Your home staging services shouldn’t be seen by you (or your prospective clients) as a commodity. That’s why the goal of your home staging website is to educate and build interest around your services so someone is intrigued enough to call you for more information.

I get asked all the time whether or not home stagers should be putting their prices on their websites. I advise against this and here are two of the reasons why.

You’re giving too much information away up front. When you leave out a key detail about your services like what they cost, you’re giving people a reason to pick up the phone and call you. The phone is a much better vehicle for building a relationship with a prospect because it gives you the opportunity to really connect with someone after they’ve seen your portfolio on your site.

If you know the right things to say when you sell your home staging services on the phone then by the time you hang up, they are already committed to hiring you because they understand how your services are the solution to their problem. Once they get that, what you charge isn’t a primary factor in the decision to hire you.

You’re selling your service like it’s a commodity. When you advertise your rates online, all you’re really doing is giving your visitors a good reason to shop around for the best price as if all home stagers offered the exact same service and result.

In all likelihood, when a homeowner sees your prices on your site, their next move will be to find other stagers to compare rates with. If you’re a professional home stager who values the quality of what you offer, you know that comparing one stager’s rates to another could be like comparing apples and oranges. Why encourage a prospective client to do that? Why give them a reason not to call or email you?

If you had a store and you were selling brand name TVs at cheap prices of course you’d be putting those prices online. You’d be using your low prices as a reason to do business with you. Unless you want to be the Wal-Mart of home staging, don’t even go there!  No matter how competitive your rates are, there will always be someone cheaper. And who wants a client who is only looking for cheap staging?

To learn more about how to handle your conversations with prospective clients, look at Course 3 of the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program as well as the Staging Diva Sales Script. Both resources will help you convert more homeowners into home staging customers.

Home stagers, have you already discovered the hard way that having your prices on your website is a bad idea? Or have you found the opposite? Please share your experiences by commenting below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould’s mission is to inspire people to follow their dreams. She developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Courses to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

[tags]home stager, home staging, home staging sales script, staging diva, home staging course, home staging business, home staging website[/tags]