Wouldn’t it be great if your senior living company had a reference source for all things sales and marketing? A single point of truth that everyone in your organization can refer to for guidance on sales and marketing processes, procedures, best practices, expectations, and benchmarks? Do your company – and yourself – the biggest favor by establishing a sales playbook, an indispensable tool every senior living operator should have.
A sales playbook is an invaluable go-to reference guide that provides clear, concise, and definitive guidance and answers for your team. It has the added benefit of saving time because your sales directors can consult the sales playbook when a question arises instead of inquiring with your senior living sales leadership team. Here are just a few of the sections every senior living sales playbook should include:
Sales Director New Hire Procedures and Checklist
This section covers every onboarding activity that needs to take place in the first few weeks after a new sales professional is hired into your senior living company. This includes meeting the team; setting up logins for all the systems they’ll use; reviewing materials, sales tools, and marketing plans; training on your company’s sales systems and CRM; sales skills practice sessions; and more.
Benchmarks & Expectations
This section covers in detail the senior living sales activity benchmarks like numbers of call attempts, tours, deposits, and move-ins, and target conversion ratios. It also covers expectations over the first 30-60-90 day periods and beyond, starting with all the new hire onboarding activities and going all the way through achieving all benchmarks and goals.
The Details of Your Sales System
Whether it’s your own homebrewed sales system or one you’ve adopted from a sales consultant or other source, here’s the place to outline and explain the specifics of the system, from the basics to the finer details. You’ll want to include all your sales tools and processes, from the initial inquiry through conducting tours and closing. Note that this section will comprise the majority of your sales playbook.
Marketing Plans
A marketing plan is a high-level tool for managing prospect and referral source events, outreach, advertising, and promotion. The marketing plan pulls together the budget, schedule, focus, details, and the expected impact on leads and occupancy into a month-by-month summary that’s easy for all parties involved to refer to.
Referral Sources Outreach & External Business Development
Referrals of prospective residents can come from a variety of sources including friends, employees, current residents, paid agencies, and professionals. Developing relationships with professionals who can, should, and will refer to your community is critical to growing occupancy. In this section of your sales playbook, you’ll want to outline your processes, tools, and resources needed to maintain a strong referral source outreach program.
Networking
Networking and outreach are two different activities, even though they both involve your sales directors getting out into the community to build relationships. Outreach – as mentioned above – is developing relationships with the professionals who can reasonably be expected to refer to your community. Networking on the other hand is casting a large net to get to know as many people as you can for the purposes of building awareness of your community and finding new referral sources. This section outlines your networking program’s processes, tools, and resources.
Events
Events are in-person or virtual gatherings sponsored and run by your community for the purpose of attracting qualified leads, referral sources, and influencers to your community. Your sales playbook presents the details, tools, and resources necessary for holding a successful event of any size.
Glossary of Terms
There isn’t a sales organization today that doesn’t rely on a large vocabulary of terms, phrases, and acronyms. You’ll want to list and define all your terms in your sales playbook’s glossary so everyone in your organization is “on the same page” with the lingo.
Your sales playbook needs some extra attention to keep it a useful and valuable resource for your organization, so you’ll need to:
- Work out where it will be kept to make it easily accessible to your team. A permanent location in your company’s online file sharing system is a great solution.
- Keep it current by setting a timeline for review and revision cycles. At least once a year the guide should be reviewed by the corporate sales leadership. Be sure to note the current version on the cover, such as naming it “(your company’s) 2022 Sales Playbook”.
Need a best-in-class sales playbook for your senior living company’s sales department? Grow Your Occupancy is here to help! Book your free 30-minute consultation to find out how!