Senior Living Sales: Cold Leads Success Story

When it comes to senior living sales, we often discuss best practices, like finding gold in lost or cold leads. But stories are much more compelling, right?

Below, we share results we achieved for a client and the takeaways you can learn and apply to your own community.

Many lost leads aren’t actually lost—they’re simply deferred.

Remember, lost leads were once qualified leads.

Unfortunately, something happened along the way that forced these leads into the dark abyss known as the “lost lead” category in your senior living CRM. Leads in this bucket might also have labels like cold, unable to reach, decided to stay home, chose home care, or moved in with family.

But here’s the secret about these leads. Don’t think of them as lost forever. Think of them as deferred.

• That person the sales team reached out to only once or twice might not have been ready for the sales call then, but they could very well be months later.
• Those who decided to stay home might think about things differently after a snowy winter.
• That person who chose home care might have more needs than the aides can handle—or that the person’s home can accommodate.

Our point: Revisiting lost leads is a smart strategy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And thanks to marketing automation, you don’t need to put the onus on your senior living sales team to call or manually email hundreds or thousands of lost leads. A turnkey email campaign (we call ours “Stay in Touch“) can do the heavy lifting. If someone bites (i.e., engages), then the sales reps can get involved at that point.

Here’s a recent success story using this approach.

We went through this process with one of our clients, Sinceri Senior Living. They had around 4,300 cold leads that they wanted to re-engage. Our automated “Stay in Touch” email marketing campaign resulted in 20 move-ins, equating to three million dollars in revenue. Not too shabby, right?

Even better: An additional 350 (or so) leads re-engaged (whether it was moving to marketing-qualified or sales-qualified status), so the sales reps then had another 350 engaged leads to work with.

⮚      TAKEAWAY: Don’t ignore lost or cold leads. View them as opportunities. Create a plan for entering them into an automated email campaign that will re-engage and convert at least some of them to tours, deposits, and move-ins.

Most stalled leads won’t stay stalled forever.

Your community likely has a bucket of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) that have gone through your nurturing workflows, yet they still haven’t advanced to sales-qualified lead (SQL) status.

Stuck MQLs also offer great opportunities. Sure, after they’ve gone through your nurturing workflows, you could simply enroll them in your email newsletter and call it a day. But that likely won’t be enough to nudge them.

That’s why we recommend creating a slow-burn, long-term drip campaign. We call ours “Still thinking?” In it, we offer ways for the person to self-identify where they’re at in the process, if things have changed for them, and so forth.

Again, this is an automated email campaign—no heavy lifting for sales or marketing (once you set it up). The goal is to re-energize some of the stuck leads. It won’t work on all of them, but even if you can get a small portion to move forward, it’s all good.

And for the rest of the leads that truly cool down to the point they enter the “lost” bucket? You can give them a break from emails for a while before entering them into the “Stay in Touch” campaign. And don’t worry: Good marketing automation, like HubSpot, has settings you can enable to ensure people don’t go through the same workflows repeatedly.

Here’s a recent success story using this approach.

We used the “Still thinking?” campaign with Sinceri. The result? Twenty percent of the stalled MQLs advanced to SQL status.

⮚      TAKEAWAY: You have to nudge MQLs along. Yes, even after they’ve been through the initial nurturing workflow. The sales cycle for senior living can be long (especially for independent living).

Would you like to experience similar conversions with your cold or stuck leads?

The results we achieved for Sinceri Senior Living weren’t an isolated experience. We strive to get these results for all of our clients. Get in touch and let’s talk about how to convert cold and stuck leads into move-ins.