How to improve you lead management process in 2023

How to Improve Your Lead Management Process in 2023

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We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing how to get senior living leads. But what happens when all your hard work begins to pay off and you’ve got more leads than your team can handle? Yes, it’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem, right?

Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe you’ve been doing all the work, but you’re not getting the results you were hoping for.

Both situations require a hard look at your overall lead management process. When you do a better job of monitoring lead quality, scoring leads, and choosing the right technology to funnel leads based on their scores, the easier it will be for your teams to manage an influx of leads—or to get your lead gen machine humming in a way that makes everyone happy.

Below, we take a deeper dive into developing this smarter lead management process.

1. Monitor lead quality.

You want to make sure the leads you’re bringing in are the leads you actually want. It sounds so basic, right? And yet many sales and marketing teams too often focus on bringing in more leads rather than the right leads. By “right,” we mean leads that reflect your community’s residents.

  • WHAT TO DO: If your site is bringing in leads, but your overall conversions are low, the problem could be lead quality. If that’s the case, revisit your buyer personas. Note: personas can and will change over time as demographics shift. For example, consider all the younger Boomers entering into senior living territory who weren’t part of the equation five years ago.

2. Audit your lead scoring methodology.

OK, we get it. The concept of “scoring leads” can conjure nightmares from eighth-grade algebra class. But here’s the thing: If you take the time to do this piece right, your lead management process will improve—seemingly overnight.

3. Evaluate your technology.

Your tech stack should be working for you, not against you. From marketing automation to your senior living CRM to your phone system . . . your technology shouldn’t be creating any friction in the sales process.

Believe it or not, the biggest friction point can be the phone. If a lead calls your community, what happens to their call? Is the front desk person equipped to answer sales-related questions? (Short answer: probably not.) Do people’s voicemails get returned in a timely manner?

  • WHAT TO DO: Monitor calls for quality. (Or use senior living mystery shopping for quality control purposes.) Make sure your phone menus are intuitive and fast. (People shouldn’t have to drill down multiple levels to speak to a human.) Consider using a call center with expertise in senior living.

4. Revisit your email nurturing.

Thoughtful email nurturing should empower leads to take appropriate next steps. Here’s where the problem tends to crop up, however: Oftentimes, marketing and sales teams will take a one-size-fits-all approach to their lead-nurturing emails. They’ve done the persona work. They’ve done the lead scoring. But then they create one set of nurturing emails with mostly similar messages. That’s not a very thoughtful approach, is it?

Effective lead nurturing involves understanding each persona’s journey and developing compelling content for each leg of the journey. The content you develop for the adult child who’s reaching out on behalf of her mother who needs assisted living is going to be much different from the content you develop for a Baby Boomer approaching retirement who’s making plans two years out.

  • WHAT TO DO: You must develop multiple content “paths,” depending on who you’re talking to and when. Think about your ideal buyers and their journeys. Now, map out the various points in their journeys. Use your website analytics to guide you. Look at leads who closed successfully and see if you can identify the emails and content that helped them convert. You want to build email nurturing workflows using content paths that inspire leads to take the next step.

5. Audit your content offers.

The senior living sales cycle has grown longer and requires many more touches than it did only five years ago. To stay competitive, your content needs to be just as strong for touch #20 as it is for touch #2.

  • WHAT TO DO: Take a hard look at your content offers—from guides to blog posts to the calls-to-action that drive people to download. Which content converts best? What is it about the content that’s so effective? Can you create more content like it? Do you have any content “gaps”? Are you repurposing your best content across multiple channels? Bottom line: Content creation isn’t a once-and-done thing.

6. Work with a lead gen agency if you need help.

There’s no shame in outsourcing some of this work to a lead gen agency that understands the senior living industry. Hint: That’s precisely what we do at Senior Living SMART. Get in touch and let’s discuss how we can help your team manage leads better.