You can only promise what you have on the shelf.
Hi y’all,
At Staging Design DC, a designer on the home-staging side once pulled two rugs for a job. A rental client was expecting those same rugs, and the team had to send something different.
At most rental companies, that’s when sales and the warehouse start blaming each other. But in Staging Design’s Beltsville, Maryland, warehouse, sales and operations work off the same floor plan. Operations coordinator Gustavo Ortega built it around how the whole team works.
Here’s the team on how the layout helps them sell:
Three habits from their floor:
Give returns one place to land. Chairs kept coming back not quite clean. “Sometimes you wanna trust your team, that they tell you that it’s clean,” Gustavo said. But with high-end clients, one person’s clean isn’t always clean enough. So he built a return zone where everything gets checked before it goes back on the rack.
Ask for a photo after every delivery. Their movers post an ETA to a team group chat on the way out of the warehouse and a photo of the finished setup once they finish delivery. Full setup is part of the service, so Hannah Howe, their event and account manager, checks those photos. More than once she’s found the furniture left in a corner instead of installed. She sends the client the photo and calls before the crew leaves: “Is this what you wanted?” Pair the photo with a signed receipt of goods and services, and you have a record of what arrived and how it was left.
Count before sales quotes. Staging Design runs home staging and event rentals off the same shelves, which is how those rugs ended up on the wrong job. So Gustavo walks the racks with a laptop and counts each item against what the system says. If Hannah asks whether they have 80 chairs and the real number is 79, she needs to know before the quote goes out.
The full tour recap is on our blog.
So if a client asked how many chairs you have right now, would you answer with a number, or a maybe?
See you next Monday,
Mallory Mullen
Goodshuffle
