I’m a Home Stager, NOT a Stalker!

If you’re like most professional home stagers I know, you attend networking events or meet people that you’d like to follow-up with. The question is how do you do this without feeling like a stalker?

Here’s a simple 3 step system to help eliminate the “ick factor”.

1) Immediately follow-up with a snail mail letter. NOTE: DO NOT just send an email. Sending snail mail is much more effective. Email can be blocked, dumped into the spam folder and just plain ignored. Even if you have a letter template that you create and have readily available on your computer (which I highly recommend that you do) and tweak it to fit this particular connection, you physically sign the letter and hand address the envelope. This ensures that your letter will get opened because the personalization keeps your correspondence from looking like junk mail.  You could send an email in conjunction with the snail mail, but not JUST an email.

In the letter, you talk about how nice it was to meet them at XYZ event last night.  As a reminder, you specialize in helping…  Per your discussion, you can support one another by…  You’d like to discuss how working together will help both your businesses.  Provide references to links where they can access more information about you online – about you, portfolio, services.  Please contact me at *phone number* or *email address*.

2) Follow-up with a greeting card 1 week later. Get a stack of nice blank greeting cards from the stationary store.  I had ones made with my logo on them, but any blank greeting cards will do.

In the card, you will reference how you had met at XYZ event last week.  You had send a letter to schedule a time to discuss how working together will help both your businesses. Please contact me at *phone number* or *email address*.

3) Follow-up with a phone call 1 week later. If they have not contacted you by now, do not hesitate to pick up the phone and make that “live” connection.  Sometimes that’s what it takes.

Ultimately, the key is not to hide behind your computer by just sending email communications and don’t rely on one attempt at communication and have it stop there.  It takes several touches in most cases.

Try this new system out in your business and let me know how it works for you. Go for it … remember that you must try something new to experience different results!