From kindergarten to adulthood, building relationships is a huge key to your happiness, productivity, and success. And at The-DSA, we want to help you when it comes to building relationships with your clients as well as your competitors.
That’s why we’re giving you five steps to connecting with clients and competitors that will take your sandbox play to a new level.
A Sandbox-approach to building relationships:
Know your business: Before you can build relationships with potential clients and even start to differentiate yourself from your competition, you need to ensure that you know your business inside and how. You also want to make sure that you have a realistic view on your strengths and weaknesses. When you know where you excel and where you can use some extra work, you can better build a business strategy around it.
Know your competition: You need to know your competitors’ business as well as your own. You need to know what it is that makes you stand out from them. See what they’re doing when it comes to marketing or advertising and find out if it’s working. When you know who you are competing against you can more easily develop fresh ideas that they haven’t turned to and bring something new to your clients.
Build relationships: Running your own business is about more than just trying to sell your products or services. But you also need to focus on building relationships with your customers. When you build and establish trust and a relationship with your clients you can turn a one-time client into a regular customer.
Listen to your customers: You may think that a service you provide or the way you provide it is great, but customers often have other thoughts on it. Listen to what your customers tell you when they provide feedback, or watch their reactions and body language when you interact with them on a project. An approach you thought was flawless may actually be improved upon with even the most seemingly small comment from a client.
Stay fresh: When you hire people, you want to bring in those who can bring fresh ideas to your business, especially in a home staging and designing business where new ideas are always circulating. Bring on new teammates that will offer up ideas when they think they may not be the best or will take risks in making clients happy. These are the people, who can help you distinguish your business from the rest.
Learn more about how our classes and hands-on training can teach you to build relationships with customers while you learn the ins and outs of how to decorate, how to stage, and more at www.the-dsa.10web.me.
Author: Sandra Racz
Sandra Racz operates Signature Redesign LLC and The Decorating and Staging Academy. She has been a professional real estate stager since 2004. Racz, services Scottsdale, AZ and Denver, CO. Sandra’s successful career and happiness in the industry inspired her to help others turn their love for decorating into a business. As the Executive Director of The Decorating and Staging Academy, Sandra also offers training in Color, Home Staging, and Interior Decorating, Seasonal Decorating and Event Planning. Sandra was recently voted One of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Real Estate Staging, by The Real Estate Staging Association® (RESA®). She has won national awards in the categories of Interior Redesign, Interior Decorating and Real Estate Staging. She has been featured in numerous magazines, local newspaper articles and has trained and lectured to thousands of decorating and event professionals. Sandra is a firm believer in giving back to the community by coordinating projects for Habitat for Humanity, the Cancer Society, The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Autism Speaks and serves on several boards. Sandra holds a B.S. in Marketing from Florida State University and a M.B.A. from Troy University. She has held multiple positions in marketing and advertising and taught college-level business classes.