Strategies for Generating New Sales Leads for Senior Living Communities 

Generating new sales leads for senior living communities is an ongoing challenge that requires a blend of traditional and innovative sales and marketing strategies. Waiting in your sales office for the phone to ring, or for an older adult and their family to walk in off the street to tour your community are unlikely to drive occupancy growth. The same goes for spending time on non-sales activities like visiting with the residents, attending social networking events, being expected to join in on multiple weekly staff meetings, and manually writing long emails to your prospects.  

Strategies for generating new sales leads for senior living communities 

Here are some of our top lead generation tips for senior living sales and marketing teams: 

Optimize your digital presence  

Establish a strong online presence through a website that is user-friendly, has strong SEO, and incorporates content marketing like keyword-rich blogs, pillar pages, and gated downloadable content. Establish and maintain a strong paid SEM campaign, have lead conversion points on your site such as a chat, downloadable informational pieces, and a tour scheduler.  Each time a click and action is required there is a 30% drop off in visitors.  Be cognizant of this and make your digital customer journey as easy as possible.  

Utilize online marketing 

Targeted digital advertising will help you reach your potential residents and their families. There are paid ad options in a range of price points, from short-term Facebook post boosting for under $100 to the sky’s-the-limit ongoing Google Ads campaigns. 

Engage with the local community 

Connect your senior living community with your local area on a regular basis. Participate in local events relevant to seniors, host educational seminars at your community, and collaborate with healthcare providers on events like health and wellness fairs to increase visibility and generate referrals. 

Implement a referral program 

Your current residents, their families, and your staff can be some of your biggest cheerleaders. Develop a referral program that incentivizes them when a lead they referred moves into your community. 

Personalize your follow-up 

Use the notes you’ve added in your senior living CRM to personalize your follow-up with leads. Understanding their specific needs and concerns and connecting with them on those points can help to build a strong relationship that converts leads into residents. 

Offer virtual tours and events 

Virtually unheard of before the pandemic, virtual tours are here to stay because they’re an effective way to show off your community to a lead who may not be able to tour in person. Examples are seniors out of the area who may be relocating due to a family move, or perhaps a senior in rehab considering a move to senior living post-discharge. 

Promote your community on social media 

Utilize the broad array of social media platforms to showcase your community’s lifestyle, events, and success stories. Engaging content can attract new leads and enhance your community’s reputation. While Facebook is considered to be the top platform for engaging with seniors, AARP research shows that other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are growing in popularity with older adults. 

Offer valuable educational content 

Elevate yourself from a salesperson to a trusted advisor by providing your leads with valuable information about senior living options, financial planning, and wellness tips through blogs, eBooks, and webinars. 

Leverage technology 

Implement marketing automation and analytics to understand lead behavior better and tailor your marketing efforts more effectively. Go beyond the basics of only sending automated emails by supplementing your strategy with SMS text messaging and use a lead engagement tool on your website such as Occupancy Funnel. 

Network with professional referral sources 

Build relationships with local professionals like healthcare providers, elder law attorneys, financial advisors, and others who are in a position to advise older adults and refer them to your senior living community. 

Seek feedback for continuous improvement 

Regularly collect feedback from prospects about tours, events, and inquiries to improve your marketing strategies and address potential residents’ needs more effectively. 

Conclusion 

By implementing these lead generation strategies, senior living communities can set themselves apart in a competitive market, ultimately increasing occupancy rates and building a thriving community. 

Learn more   

Looking for more ways to generate new leads and drive strong occupancy growth? Grow Your Occupancy is here to help with sales coaching and training for your team, hiring and onboarding support, optimizing your sales funnel (Occupancy Funnel,) and more. Reach out to us today at [email protected] and let’s take your senior living sales to the next level.  

 

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!