Category: blog

You’ve Got the Leads, Now What?

“We need more leads!”

How often have we heard this from our senior living sales directors? How often have we said this ourselves? Saying it is almost a reflex when the question of “why is occupancy down?” comes up. After all, new leads are the top of the sales pipeline for all sales, so more leads in = more move-ins, right?

So we crank up our lead generation machine. We optimize our website and refine our marketing automation and implement our paid social ads strategy. We get lots of potential residents finding us in Google searches, and filling out forms on our websites, and clicking our ads – and as a result, we get more leads into the top of the pipeline. But what happens in many cases? The occupancy needle doesn’t move.

Why?

Keeping the funnel topped off with new leads is important, but a lack of leads is not necessarily the problem in most occupancy bottleneck situations. The problem is a lack of selling.

Most of us who work in sales have heard the rule of 7 of sales and marketing a million times. It’s the average number of times we need to interact with a customer before they decide to buy, or in the case of senior living sales, decide to move in. But if we’re not following our systems and actually interacting with our potential residents (i.e. responding to their initial inquiry, following up, inviting them for a tour, following up, asking for the deposit, following up – you get the idea), we’re not keeping them interested and engaged, and not moving them forward in the pipeline toward moving in.

What do you have to gain by using our sales systems?

I’ve heard it said anecdotally in recent years that the sales pipeline in our industry converts leads to move-ins at a rate of approximately 10-12% across all senior living categories. I estimate that just 1 in 5 sales directors working at a senior living community where a sales process and a sales culture are in place are actually adhering to their process. So just imagine the results if it was more like 2 in 5 (or 3 in 5, or 4 in 5) who are diligently selling. Hypothetically, if we converted at 20% – just 8-10 basis points more than where we are now – the industry would quite literally run out of beds!

4 keys to increasing occupancy

The secret to growing occupancy in senior living communities comes down to doing 4 things:

Hire great sales directors. Hire for attributes like coachability, positive attitude, and a willingness to adhere to a tried-and-true sales system.

Foster a great sales culture. The best sales director, if forced to work in a vacuum or an unsupportive environment, will not be nearly as successful as one who works in an environment where sales is appreciated and supported at all levels.

Focus on selling. It wasn’t all that long ago when sales directors in senior living communities needed to wear a lot of different hats including generating leads and marketing their community. Today, thanks to strong SEO, marketing automation, and social media advertising, leads come to your community, and your online presence does most of the marketing for you. That leaves the sales directors to focus on what they do best – and what is most productive – selling.

Use the sales system. It really doesn’t matter which system is you’re using, as long as you’re using it consistently. Sure, some are better than others, but none will produce results if they’re not used by the sales directors.

Converting senior living leads to move-ins isn’t an unsolvable puzzle as long as the pieces are there. Take a close look at your communities and see if the keys to occupancy growth are there – great sales directors, in a great sales culture, focused on selling, using a sales system. If a piece is missing, give us a call, we’re experts at solving the occupancy puzzle, and we’ll help you grow your occupancy.

Ready to find out how Grow Your Occupancy can help you? Book your complimentary 30-minute strategy session here.

sales management senior living

The Sales and Marketing Tool Every Senior Living Operator Must Have

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!

sales tools senior living

The 5½ Senior Living Sales Metrics to Master

Sales people are like Olympic athletes – they train, practice, and are coached to perform at high levels. And like athletes, their performance is measured. Just think about a sprinter that trains to run the 100-meter dash, only they never paid any attention to their time. They have no way of knowing if they are improving, or if they are in the running to compete against other sprinters. That would be silly, wouldn’t it? The same is true for sales professionals – it would be silly to not measure sales performance. We call measuring performance metrics.

In senior living sales, there are 5 metrics every sales professional needs to know and measure regularly. We’ve also thrown in an extra half metric for good measure!

Metric #1: Overall Lead-to-Connect Ratio

Of all your new leads, how many have you contacted?

A connection happens when a) you pick up the phone, b) the prospect answers, and c) you have an initial conversation – a connection. Keeping track of call outs and connections is easy. If your CRM doesn’t track this for you, a low-tech way of tracking it is keeping a sticky note by the phone. Make a checkmark every time the phone is picked up. If the call is answered, circle the checkmark.

Metric #2: Prospect-to-Tour Ratio

Of all your new prospects – meaning new leads you’ve spoken with – what percentage of those come in for a tour?

Since 70%+ of senior living leads are coming from the Internet, the challenge of first connecting with a new lead is greater than ever before. We need to connect with a lead first, do discovery and then schedule a tour or home visit. Strong discovery and emotional connection at this stage will increase the conversion to tour ratio.

Metric #3: Tour-to-Sale Ratio

A.K.A. Tour-to-Deposit. Of tours held, in any given time, what percentage close to the sale?

A sale is simply collecting the check, taking a deposit. If your Tour-to-Sale ratio is 10%, the question to ask is, what decision did the other 90% make? Did they choose another community? Did they choose to stay in their home? How can you build more value with your prospects to increase this ratio? Knowing this conversion helps determine how many tours are needed to get to the number of sales needed.

Metric #4: Deposit-to-Move-In Ratio

Of all your deposits, what percentage move in?

Why is this metric important? There are reasons within our control and beyond our control why a prospect who made a deposit doesn’t move in. The reasons beyond our control are death and acuity higher than your community can provide care for. The reasons over and above that – the ones within our control – are the ones that may be an issue that warrants a closer look by sales management.

Metric #5: Outreach Appointment-to-Professional Referral Received Ratio

Of all your professional outreach appointments held, what percentage resulted in a referral received?

Simply put, it’s the number of referrals received from a professional in a given time period compared to the number of outreach appointments completed. For example, a Sales Director completes 20 face-to-face outreach appointments this month, and during this same month the community received 4 professional referrals. The appointment-to-referral ratio is 20%. For every 5 appointments completed, a referral was received. A second example: 10 appointments, 1 referral received. 10 to 1, 10% appointment-to-referral ratio.

We place high importance on this metric because referrals from professionals in your community convert to prospects at a significantly higher rate than referrals from paid referral sources – often 5 times more often.

And the ½ Metric: The In-Out Grid

Occupancy growth requires that a community have more move-ins than move-outs over a time frame like a month, quarter, or year. We call it netting up when there are more move-ins than move-outs, and netting down when opposite. There’s an easy way for sales professionals to keep track of their move-ins and move-outs to arrive at their net occupancy change: the In-Out Grid. It looks like this:

Move-Ins	Move-Outs
1/5 Henry	1/1 Johnson
1/10 Smith	1/22 Rivers
1/14 Jones
1/31 James
Total Ins: 4	Total Outs: 2

In this example, in January there were four move-ins and 2 move-outs. The result of the 4 ins and 2 outs is net of +2, or they netted up 2.

Measuring sales performance with metrics and paying close attention to them on a regular basis is vital to knowing where the weaknesses and gaps are in your systems and processes. By keeping on top of a handful of key metrics like the ones above, it makes the task of improving sales skills much easier for the sales professional and managers.

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!

sales senior living

Senior Living Regional Directors – An Underappreciated Resource

The Regional Director of Sales and Marketing is a role that is pivotal to a senior living operator’s success; they can make a tremendous impact on occupancy levels, the health of the community sales teams, and most importantly the revenue of the company. But the challenges senior living Regional Directors of Sales and Marketing face today in leading the sales teams in senior living communities to occupancy growth are many:

Competition among senior living communities is fierce, not only in the choice of physical community, but also in lifestyle, amenities, and monthly rates.
Families are taking longer to make a decision. Greater access to information online is lengthening the decision-making process.
Sales teams require more support, better support, expert guidance, and accountability to achieve the desired results.
Sales team turnover remains high for a variety of reasons both internal and external.
The characteristics of our customers’ personas are ever evolving, requiring constant tweaking of sales and marketing strategies.
The digital marketing landscape seems to change before our eyes. New tools, technologies, ways of communicating, and social media platforms come and go on a regular basis.

Despite these challenges, the fundamentals of relationship-based selling have stayed the same. Fact: sales systems and processes work. Even the most naturally gifted salesperson will produce more when using a system. But success with a sales system requires mastery, and mastery requires practice. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it is required to master senior living selling skills.

The Regional Director of Sales and Marketing supports it all. It is a challenging job; one that often goes undervalued and underappreciated by leadership above and sales teams below. A regional director wears many hats and carries a heavy load. The highest expectations are at the regional level, and the responsibilities are many and the pressure is high. Yet, there is often a lack of specific expectation, training, and guidance. All too often, they lack the structural foundations – such as a playbook, training, expectations, coaching, and ongoing support – necessary for success. This causes stress, which leads to burnout and turnover, which in turn stops the forward momentum of sales success.

The biggest gap in supporting this pivotal position is caused by a lack of tools, training, and guidance. We ask the regional directors to manage multiple communities, hold others accountable, identify problems, and create solutions. We require success yet fail to provide a roadmap to achieving it.

The lack of established regional director fundamental training may be because the job is so multi-faceted. Many corporate sales executives do not know where to start. Many do not have a roadmap. Often, a highly successful community sales director is elevated into a regional manager role, a role in which they lack the needed experience and skills in planning, training, mentoring, and accountability.

Three ways to support and strengthen your regional director sales team:

Provide a playbook. Also known as a sales manual, this is a written guide to your company’s sales policies, procedures, measurables, and exercises.
Set and support expectations. Outline your company’s specific expectations for sales success and provide your regional directors with the tools to support and achieve the expectations.
Provide leadership coaching. Being an effective leader is not an innate talent, it’s a skill that needs to be developed, practiced, and refined. Provide your regional directors with a leadership coach who understands both sales and leading others to success.

Despite the many challenges faced by senior living providers today, sales management is one area where investing in the people can have a measurable impact. Giving your Regional Directors of Sales and Marketing the tools and support they need to be successful pays off in a healthy sales team, occupancy growth, and increased revenue.