How To Get Quality Interior Design Clients [3 Strategic Steps]
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Getting clients is the name of the interior-design game, right? Not so fast. You need the RIGHT clients and projects. Ones that are a good fit for your business and respect the design process.
Many interior designers, architects, and other home design professionals think that rejecting projects is only for established designers and firms - “It’s a luxury they have that the rest of us don’t” is the sentiment.
That is not the case, and being able to distinguish projects that are a good fit from the ones that aren’t is an important factor in determining whether your business grows, becomes established, and is profitable or not.
Let’s talk about why this happens, the costs of not vetting design projects, and what we can do to prevent it.
Opportunity Cost of Not Qualifying Projects
Action Steps - Contact Page
Action Steps - Discovery Calls
Action Steps - On-Site Consultations
Opportunity Cost of Taking On “Any” Interior Design Project
A definition for opportunity cost is ‘The loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.’ Essentially, every time you say “Yes” to something you’re saying “No” to something else.
$100 spent on a pair of shoes is $100 that can’t be spent on something else. It’s pretty straightforward.
If we’re spending 2 hours watching Netflix each night, that’s 2 hours not spent doing something else, whatever it may be.
What may be a little murkier is that the same is true with how you allocate time when working in your business.
Here’s what happens when you take on design projects that aren’t a good fit:
When designers don’t properly vet their projects, they can find themselves in an anxiety-riddled, time-consuming, and possibly expensive situation where they’re so stressed out they’re posting to a interior design FB group on a Tuesday afternoon to vent and seek advice rather than working. (How many times have I witnessed this?!)
This is what can happen:
Disproportionate time and energy is spent managing problematic projects/clients to the detriment of other areas of work/life
It can cloud the way you view the designer-client relationship, causing you to resent your client(s)
It can even affect the way you view the profession over time
The problem is some designers are too desperate for work so they ignore the red flags in front of them when going through the process of qualifying a project. They’re so worried about getting the job, they sometimes forget to ask themselves if they in fact want or should take the job.
This is an important question to ask, because it goes back to opportunity cost.
If you spend a lot of time on a high maintenance project, It may mean you miss out on one that would be a great fit for you because either your schedule is booked or you simply dropped the ball on lead generation because you were so overwhelmed.
A further possibility is your reputation may even be damaged because the project didn’t go well, regardless of the reasons. Legal issues can come into question too if it gets to the point you feel you need to break the contract or you have a difficult clients who decides they’re unhappy. (Both are subjects I see more often than I’d expect on the FB groups.)
Don’t let this be you! It does not need to be the case. Does a sideways project/client happen on occasion? Sure. But if this happening on anything like a semi-regular basis, you need to do a better job of vetting your projects before you both sign the dotted line.
Action Steps for Vetting Interior Design Projects
I know from personal experience that the majority of those sub-optimal projects can be weeded out from the get-go if you as the business owner have a process for educating your potential clients.
It is imperative you clearly communicate how you work, and what they can expect during a design project through your Design Services Guide, Discovery Calls, and On-Site Consultations, while actively gathering information and looking to for clues along the way about the quality of the project.
Website Contact Page - Inquiries Form
Statistically, we will only book a certain percentage of the inquiries that come into our business. This means the time you spend on those inquiries that go no where, for whatever reason, is time that would be better spent elsewhere for the most part.
Your time has value, monetary or otherwise, and time is money.
So time spent on potential projects that aren’t a good fit needs to be minimized.
Meet your BFF: the website Contact page Inquiry form
Your Contact page Inquiry form is the perfect beginning of your sales funnel. It should also your project/client qualifying process. And yes, you as a home design professional absolutely have a sales funnel. The question is, what’s the quality of it?
The concept is simple: for a potential client to reach out to you, you ask them to answer some questions via a form on your site’s Contact page.
Some designers have a new inquiry just submit their contact information. Then they will ask them to fill out a full questionnaire before the Discovery Call.
Up front, I will say I don’t advocate for lengthy questionnaires prior to speaking with a potential client. Design services are a luxury and are often sought by busy, successful people. They may bristle at being asked to fill out a lengthy questionnaire before they’ve even had a chance to speak with the designer.
Just as you should be looking to qualify a potential client on a Discovery Call, they will be doing the same. And just like you, they don’t want to invest a lot of time up front pointlessly either.
Plus, once they have the Discovery Call scheduled, they aren’t as motivated to send in a questionnaire. They rightfully figure they'll just wait until they’re on the phone with you to share that information.
Interior Design Contact Page Strategy
I think it’s a better strategy to include key questions on a Contact page inquiry form. Just enough to A) decide that a Discovery Call is warranted, and B) give you some information ahead of time to better prepare for the Discovery Call.
For example, if your minimum project budget for everything - design fees, construction, furnishings and finishes is $50,000 and a potential client indicates on the inquiry form that their budget is $25,000, then you know it’s not a project for you.
You can kindly let them know via email or a brief phone call and hopefully refer them to another designer with a similar aesthetic who takes smaller jobs and would be a better fit.
Neither of you needs to spend time on that Discovery Call and you can both move on.
Most of the time though, you will have a Discovery Call and so having some information up front gathered from your Inquiry form gives you an edge by helping you come off as better prepared and professional than if you’re going into the Discovery Call cold or caught off guard by something because you didn’t gather any preliminary information.
Interior Design Discovery Calls - Speak Up and Listen
I recently heard Cheryl Luckett of Dwell By Cheryl discussing her Discovery Call protocol on a podcast. Even after being in business for years, she still always prints out her list of questions for the call. (BTW, so do I.) She is very intentional about communicating how she works. In a nutshell, she works as the Designer, not the collaborator.
In other words, she operates from the perspective that she’s being hired for her design expertise and she doesn’t do a lot of back and forth with the client prior to presentations. She’s not bringing the client along to go tile shopping. She selects tile options she has decided will work well and presents them to the client during a meeting to discuss and select.
How you choose to work is up to you - many designers welcome heavy client collaboration, (or at least that’s what they claim in the magazine spreads) but the point is, she is clear and intentional about how she works.
The express purpose is to educate the potential client about her design process so the client can make an informed decision. In addition, she’s able to gauge their response to what she says about her design process.
This will lead to more successful projects than if either party is less than candid about how they work or what their needs are. Open and honest communication is always best (in any relationship, right?!) and everyone will be better off for it.
Discovery Call Take Homes
Speak up. Be very clear about how you work, your expectations, and boundaries. Your potential client deserves to have the full picture of what working with you is like.
Watch and listen. Pay attention to clues about the potential client, both positive and negative.
An open, frank Discovery Call can go a long ways to making an informed decision about moving forward for both parties .
On-Site Interior Design Consultations - To Free or Not To Free, That Is The Question
Another opportunity to education, listen, and learn is the initial On-Site Consultation. One of the first signals you put out about your business with this event is whether or not you charge for them.
“Free” consultations are in fact very expensive for the designer. It takes time to prep for them, travel to get there, conduct the consultation, and do any post consultation write-up and communications.
All in all, it’s a lot more time invested than the “free one hour on-site consultation.”
I’ll state up front, I’m an advocate for charging for your on-site consultation. It doesn’t have to be a lot, and you can deduct the consultation fee from their first invoice should they decide to move forward with you.
But it helps determine how serious they are and if they’re invested in working with you or mostly invested in getting the “best deal” possible.
A related example is contractors producing bids for free. Too often the inquiry is just kicking around the idea of doing a project and not yet serious or they may be just comparison shopping. Meanwhile the contractor may spend hours doing a bid that was never a serious inquiry.
Years ago we were in the bidding process for a major remodel and though we’d gather bids from seven contractors to find the best numbers. One of the contractors asked how many bids we were getting. When I told him seven, he basically said “thanks but no thanks.” I didn’t get it then but I do now.
You need clients who respect you and the design profession.
I spend a fair amount of time in FB interior design groups, and as I mentioned above, there are too many posts on the subject of nightmare clients who clearly don’t respect the designer or the design process. This is often a result of the designer not setting clear boundaries and expectations (and a weak contract is almost ALWAYS part of this), and/or taking on projects that were a bad gut-reaction to begin with.
If you’re just starting out and don’t feel comfortable yet, I get totally get it, and that’s fine. But once you get experience under your belt, start charging for your consultations. Make it a goal to change your business model mindset so you do feel comfortable.
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Conclusion
Design and construction have enough mishaps on their own. Especially now with the frequent delays between over-booked tradespeople, lengthy waits for products, and whatever else comes our way in these unpredictable times.
A great quote from a landscape architect I worked for was “It’s construction. Things get messy.” He had a very relaxed, roll-with-the-punches attitude that served him well.
The point being, you will have enough of those legitimate design-and-construction issues to deal with that are just part of the job and need to be worked through.
What is largely avoidable is taking on projects that aren’t a good fit or choosing to work with clients who signaled early on they’re difficult to work with even though the warning signs were present.
So do yourself and your potential clients a favor and take proactive steps to clearly communicate how you work as a designer and to qualify your potential projects. It can be a real turning point in your business.
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