Many of you have been asking me what my favorite home staging tools are.

The tools I’m sharing today can be helpful for anyone starting out in the home staging field, but also for any entrepreneur running a business.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

First off, a CRM program is an excellent and vital tool for anyone in the real estate or design business. A CRM gives you the power to store and manage customer information, contacts, and other data to help you maintain customer business relationships – and drive sales. Leading industry platforms, like Salesforce, offer a multitude of solutions for contacts, documents, payments and project management. Making CRM a tool for your home staging business is an excellent place to start bringing together the essential pieces of your company.

Email Marketing Services

Additionally, email marketing is one of the most useful marketing tools you can use. Go straight to your clients’ inboxes, and on a regular basis. Home staging tools like email marketing platforms also allow you to manage your contacts, track performance of your emails, and most importantly, not let your emails end up in the spam folder. Popular email services like Mailchimp have a simple interface, easy-to-use email creator, and the ability to set up delivery time. Plus, Mailchimp is integrated with Instagram for easy advertising.

Benchmark is another impressive email marketing service. It offers templates and drag-and-drop email editing solutions. It also features list management and tracking, and it integrates with Salesforce.

Document Management

Having a great storage system for your documents is vital, but so is having a system that will allow you to sign, send, and track all your important documents. The home staging tool DocuSign can replace steps like printing and scanning. Hellosign is another popular program that offers a user-friendly interface and integrates with a Google account.

Merchant Service

A merchant or payment processing service may not seem like an obvious home staging tool. However, a merchant service can streamline payments for your home staging business. An online merchant service like   Square.com, Authorize.net, or BluePay processes credit cards, checks or PayPal payments easily and securely. A home staging tool like an online merchant service maintains better cash flow and records for your home staging business.