Senior Living Sales Tips: 3 Faulty Mindsets to Avoid
Since our founding, we’ve partnered with senior living operators all over the U.S., from start-ups to Top 30 providers. Our most successful clients have scaled from two to thirty-plus locations, while others have doubled in size in just a few years.
One of the biggest takeaways from these client engagements is that successfully growing occupancy often involves dismantling faulty mindsets, especially around senior living sales and marketing and how (and if) they align.
Below, we outline those faulty mindsets and how to reset them for good.
Faulty mindset #1: Thinking that marketing serves sales.
A better way to think about it: Marketing and sales teams serve the prospect.
How the marketing team serves the prospect
In the awareness and early consideration stages, marketing guides prospects until they raise their hand and indicate they want to engage with sales. Marketing also creates effective personas based on leads (and their corresponding demographics) who have already advanced to tours, deposits, and move-ins. The marketing team can use these personas to attract prospects with similar wants, needs, and motivations.
By providing a blend of educational and emotional content, marketing positions the brand as a trusted resource. It also empowers prospects to self-qualify through transparent information like pricing and reviews.
Ultimately, marketing attracts the right prospect, meets them where they are in their decision journey, and segments marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from sales-qualified leads (SQLs). The sales team will pursue the high-intent, ready-to-advance SQLs, while the marketing team will continue to nurture the not-ready-yet MQLs.
How the sales team serves the prospect
First, let’s back up for a moment. What exactly is a “sales-qualified lead” anyway?
It’s when a prospect takes an action that indicates they want to interact with sales, typically by booking a tour or calling the community directly to speak with sales. This can be a first action or a transition from MQL to SQL, where the prospect advances through lead nurturing via marketing automation emails and text message campaigns.
Once the prospect becomes an SQL, the sales team serves the prospect by building rapport, showing empathy, answering questions, and providing personalized guidance.
Sales will also spend time building a relationship, nurturing and advancing the prospect with creative follow-ups, and overcoming objections.
How the prospect fits in
Prospects determine their status, not marketing or sales. The prospect’s intent (evidenced by their actions) drives their designation (MQL vs. SQL).
Keep in mind that being sales-qualified has nothing to do with being financially qualified, health-qualified, or the right fit. The sales team is responsible for performing the final level of qualification during the discovery process.
The best way for marketing and sales teams to ensure that the marketing budget generates the most qualified leads is to use accurate dispositions in closing leads so the team can quickly identify which channels produce the best leads.
Faulty mindset #2: Thinking quick move-ins are the only answer.
Stop the madness! Quick move-ins are often your most urgent cases. And spoiler: They don’t stay as long as prospects who make decisions based on choice rather than crisis.
Don’t believe me? Consider this.
The 2023 Aline Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report for Senior Housing revealed a strong link between sales cycle length and duration of stay in the community. Short sales cycles (under 30 days) led to significantly shorter stays, often due to high-acuity, urgent cases.
Conversely, prospects nurtured over longer sales cycles, especially those lasting a year or more, resulted in much longer stays, nearly doubling from 18 months to 39 months.
This extended stay translates to more revenue per resident, highlighting the financial benefits of nurturing prospects over a longer sales cycle.
This is precisely why the sales team shouldn’t nag the marketing team about generating only urgent, crisis-driven leads. Doing so is expensive, self-defeating, and unsustainable.
Can you imagine being an airline that only advertises to people wanting to fly a few weeks out? Or a hotel chain that only advertises rooms for same-day booking? Of course not. And yet we still hear from sales teams all the time, “Just get us sales-qualified leads. We only want tours and phone calls.”
Shift your mindset! Building a robust pipeline of prospects in every decision-making stage is much more cost-effective overall and will deliver better ROI.
Faulty mindset #3: Thinking more leads automatically equates to more tours and move-ins.
If you’re bringing in more leads, but they’re not sales-qualified or even marketing-qualified, what’s the point? You’ve wasted money attracting people with little to no chance of converting or advancing to a tour, deposit, or move-in.
When you have an effective digital marketing strategy in place, lead volume often goes down, but lead quality and conversions go up. Conversions are what matter most.
Senior living sales tips: How to reset your mindset by focusing on the following
Quality over quantity. Spend time evaluating uncontacted and lost leads to identify the lead sources that are generating quantity but not quality. Most CRMs offer a report that rolls up leads, tours, deposits, and move-ins by lead source. Focus your marketing investment on the sources generating the highest conversions to tours and move-ins.
Conversion KPIs. Look at the gaps between the marketing and sales handoff since this is where many opportunities are lost. Some of the KPIs to dig into include the following:
⮚ Speed to the lead. It’s critical to understand how much time elapses between when the lead hits the CRM and when the salesperson makes the first outreach attempt. Our data shows that 70% of all scheduled tours are booked within the first hour a lead is generated.
⮚ Persistence and cadence. Look at how many attempts are made to contact the new lead. (For context, it typically takes five to eight attempts to make contact.) You should also consider the types of attempts. Aim for a good mix of calls, texts, and emails. We’ve found that making four attempts on day one achieves the highest conversion of lead to tour. Additional attempts should be made on days two through four.
⮚ Dwell time. You should also understand how long a lead lingers in a stage so you can identify when prospects stall in their journey. Have a strategy to re-engage them before they sit too long. This is especially important for post-tour leads that require quick follow-ups to advance prospects to deposits and move-ins. Remember, each stage—pre-tour, post-tour, and waitlist—requires a strategy.
⮚ Call tracking. Without a doubt, the biggest missed opportunities are unanswered and mismanaged calls. Prospects who call the community have the highest intent and best opportunity to convert to a tour. And yet according to WelcomeHome’s Q2 2024 Sales Benchmark Report, less than 30% of prospects’ calls are answered. Ouch! One of the best things you can do is develop a centralized lead management center—either in-house or outsourced (LeadGenie is a great option).
⮚ Lead segmentation. Use marketing automation, such as HubSpot, to triage leads, send SQLs to the sales team, and move MQLs into lead nurturing and advancing campaigns until they are ready to connect with sales. Lead scoring is an additional strategy to identify lead engagement (how often a prospect visits the website, opens an email/ text, downloads content, etc.).
Spend more time developing relationships within the local community. The highest-converting leads are from “word of mouth” sources, such as friend and family referrals, professional referrals, and community sources. Outreach and relationship building should be a top priority.
Don’t forget to work your “bought and paid for” leads. Most communities have hundreds of prospects labeled “cold” or “lost, but not disqualified.” (The reasons can run the gamut for the latter: stayed home, unable to reach, moved in with family.) Yes, new leads always are more exciting. But all of these “cold” or “lost, but not disqualified” prospects were once your coveted new leads. Re-engage them!
Remember, senior living has an exceptionally long sales cycle. Prospects who weren’t ready months ago may be closer to a decision today. Our “Still Thinking?” campaign moved 20% of “stuck” MQLs to SQLs for one client, while our “Stay in Touch” re-engagement campaign delivered 21 move-ins representing $3.7 million in revenue for another client. There is gold in those cold leads.
Shift your mindset and experience the benefits
Operators who put prospects at the center of their marketing strategy, build a system to nurture them through their journey, balance quick move-ins with longer sales cycles, and focus on lead quality instead of quantity will come out winners with consistent and sustainable occupancy growth.
Need a partner who will help get you there? Book a call with us today.
