At Your Appointment”. This document lets our clients know exactly how we conduct our home staging consultation. It also lets them know some very basic things they can do ahead of our appointment if they feel like diving into their staging process.
Reassurance From The Beginning
When we arrive at our home staging consultation, we often find clients who are both nervous and excited. Our clients are vulnerable as we step across their threshold and often apologize for the condition of their properties. I've come to learn this is a bit of a defense mechanism because they worry we will be judging them and their things. It's also about feeling a little out of control. We like to nip this in the bud from the beginning!
Our appointments start with us explaining how we will go through their house and what we are looking for. We always talk about several things:
- This appointment focuses on how important the camera is in our approach staging
- This appointment will assist with their pre-packing process (you can read here why we never talk about decluttering)
- We think about return on investment with each of our recommendations
- We try to minimize large projects and purchases
- They are in charge of what they choose to implement
You can literally see our clients start to relax as we roll into their appointment!
Education + Empowerment
We approach our appointment through the lens of education. We teach the why and how of our recommendations as we move through a house. Our sellers get incredibly detailed information so they can implement their plan perfectly on their own. This gives them such a sense of empowerment and they love seeing their efforts create incredible transformations.
We also empower our clients by telling them they don't need to implement every recommendation. Whaaaat?! Yep, we let them know we are there to share all that can be done. But at the end of the day, it is their time, effort, and finances and they can choose to not take on certain things. This one statement actually helps people who are in resistance or overwhelm relax a bit. It's kind of like magic!
Support On The Flip Side
After we send our Selling Success Plan, our engagement doesn't end. We personally call each client after the appointment to make sure they received their plan and let them know we are here for them if they need any questions to be answered. We also send three follow-up emails to check-in. Because we are so detailed in our directions and have educated our clients along the way, we rarely receive follow-up questions but we want them to know we are here if they do.
Our other favorite way to support our sellers and Realtor clients is to cheer on their listing by promoting it to our email list and our social media channels. We love getting quick sales for our sellers so we include this co-promotion as a part of our service to spread the love and get more attention on each listing. I wrote more about how we do that here.
Phew! I know that sounds like a lot but the cool thing is, that all of those things have been made standard in our business. Some of those things are automated and others are automatic because they are part of our Styling Evaluation System. Our exact system with all of the supporting documents is included in our new RethinkYou Mentorship Program opening soon. If you'd like to be added, click the button below!
xoxo, Lori
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