I am someone who loves to learn other people’s systems mostly because I don’t love recreating the wheel.
If someone has gone before me, I want to learn from what they’ve learned. I can always tweak and refine but at least I have a starting point that’s more solid than my guessing! Can you relate?
In that spirit, I am going to share the exact steps we take our clients through on their path to a home staging consultation appointment right up to what my team and I carry in our consultation bags.
The steps below have been created after years of refining and include automation in order to free up our precious team time to do more valuable tasks.
You can do many of these steps in a non-automated way to get started. Just write these steps out to create your system and that will help you gain more time for yourself as the system will streamline your efforts.
I share all of these steps including tutorials for how I developed the automation so you can either hand them off to a virtual assistant or implement them yourself inside my new program RethinkYou.
Our Staging Consultation Process
Discovery Call
Our first step with any new client is our Discovery Call. This is our version of sales call and it’s designed to uncover:
- How our prospective client learned about our company
- Why they are reaching out to us (what is their problem and why do they feel we are the solution)
- What are they hoping the staging process will accomplish
Once we understand those three things, we are better positioned to share how we can help and what our process looks like. It also enables us to send a thank you note to a referral partner if the client was referred. Gotta remember to love up those people who share you!
Payment Link
Once a client has decided to move forward with us, we send a PayPal payment link. You could use Stripe or a similar service depending on what’s available in your country.
In the age of online shopping, everyone should understand there are tons of things you pay for before you receive the deliverable.
For our business, we wanted this payment link to be the start of an automated process that could work regardless of who was paying for the appointment (realtor or seller).
Once payment is made, the purchaser is redirected to a web page where they add the name and email address of the person who will be having the appointment so we can send the link to our calendar. For this web page or landing page, we use a website called Leadpages.
Calendar Link
Finallllly!! Now the client gets the calendar link! For us, this is sent automatically after the contact information has been added to the Leadpage I mentioned above.
For our calendar, we use Acuity Scheduling. I’ve also heard that Calendly is great. This calendar shows the availability for all of our team members so there are a variety of times to choose from.
All of our welcome documents get delivered right from Acuity too, which is awesome! I talk a bit more about our welcome emails here.
Our bag is packed
Each of our team members has a home staging consultation bag that they take with them for every appointment. Here's what we always have on hand (the breath mints might be the most important! Haha!):
Most of these need no explanation but a couple might.
Post-it Notes
I love these for helping the client identify large pieces of art, furniture, or accessories that can be relocated, stored or donated because they aren’t needed to style the house for photos. All of this information is added to their Selling Success Plan but some people love to take action before our plan arrives (within 48 hours is our standard) and this enables them to do that easily.
Mini-Level and Poster Putty
I use these super practical items to demonstrate to our clients how to make sure art is leveled and will stay in place. I place poster putty on the lower corners of the art, place the level on the art, level it, and then press the puttied corners firmly. Voila! Lopsided art becomes a thing I’d the past! People love learning this little hack!
Car charger
Our team takes photos of all rooms during our consultation and uses an interactive form I created in an app called GoCanvas to take our consultation notes. This involves having our iPhone or iPad charged for each appointment. The car charger is a clutch when multiple appointments a day are happening.
Paint Decks
It’s obvious to have paint decks but I just wanted to add…don’t purchase these! As a member of the design community, you should get these for free. You can also get large samples free as well. My Sr. Stager carries large swatches of our favorite neutrals which you can download here.
I’d love to hear from you! What’s in your onboarding process or your home staging consultation bag?
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