5 floral designer traits customers want and how they drive profits

My uncle often says “It’s nice to be nice to the nice” and yes, that is true. Your team must be nice to your customers and each other, but being nice is obvious. Isn’t it? Let’s dig a little deeper than the superficial layers of “be truthful, be courteous, be kind” into the real floral designer traits you need to drive profits in the current economy.

Whether you are an experienced designer or a total newbie, today is the time to review where you stand on...

the 5 traits your customers are looking for in a floral designer

1. Confidence:

In yourself and your team

A lack of confidence can overshadow your credible products and services, especially in the floral design industry. I say this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, floral design is a field few people have expertise in, and customers who lack knowledge about a subject are going to look for other cues on who to hire as their florist. Those cues include demonstrating to the client that you are confident in and stand by your work.

Secondly, if you don’t feel confident you may think you are hiding it well, but you’re probably not. A lack of confidence can show through both verbally and physically during interactions with potential customers. Your potential customers will sense your insecurity, and they won’t even register why, but they will hire someone else with more confidence. You cannot afford to lose customers because of a lack of confidence.

My floral company was hired for this wedding specifically because we had the confidence to install this ceremony piece. It may not look elaborate, but the client said others she met with just didn't seem confident about making it happen. We said we'd handle it with no nails and won the job!

So, let me give you some confidence tips I learned along the way.

There are a few easy ways to make sure you come across as confident to your customers. The first one is using confident positive language. It’s important to convey your confidence in all your client facing communication. That includes your employees too since they are doing most of the client-facing work. So, get them involved and you can all practice using positive language. This article from LinkedIn is a great start!

Here are two actual examples to clarify this floral designer trait for you. Let me set the scene. A customer walks into a flower shop to pick up their order:

The unsure owner says…

Hi (insert customer name here), I hope you like it. I think it turned out how we discussed. If you don’t like it, I’d be happy to change it.

I’m cringing because I seriously heard a florist say this to a customer while I was exploring her shop on vacation a few years back.

(Side note: Yes, I enter every flower shop I can find when I’m on vacation, don’t you?)

This type of communication lacks confidence and opens too many opportunities for criticism.

It was painful for me to hear because not only is this type of communication vague, it’s ripe for complaint. It doesn’t build her anticipation in the floral arrangement. In fact, it did the exact opposite. If you say you are willing to change it before they even see it… they will ask you to change it. No doubt in my mind. And that’s exactly what happened. The customer saw the flowers and said “I want you to change out these roses, they just don’t look like they are going to last very long.”

Do you see the problem here? There was nothing wrong with the design. However, because the owner asked the customer to find a problem she found one.

If you struggle with using positive language, you can easily change your tone to one of confidence with this next example.

A confident owner says…

Hi (insert customer name here) you are going to love this arrangement! Jennifer made it for you and she did a great job executing the design you requested. It turned out beautifully.

Ok. Full disclosure. This example is a direct quote from yours truly. I used this type of communication with my clients all the time. I want you to steal it! Please do! It demonstrates confidence in your leadership, your employee who created the arrangement and your business’s ability to listen to, and execute the client’s wishes.

I tried a few different tactics with customers who walked into my old shop to pick up flowers and this was by far the best.

Welcoming them into the shop and priming them with positive language about their floral arrangement made them feel special (which by the way is another trait customers look for we will discuss below). It also exudes confidence. It’s a lot harder for someone not to like something when you tell them how amazing it is before they even see it.

Begin to use or step up your game with confident positive language for a week or two and see how your customers react. This is a great tactic to use while writing emails as well. I think you’ll find it empowering!

When it comes to selling, and pricing your products

Confidence in your products and services is a critical step towards running a profitable business. If you are unsure about where you stand on pricing, it will show. As a result, the customer will not feel comfortable buying from you. The first step is to make certain you are rock solid on your flower math. If you need a review or introduction to flower pricing check out my previous post here.

Also, if you are struggling with the amount of time you spend and disorganziation of pricing your flowers by hand, please check out EveryStem florist software. This program is built for pricing with confidence, allows you to save hours of time over using pencil and paper or an old spreadsheet, and is very affordable. We’re talking less than the cost of a pack of Quicksand roses people! It works the way florists think because I designed it with you in mind.

The other tactic for confidence with pricing and sales is…

Practice confident pricing! Start today.

Yes, that’s right. You can practice pricing and selling your products the same way you practice your hand-tied bouquets and compote arrangements.

It’s the only way to sharpen those math and communication skills. Dedicate time to practice each day and you’ll build confidence along the way.

Pricing out daily floral arrangements should be second nature to you. If it’s not, start working on it today. Challenge yourself and your employees to get better at crunching those numbers! It’s just that simple. I’m not saying all the math must be done in your head, but know the formulas. Then challenge yourself to price arrangements both from the bottom-up and the top-down. You can do it. The more frequently you practice the more confident you’ll become with it.

EveryStem florist software makes this process so simple! You enter your flowers and their wholsale prices. Then it calcluates all the Flower Math for you based on your markup and labor fee. It is the most affordable florist software available!

Side note:

Bottom-up pricing: you take the wholesale cost of flowers, supplies, hard-goods, and multiply by your margin to get a retail price.

Top-down pricing: you take the retail price, for example, your customer wants to spend $150, and divide by the margin to get the amount you can spend on your wholesale flowers and supplies.

3. Transparency

A transparent business model hosts a myriad of benefits not only for your employees but also for your customers. It’s a trait every floral designer must have in their tool-kit.

For your employees, it’s about trust.

Team members need to feel comfortable enough to offer productive suggestions and communicate openly about issues before they explode.  Your people will be equipped to do their best work in a transparent environment. Employees are hands down your most important investment. So, give them all the information you have and do it frequently. Use the trait of transparency to drive optimal performance in your team.  

Guess what? For customers, it’s also about trust!

73% are willing to spend more and 94% are more likely to be loyal to your business because of transparency per a recent study by Label Insight, Inc.

Bridal Bouquet - Image credit Tony and Elena Wedding Photography

My business had the pleasure of working with many families on multiple weddings. The bouquet above was for one such affair. This was because we built trust through confidence, transparency and expectation management. Our level of personal attention and unique design style were important factors as well. These traits are must haves for floral designers.

If you’d like a little more background on why running your business this way is critical, check out this article in Entrepreneur. It covers the origins of transparency in business and where the author thinks it’s headed in the future.

Finally, here are a few aspects of your business that may need a transparency audit. Do you have these characteristics?

A work in public mentality.

Show your work, your process is fascinating to people outside the flower business. This type of transparency invites a deeper level of trust. As I mentioned above, people will spend more which in turn will increase profits.

A way to express your experience transparently.

Sharing stories that include tidbits of your learning process is a great way to show your knowledge. This is a perfect prompt for a weekly post on social media. Drive profits through social endeavors with an emphasis on transparency.

A plan to show customers you are the solution to their problem.

Let customers know that you are one step ahead of them when finding problems that may pop up along their journey. Then, show them your team has a solution for all their potential problems. Your customers will be willing to spend more because you offer guidance and reassurance, not just pretty flowers.

A sourcing strategy for your hard-goods and flowers.

Ethically sourced products make for happy customers. Know where your products and flowers come from and share that with your customers. Overall, it will lead to higher profits. If you need an affordable florist software to help you price your flowers with confidence, check out EveryStem florist software. I created it to help designers like myself make more money and support local farmers at the same time! The program allows you to decide which farms and wholsalers you’d like to buy from rather than importing pricing from only large-scale wholsalers like other softwares.

Review these points with your team and determine which ones you can improve upon. Then, start working on how to step up your transparency game!

3. Expectation management

Trust is the basis for reasonable expectations. If your company is operating with transparency, then you can easily build trust with your customers. Now that you have their trust you must keep it throughout the relationship. The next step to keeping the customer relationship healthy is expectation management. This trait will not only help you improve your relationship skills as a floral designer but also as a human being.

Take a walk with your customer through the steps of their experience with you. Then, answer their questions for them before they ask. Managing expectations is fundamentally staying one step ahead of your customer and delivering above what you promise.

Expectation management was key to keeping this demanding wedding client happy throughout the planning process. In the end, they loved not only the flowers, but the process and service too!

Here are a few key tactics for handling this process.

Start with zero assumptions and clear communication.

The initial client process is often emotionally draining. You meet with a client and discuss all their floral needs for a wedding or event and by the end of the conversation, you skip over the communication about how they book your services for their event. You think to yourself “It’s in the paperwork and they can read it on their own time.” That’s assuming they will read it and we all know that’s probably not going to happen.

Expectation management is key to booking wedding and event clients.

You need to communicate to your client the entire process of booking your services and working with you in your initial conversation. It’s the first key to managing their expectations. Always take the time to explain the next steps and create a template email that re-states those steps to send along with the proposal or invoice you create for them.

Similarly, with daily orders, these tactics still apply.

The process of ordering and receiving a delivery must be clearly relayed (or displayed on your website) for your clients. A clear process helps your employee explain to a client who calls at 4 pm the reason why you can’t deliver an arrangement to downtown before 5 pm on the same day. She can confidently let the customer know that orders placed after 2:00 pm will be delivered the next business day.

This type of open communication leaves little wiggle room for the client to make assumptions on their end. If you lead with clarity the customer will typically follow suit.

The transparent company policy is in place to manage the client’s expectations and lends support to the employee’s confidence relaying the policy to the customer.

As you can see from my example above these traits are valuable building blocks. Let’s keep building!

Keep your customer informed.

The next tactic in customer expectation management is communicating frequently and keeping your customer informed.

If I met with 3 wedding clients in a day I would give them a longer lead time on their proposals than if I met with only 1 client that day. That’s because I can’t create 3 wedding proposals at the same time. I would tell the first client that I’d have it to them within 3 days. Then, I’d tell the second client I’d have it to them within 5 days and the third client I’d tell them to expect their proposal within a week. Then I’d do my absolute best to have it there the day before I promised.

I always aimed to send my clients a proposal earlier than expected. It often resulted in them booking my services for the event. It’s important to be transparent in the timeline you give your clients and then to keep them informed if the timeline needs to change for any reason.

Do you see where I’m headed with these tactics?

Great, let’s dig a bit deeper! Whenever a customer of mine had a favorite flower there was always a chance it would not arrive or that it would arrive in unusable condition. Those situations would make my stomach do flips early on in my career. Until I learned about expectation management.

After I learned about building up my customer’s trust and positive open communication it became so much easier for my team to manage our clients’ expectations.

I’ve called many clients over the years with the news that a certain flower variety wasn’t available for their wedding or that we had to make a change to the plans due to weather. Do you know what happened next?

They’d say, “LuAnn, I trust you. I know it will be beautiful. I’ll leave it up to you to decide for me.”

My first-hand experiences have shown me that expectation management tactics work! Without handling the relationship up-front situations like these could easily get out of control with demanding clients. There is, however, one more step to making sure this strategy doesn’t back-fire.

Deliver on your promise

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? The final step to managing client expectations is knocking their socks off with your delivery. Whether it’s a contact-less delivery of flowers, getting their proposal over to them before your deadline as I mentioned above, or a wedding with multiple installations, you’ve got to deliver your end of the deal. That is how this all ties together.

Customers want to be listened to, communicated with, and impressed by the value and impact of the final product. If you can successfully drive that process an increase in profits will be the result.

So, don’t hold back. Give 100% to each client because part of managing their expectations is exceeding them… by just the right amount!

4. Personal attention

 Your customers want to feel those warm fuzzy feelings before they hire you. They need a strong sense that you’ll take good care of them. They want to feel listened to and frankly, they want to be the center of attention. As a floral designer, you can use this trait to lock in your customer. The emotionally-driven occasions that fuel our industry also heighten the customers’ longing for personal attention. You can use that knowledge to book more clients.

Simple sprigs of coordinating greenery set on each of the head table place settings was the final touch of personal attention this couple needed on their wedding day!

Your employees should be handling most of the initial interactions with your clients.  They are the experience makers who impact the customer and solve their problems. So, train your employees to put customers first no matter what. You can teach them to use transparency, expectation management, and confidence to show your customers a superior level of personal attention.

A few tips for personalizing customer interactions

• Learn customers’ names and preferences then store that information in your POS system. Ask questions!

• Find out more about them so you can serve them better.

• Offer personalized product recommendations, this can be done both online and in the store.

• Send out a personalized newsletter. Remember, that’s why you are building an email list!

• Follow up when they least expect it!  

44% of customers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized interaction with a small business. [segment.com]

So, use the tips above and make personal attention one of the traits your floral design team focuses on regularly. Your efforts will undoubtedly increase profits and repeat sales.

5. UniqueDesign

A unique take on design is the final trait customers want in their florist.

In a study by Botanical Brouhaha, over 70% of couples surveyed chose design style as one of the top reasons for choosing their florist.

What led you to hire the florist you chose for your wedding? (choose all that apply)

In fact, it was the number 1 reason ranking above both budget and personality.

Customers often ask for a replica bouquet, also known as an exact copy of their inspiration photo. You can provide them exactly that and it’s just fine. Or you can take it up a notch by using your unique style to design a bouquet that’s even better than the photo. Now, that’s always been my goal! And it should be yours too.

Challenging yourself and your team to create unique designs is a driving force towards increasing profits.

You can up the ante by expressing to your client the importance of personalizing her flowers.

The ability to impart your unique design style into a client’s general aesthetic for a wedding or event is no easy task. This trait requires practice as a floral designer. It takes a combination of confidence, transparency, expectation management, and personal attention to do so. Interestingly those are the 4 traits I’ve already mentioned above. It’s no coincidence because I know first-hand that working on these specific traits will improve your ability to listen to your customer and create unique concepts to serve their floral design needs.

Consistent improvement in these 5 traits will strengthen your floral design team!

In summary, you need the confidence to handle difficult client interactions. It’s transparency that will drive you to share your processes and build trust with customers. Expectation management will be indispensable as you move through the current pandemic and economic climate. Ultimately, it’s a unique design style combined with epic customer service that keeps them coming back for more. So, take a step back to look at how you can use these traits to tailor the customer service side of your floral design business. There’s always room for improvement!

Tell me your thoughts on these floral design traits and how you use them in your business model. Send me a message here or share a comment below.

Until next time,

LuAnn