When you’re a home stager one of your most important tasks is taking action every week to grow your home staging business— that is, if you want to earn a nice living and see your situation consistently improve. After all, you can’t stay in business for long if you aren’t bringing in new clients!
Many people mistakenly assume this means they have to pick up the phone every day and call up potential clients and real estate agents.
If you’re like me, the thought of “cold calling” probably gives you clammy palms, causes your chest to tighten, and makes your stomach queasy.
If cold calling had been the only way to grow a business, I would have given up being an entrepreneur back in 1989 right after I started!
Instead, over 20 years have passed since I had to depend on an employer’s paycheck, and I’ve never made a single cold call to get new clients. Not when I was a marketing consultant dealing with large corporate clients and advertising agencies, not as a designer selling my custom home accessories, not as a home stager and not as a home staging trainer and mentor.
Cold calling is one of the least effective marketing strategies. It’s unpleasant to do, it’s time-consuming (which makes it expensive), and for the most part, you’re reaching out to a hostile audience who will be upset with the interruption and not at all interested in what you have to sell.
Have you noticed that most cold calling is done by computers nowadays? A computer that dials numbers randomly and plays a pre-recorded message can reach thousands of people each day. If only one of these calls turns into a customer, the program pays for itself. But you can’t personally call thousands of people every day, even if you did have the stomach for it!
Each of us only has 24 hours in a day, and if you’re spending the working portion of it reaching out to total strangers on a one-on-one basis, you’re unlikely to achieve the “critical mass” necessary to sustain and grow your business.
Instead, you need to think of one-to-many marketing techniques.
In other words, you deliver your message once and many people hear it. For example, if you introduced your services to a group of 30 people, chances are pretty good that one of the following will be true for 3 to 10 of them:
- They already have a house on the market that isn’t selling
- They will be selling their home soon and are worried about how much they’ll get for it
- They know someone who is struggling to sell their house
- They know someone who will be listing their home on the real estate market soon
You don’t know in advance which of the 30 people in the room are the 3 to 10 who might need your services right now, or know someone who does. You also don’t know which of the 30 are the type to hang onto your business card and stick it in their “house” file so they’ll have it when they need it. But, when you deliver the right introduction to this group, they’ll come to you!
Another example of one-to-many marketing is making your business easy to find on the Internet. People who are actively looking for a home stager in your area will actually come to you. How much easier is that than you running around trying to find them one by one?
Besides, when you’re contacted by someone who found you online, they already know they want a home stager. This is a much easier selling proposition than trying to first educate them about staging, then convincing them they need it, and then convincing them to hire you!
When someone calls you because they already know they’re interested in home staging, I teach you exactly what to say in the Staging Diva Sales Script. You’ll learn what I say to clients word for word and how I made $10,000 a month in home staging fees. You don’t have to be “salesy” in this conversation. You can stay in the mindset of someone who is there to serve, and your task is to help them understand how you can assist them so they’ll book a paid home staging consultation with you.
There are tons of ways to make it easier to get found by your ideal clients on the Internet, including: joining the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers so you don’t have to figure out how to build your own website and drive traffic to it, getting me to write an article about you (a free service that surprisingly few home stagers take advantage of), blogging, joining Active Rain, and more.
When you’re ready for in-depth marketing training to help you start or grow your home staging business, please check out Course 4, Staging Diva Sales & Marketing Secrets to Boost Your Home Staging Business.
This comprehensive course is based on what I learned from my MBA in Marketing, and the techniques I’ve used to build my own businesses for more than 20 years. I’ll also share how I built my own staging business to such an incredible size in such a short time using only free and low cost marketing techniques.
The Staging Diva Graduates you’ll read about in this issue, as well as the 10 I feature in my F’REE report, Ask Staging Diva: Can a regular person like me become a successful home stager?, have used these tactics successfully for years.
Here’s a brief outline of Course 4:
- Defining what success means to you and how that relates to your chosen marketing strategies
- How the buying cycle works
- Overcoming the top 5 reasons someone won’t hire a home stager
- The key questions you must answer before someone will buy
- How to reach your 4 key target audiences (yes, there are 4!)
- What you should know about each audience
- Building your web presence and learning about search engines
- Pricing strategies to work less and earn more
>This is your last chance to get Course 4 for only $249.
The cost goes up by 30% in July, though the course would still be a bargain at 10 times the price because it will help you make money for the rest of your life.