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How to Shorten the Sales Cycle

How to Shorten the Sales Cycle: Tips for Marketing & Sales Teams

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In a previous blog post, we discussed how senior living leads require many “touches” before buying—and that the sales cycle can be quite lengthy.

In fact, according to a white paper by Enquire Solutions, the sales cycle can range from 107 days (for memory care) to a whopping 400 days (for life plan communities). Assisted living and independent living fall in the middle at 145 days and 203 days, respectively.

Wondering how to shorten the sales cycle—or whether it’s even possible? Here’s our take.

Accept that the sales cycle is long, but don’t use it as an excuse.

Acceptance doesn’t mean giving in. What it does mean is having realistic expectations about your sales forecasts, conversions, and pipeline.

Yes, the sales cycle is long, especially for certain types of senior living, as noted above. But keep in mind that these numbers are averages. Benchmarking is good since it gives everyone a starting point, but that doesn’t mean you and your teams can’t beat the numbers.

✔ Experiment and measure results. Encourage your teams to experiment—with content, with emails, with in-person events, and with different senior living sales strategies. Keep close track of the results. If your team comes up with a marketing program or campaign that shortens the sales cycle, excellent! Do more of that.

✔ Always be ready (and willing) to pivot. Lots of things can influence the sales cycle—many of which are out of your control like inflation, a recession, or a pandemic (or all three at once). Even if you come up with a “winning” program that dramatically shortens the sales cycle, this program might not produce winning results forever (which is precisely why you need to measure and monitor results). Remain nimble.

✔ Remind prospects that “seeing is believing.” We have so many clients who say that the best way to convert people is by having them attend an in-person event that truly demonstrates what it would be like to live in the community. And the most successful in-person events usually involve food, like lunch. Offer those free lunches and see if that helps shorten the sales cycle.

Use lead scoring to segment leads.

Not every lead is ready to buy TODAY. Your job is to differentiate between marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Serve up the SQLs to the sales team since those leads have indicated sales-readiness. MQLs have future sales potential—someday. For now, however, they need nurturing, not pestering.

Segmenting and scoring leads will shorten the sales cycle since the sales team will only be focusing on SQLs rather than every lead that comes across the wire—and they’ll be converting more as a result.

Embrace progressive form fields.

Your website forms can be a treasure trove of information. The more you know about a lead, the better equipped you are to determine where the person is in their buying journey. The challenge, of course, is that no one likes answering a lengthy list of questions on a form.

What’s the solution? Progressive form fields.

As people engage with the content on your site, you can serve up different questions based on the answers they provided on other forms. This will help you better identify true SQLs—and the various subsets in each. For example, an adult child searching on behalf of her mom vs. an older adult searching for herself.

Have a smart strategy for managing third-party leads.

We’ve discussed the problems with third-party leads and lead aggregators. In short, third-party leads are shared among many communities, these leads historically have low conversion rates, and they’re expensive (just to name a few issues).

But we get it: Some sales teams might not be able to let these leads go. If that’s the case, you’re going to need a smart strategy to convert these leads faster using marketing automation technology.

Luckily for you, we’ve created a solution that can help. We call it Speed to the Lead. Thanks to an automated five-step lead nurturing workflow, this solution will help your community respond quickly to third-party leads, deliver brochures immediately, and encourage tour requests.

Always try to connect on a personal level.

People enjoy doing business with people that they like and trust—and that they feel gets them. Yes, it might require a little more effort on the sales rep’s part, but when trying to figure out how to shorten the sales cycle, getting personal could help shave off some days. “Oh, everyone there is so nice and really has gotten to know me . . . maybe this really would be a good move.”

Connecting on a personal level is just that—it’s personal. One-size-fits-all approaches won’t work. Some ways to develop your skills in this area . . .

✔ Get in the habit of offering meaningful tokens/gifts based on what you learned about the prospect during an inquiry. Did you learn they’re religious? Give them a small book of devotionals. Did you discover they’re a Green Bay Packers fan? Give them a pair of Packers socks. Did you discover they love gardening? Gather some clippings from the gardens within your community and deliver the bouquet to their home with a nice note that you’re thinking of them.

✔ Practice active listening. With passive listening, you’re simply going through the motions. Active listening, on the other hand, is just that—it’s active. This essential sales skill shows you’re demonstrating through your own nonverbal gestures and your thoughtful follow-up questions that you’re really paying attention to what the prospect is saying. You take notes—and you revisit those notes. You use those notes to guide and inform the next steps and subsequent interactions. Active listening shows your interest in the prospect as a person first rather than simply a potential sale.

✔ Make sure you connect with all decision-makers—and influencers. This is especially important if adult children are involved. Keep in mind that their worries and concerns will be different from their parents’ concerns.

Need help converting more leads to move-ins?

Get in touch if you’d like fresh eyes on your senior living marketing and sales strategies. We know the industry and what works to attract the right leads, nurture them over time, and convert them to move-ins faster.

Tips-for-Overcoming-SL-Sales-Objections

3 Tips for Overcoming Senior Living Sales Objections

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In a perfect world, all senior living sales interactions would end with prospects saying, “YES! I want in.” But life is far from perfect, right? This is why sales reps must learn how to adeptly handle common sales objections. Here are three strategies to embrace.

1. Shift the conversation from negative to positive.

If a prospect is rattling off all the reasons they’re hesitant, shift the conversation to the things they do like about your community.

The goal is to reduce the anxious feelings that have bubbled up and help the prospect visualize their life in your community. (Remember, this anxiety-inducing stuff exists for most people moving into senior living. As the saying goes, the only way to get over it is by getting through it.)

For example, maybe a prospect has been lamenting about moving away from the only home they’ve known for the last several decades. Here’s how you could help shift the conversation . . .

“I know you love the home you’ve raised your children in. I can’t imagine how hard it will be to leave it. But I’m wondering if you can picture yourself living in our community. What are some of the exciting things that jumped out at you during the tour? Tell me some of the things that you could see yourself really enjoying if you lived here.”

Now, here’s a tip for taking things to the next level. Keep specific notes on what the person says they liked about your community. Is it the gorgeous gardens? The delicious meals they don’t have to cook? All the activities, like the thriving book club?

Use these things to entice people back to the table if they go cold on you. Playing off the above example:

  • If they love the gardens, hand deliver a vase filled with flowers that are currently blooming on the property. Include a note that says, “I thought you’d like to see what’s currently in bloom! You’d have a bird’s eye view of these gorgeous flowers from your apartment home.”
  • If they love the food, drop off a boxed lunch one day as a surprise. Include a note that says, “Here’s what people are enjoying for lunch today at The Elmwood. We had extra, so I thought I’d share. :) We’d love to have you by for lunch in person so that you can check out the dining room firsthand.”
  • If they love book club, drop off a copy of the new book that the club will be discussing . . . and invite them to attend the meeting, no strings attached. “We can’t wait to discuss this month’s book! Care to join us?”

Gestures like these can be extremely effective because of personalization. Everything comes across as thoughtful rather than pushy or salesy.

Yes, doing this requires a little extra work. And no, not every prospect will convert to a move-in. But look at it this way: If you deliver five lunches to various prospects over a two-month period and one of those converts to a move-in . . . well, suddenly that extra effort has a big pay-off, right?

2. Sound sincere in every interaction you have—and even more so with hesitant prospects.

One of the biggest mistakes we hear with senior living salespeople is the lack of sincerity in their voices. Sure, we understand how this happens. You might be encountering lots of sales objections any given day, week, or month, and it’s easy to sound like you’re mailing it in when you say something like “I understand” or “I hear what you’re saying.”

The trick is demonstrating that you truly do understand and that you are hearing what your prospects are saying.

We’re not going to lie: This requires practice and dedication. Yes, you need to learn the substance of various sales scripts inside and out. But then you need to practice various ways to deliver the substance of those scripts. HOW you say something matters just as much (if not more) than what you say.

Let’s pretend one of the objections you’re hearing is that the prospect is resisting moving out of their home. That’s a common objection, right? In the back of their minds, the prospects know they need to move. Or maybe you’re working with a couple, and one person is more hesitant than the other. Or maybe you’re working with an adult child and the adult child’s parents, but it’s clear the parents are NOT on board with the thought of moving . . . even if it’s truly time for them to do so.

Don’t simply say you get it. Demonstrate that you truly get it. Then, follow up with an actionable next step for the prospect to take that will help them overcome the objection organically. Or, at the very least, ask an open-ended follow-up question that creates deeper communication, trust, and empathy between yourself and the prospect.

Let’s see this in action . . .

“I get that you don’t want to move out of your home. You know what? I bet I’ll feel the same way when the time comes for me. But this also reminds me of something. I recently worked with a couple who’d been in the same home for over fifty years. They raised five kids in that house. So many memories. I’m not going to lie . . . they shed some tears the day they moved out and into their home here at The Elmwood. But they’ve transitioned nicely . . . certainly much better than either of them had expected. Hey, would you be interested in chatting with them about their experience?”

Here’s another approach:

“Oh, I hear you. They say moving is one of the most stressful life events—if not THE most stressful. Is it the stress of moving that’s giving you pause? Or is it something else?”

And yet another:

“I hear you. You’ve been so happy in your home . . . I can only imagine how tough that must feel at the thought of walking away after so many years. Let me ask you this: What would help make you feel better about making the move here?”

3. Anticipate common objections and react accordingly (and appropriately).

No doubt, if you’ve worked in senior living sales long enough, you’ll encounter the occasional sales objection you’ve never heard before.

But plenty of common objections exist. And guess what? You can prepare for those!

Some tips in overcoming those common sales objections. . .

Keep in mind that one size doesn’t fit all.

Price is often a big objection, but “price” is also broad. What is it about the price that’s giving them pause?

  • Can they afford to move in, but are they worried about what happens if they outlive their savings?
  • Are they confused about costs involved if they require more care over time (moving from an IL campus to AL, for example)?
  • Are they unaware of the financial resources they can tap into, like the Veterans Aid & Attendance Benefit?
  • Is it just plain sticker shock (which is common), but they actually are in a good position to buy—they just don’t know it?

Those are all very different scenarios. And yes, you need to prepare accordingly for each one. So do just that. Come up with a list of common objections. Then, think of all the various sub-sets for each objection. From there, practice role-playing how you’d respond to each objection. (Hint: We have a ton of free senior living sales resources you can download.)

For example . . . if your prospect is a veteran, introduce them to an outside consultant who specializes in the Veterans Aid & Attendance benefit. If the prospect is in your office, call the consultant and make the introduction right then and there.

Another example: If your prospect is struggling to understand what’s included in the number you quoted, offer a chart that provides context and is easy to skim. It’s easy for people to fixate on the big number, and yet they miss the value—the fact that number often includes two meals a day, utilities, housekeeping, maintenance, etc. The prospect needs to remember that even if the mortgage for their home is paid off, they still have monthly expenses—and that this BIG number you just shared covers stuff like that.

Pay attention to what isn’t being said.

The best sales reps are experts in nonverbal behaviors and reading between the lines. If someone says, “We can’t afford that,” but you have a good sense that they can afford to buy based on the asset info they shared, it’s possible the prospect is using price as an excuse.

An observant senior living salesperson will recognize that the prospect has other things on her mind and probe further. Asking some open-ended questions (gently) could help. “Gosh, I know. The pricing always causes a little sticker shock when people first see it. Let’s put that away and talk about how you feel about the community. If money weren’t an issue, how would you feel about our community? What do you like? How is it lacking—or what could I provide more info on?”

Work with your marketing team on materials that can address common objections.

Sending prospects home with the right collateral can make all the difference. This is why senior living sales and marketing alignment is so critical. You need to communicate common sales objections to the marketing team so that they can create content—guides, white papers, articles, case studies—that will help dismantle those sales objections one by one.

Go off script.

Magic happens during improv, right? Scripts should never be straightjackets. If you have an idea—even if it’s a little unconventional—that you think might work with a prospect, give it a whirl. Obviously, when we say unconventional, that doesn’t mean unprofessional. But don’t be afraid to experiment a little—and to share what you’ve learned with your colleagues.

Does your senior living sales team need some fresh inspiration?

If you need assistance aligning your sales and marketing initiatives, we can help. Get in touch and let’s brainstorm together.

Senior living lead eggs hatching with footprints towards sale sign

5 Things You Shouldn’t Do with Your Senior Living Leads

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If we could share one article with every senior living marketing and sales team, this would be it. Why? Because it has to do with everyone’s favorite topic: senior living leads. Specifically, mistakes to avoid. Let’s get to it.

1. Don’t treat all senior living leads the same.

If you’re a Senior Living SMART client and/or a regular reader of our blog, you’ve likely heard us say that not all leads are created equal. Some leads are ready to buy now. Others might be ready two years from now.

How should you handle the very different needs of various leads? To start, you should divide your leads into two buckets—sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). SQLs want to buy sooner rather than later, so they will be served up to the sales team. MQLs aren’t ready yet, so they will enter longer-term nurturing campaigns.

For all of this to happen efficiently, you’ll need marketing automation software and website forms that capture meaningful info to help segment and score your leads. You can choose to get more granular with your lead segmentation if you wish. For example, within your MQLs, you might segment leads according to buyer persona (e.g., senior vs. adult child).

Bottom line: Meet your leads according to where they are on their journey. Don’t treat them all as if they’re ready to buy today or tomorrow.

2. Don’t ignore leads just because they’re in the very early stages.

This goes along with the previous point, but it’s worth repeating. Too often, we see marketing and sales teams ignore leads that are in the earliest stages of their journey (think leads that don’t plan to buy for at least a year). This is short-sighted. Remember, today’s researchers are tomorrow’s buyers—even if that “tomorrow” is eighteen months from now.

While you might not market as aggressively to early-stage leads, you should still provide regular, helpful communications. The goal? For the lead to think well of your community so that when they are ready to buy, your community will be top of mind.

3. Don’t bombard your leads with the same marketing messages.

Since you have a variety of leads coming in, you need to have a variety of marketing messages at the ready as you nurture MQLs to SQLs. Because that’s precisely what good nurturing is—delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Getting to know your leads is an excellent way to develop engaging content for them. But how do you get to “know” your leads? Simple. Through your website forms.

Earlier, we mentioned having website forms that capture meaningful info. But if you want to take it to the next level, consider implementing progressive profiling. With progressive form fields, you can control which questions appear on which website forms. Not only that, but once a person has filled out one set of questions, they’ll be asked a different set the next time they fill out a form on your site. The answers will give you valuable insights into your prospects. As a result, you can serve up nurturing campaigns that make sense to them.

For example, maybe your website forms capture people’s favorite hobbies. For those who love food and cooking, you can serve up emails that discuss all the fabulous activities in your community centered around cooking: breadmaking class, sushi night, wine-tasting every Thursday afternoon, pot-luck dinner parties, etc. For those who cited sports as a favorite hobby, you can serve up a similar set of emails that talk about your fitness center, tennis and pickleball courts, golf league, football get-togethers, and the like.

The basic email campaign can be the same, but you will customize the messaging so that it speaks directly to your leads. Custom messaging is the secret sauce to effective lead nurturing.

4. Don’t “set and forget” your marketing automation.

With marketing automation, it’s easy to set up email nurturing campaigns and forget all about them. While automation is supposed to make your life easier, you still need to monitor results—and make adjustments based on what the numbers tell you.

What you should pay attention to:

  • Engagement. Are people opening the emails? Are they clicking through to your offers? Are they converting on those offers? Don’t send emails just to say you’ve sent them. You want your emails to work, meaning they should motivate the recipient to take a specific action—even if that action is something as simple as reading a blog post.
  • Conversions. Over time, provided your email nurturing is effective, you should see increased conversions: MQLs to SQLs and SQLs to customers.
  • Messaging. Even if engagement/conversions look good, revisit messaging to make sure everything you say is accurate. For example, you might have promoted virtual tours due to COVID. Now, you might have options for both in-person and virtual tours. We recommend looking at all messaging at least twice a year.

Don’t be afraid to adjust messaging that isn’t working. Trust what the numbers are telling you. You could throw a whole campaign out the window and start over. Or you can A/B test smaller changes. For example, if people aren’t opening your emails, test different subject lines. Haven’t tried personalization yet? Maybe you experiment with that and see how the results look.

Effective marketing automation is part science, part art—and it absolutely requires the human touch.

5. Don’t assume you’re in control. (Because you’re not.)

This is the hardest pill for sales and marketing teams to swallow. Twenty years ago, before everyone was online and before every senior living community had its own website, each community’s sales and marketing team was very much in control of the sales process. If someone was interested in learning about your community, they had no choice but to call or come in for a tour, which put them (the buyer) at the mercy of the sales team.

Things have changed. Thanks to senior living websites, review sites, and social media, buyers can now research to their heart’s content before ever talking to a salesperson. And they’ll only do the latter on their terms when they’re ready for a sales interaction.

If senior living sales and marketing teams want to succeed today, they must embrace this shift and focus on enabling buyers to get the info they need, when they need it. This means marketing and sales must remove any friction from the process and make it as easy and straightforward as possible for the buyer to purchase from you. Say hello to your new top priority!

Want more helpful strategies for increasing senior living leads? Download our guide.

Even though we bill ourselves as a marketing agency, we also have expertise in the senior living sales process, as this free guide demonstrates. Enjoy it with our compliments!

And, of course, if you need assistance, get in touch and let’s chat about your senior living sales challenges.

How to Increase Sales in Senior Living Schedule a 30 minute brainstorming session
how to increase sales in senior living, man at whiteboard

How to Increase Sales in Senior Living

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Maybe you’re a senior living sales counselor and you’ve been wondering how to increase sales in your community. Maybe you did a search in Google on that precise term—how to increase sales in senior living — and you landed on this blog post. You’re probably holding your breath, hoping this article will have the answer. Good news, folks! It does. And the answer is surprisingly straightforward.

Here’s what you need to do if you want to increase your senior living sales.

You need to work closely with marketing.

Long gone are the days where senior living marketing and sales worked separately. Any businesses that still maintain this separation and silo mentality are doomed for failure. Or, at the very least, they’re certainly not doing as well as they could be.

The line between sales and marketing has blurred. Why? For the simple reason that sales folks no longer drive sales. Buyers drive sales. Marketing’s job is to help enable today’s buyers to buy from you. Which means marketing often needs to think more like sales, and sales folks need to be ready to lend a hand to marketing.

You need to accept that not all leads are created equal.

Sure, some leads will be ready to have a conversation with you today or tomorrow. Those are sales-qualified leads. But most leads are not ready to buy right now. They’re interested in your community, and in senior living in general. But there’s a long way between “interested” and “ready to buy.”

Your job is to focus on the sales-qualified leads while the marketing-qualified leads continue to learn and explore your brand on their own through marketing automation (More on this in a moment.). This can be a tough pill for sales folks to swallow because if you follow this approach, you’ll be working fewer leads, which we know can feel scary.

But the good news is this: You’ll be working better leads, as a result.

You need to use marketing automation.

There’s no sense in bothering with our first two points if you’re going to skimp on the technology. Now, we get it: You’re a sales counselor in an incredibly personal, “high touch” industry. But no amount of charm is going to get you anywhere if you’re not already leaning heavily on marketing automation.

This goes back to our point about buyers being in charge of the sales process. Not marketing. Not sales. Today’s buyers want to interact with your brand (meaning your website, your social media, your emails) anywhere from 5-10 times before talking to anyone in sales. And the only way you can give them the brand experience that they crave is by having powerful marketing automation in place to help them explore your brand in the way they desire.

Why? Because that’s what marketing automation is—it’s a tool that helps deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time. And guess what? It makes your job easier.

You need to pay attention to results over time.

Sales folks are famous for living in the moment. We get that. But one great week of sales isn’t necessarily an indicator that you’ve landed on the formula for boosting senior living sales in general. Which is precisely why you (and your marketing cohorts) need to embrace analytics.

You need to monitor what’s working and what isn’t. And before you even get to the monitoring part, your team needs to define what they mean by “what’s working.” Definitions will vary for different buyers based on where they are in their journey.

Sure, the ultimate indicator is move-ins, but for buyers who are just starting to research senior living, they’ll need to hit a bunch of milestones along the way before they buy and sign on the dotted line. The marketing and sales teams need to agree on which data and analytics matter.

And here’s the thing: THESE DEFINITIONS WILL CHANGE. What you used as a measuring stick two years ago might not work today. Being flexible is a trait all senior living sales and marketers must embody.

Bonus advice: Use an objective third party to help align your senior living sales and marketing.

The truth is that even the most well-intentioned sales and marketing teams don’t always align goals initially. So if this is the first time your senior living community is talking about things like marketing automation and buyer enablement, consider reaching out to an agency like ours that knows how to bring everyone together.

Get in touch and let’s chat.

senior living marketing event ideas, food truck

Senior Living Marketing Event Ideas to Try

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Need some fresh senior living marketing event ideas as we emerge from the pandemic? Here are some to consider. 

Senior Living Marketing Event Ideas to Boost General Awareness about Your Community

With these events, the goal is to create awareness about your community with the people who live in the surrounding area. These events cast a wider net—in fact, some of the events might skew younger—but the idea is everyone knows (or is connected to) someone who fits your ideal buyer persona. 

In other words, that twenty-five-year-old might have a grandparent in the area, or that forty-year-old might have a mother who’s been thinking of making the move to senior living.

Host a blood drive.

The American Red Cross has a turnkey system for hosting a blood drive. You provide the space, the volunteers, and the donors. The Red Cross takes care of everything else.

  • Who to invite: General population in the area, current leads, residents/families. The nice thing about this event idea is that you gain a lot of traction in one fell swoop. 
  • How to promote the event: Promote it to your lead database via email, promote it to residents and families, and promote it to people in the area through local advertising (such as Patch.com and the local paper—you can often submit event listings for free).
  • How to market your community at the event: After people donate blood, send them off with a goody bag with collateral about your community and a fun branded promotional item. Have sales reps on hand in case people have questions about the community. And make sure the reps are prepared to conduct impromptu tours if someone is interested.

Host “Food Truck Friday.”

Reach out to local food truck vendors in the area and designate a “Food Truck Friday” event. The trucks come from, say, 4-8 and park in your lot for residents/families and people from the larger community to enjoy.

  • Who to invite/how to promote the event: Same as above.
  • How to market your community at the event: You bring dessert! Set up a candy booth with your company’s signage. (Like the candy tables that are popular at weddings.) People can fill a bag of candy (for free). The bag will be branded with your community info and include collateral. Again, have sales staff available in case someone attending the event has questions about your community.

Senior Living Marketing Event Ideas to Woo Hot Prospects

When it comes to creating events to court prospects who’ve already expressed sincere interest in your community, you need to think strategically. These events will be “smaller” in terms of scale—and if any particular event proves successful, be prepared to start running it on a more regular basis.

Spaghetti Supper to Go

One of the most popular questions that prospects ask sales counselors is this: “How’s the food?” Show off your chef’s mad skills by offering spaghetti dinners to go—complete with garlic bread and cannolis. Serious prospects can finally taste food that they’d see on your menu if they lived in your community.

  • How it works: Prospects can reserve their order and drop by to pick it up between five and seven on the appointed day. With each order, make sure someone greets the prospect, helps them carry the dinner to their car, and offers a swag bag with some extras, like fun branded promo items. The next day, the sales rep can follow up and ask what the prospect thought of the meal.
  • Who to invite: Limit the initial send to hot sales-qualified leads (SQLs). And if this is your first time doing an event like this, limit the total number. Discuss with your chef about a reasonable number of spaghetti suppers they can prepare for one evening and start with that number as the upper limit. (So if the number is 10, send the offer to 10 prospects. There’s little chance that all 10 would say yes, but if by some chance they did, the chef could still accommodate all of them.)
  • How to promote it: Use a combo of email marketing and good old-fashioned phone calls. 
  • Bonus tip: The sales rep should follow up the next day with the prospect and ask what they thought of the food and to see if they’re any closer to making a decision. Plus, once you get in a rhythm, this can be an easy ongoing event—one you do every month for hot SQLs you’re trying to close.

Backstage Pass

You’re trying to sell how great your community is as a place to live, right? So give some of your hot prospects backstage passes to try out certain amenities.

For example, do you have a fabulous fitness center with lots of fun classes? Give the prospect a free pass to try it out for a week. Got an amazing restaurant on site? Give prospects a pass to enjoy a meal on the house. You get the idea. The goal is to give the prospect the opportunity to experience the community without a sales person hovering.

  • How it works: Determine ahead of time 3-4 amenities that you’ll allow free passes to (and any rules/conditions). Create a nicely designed oversized “backstage pass”—something that reflects your community’s branding. Give it to the prospect and explain how it works. Even if they don’t use the pass, the offer itself will likely have a powerful—and memorable—effect.
  • Caveat: Make sure relevant team members are aware of the backstage pass. So, for example, if the pass is for the fitness center, everyone who works in the fitness center should A) be aware of this promotion and B) be alerted when someone is given a pass to the fitness center. This way, the fitness center employees can greet/help the prospect accordingly.
  • Who to invite/how to promote it: Determine on a case-by-case basis. If the hot prospect seems really interested in your community, this might be the offer to help seal the deal. Or if the prospect is wavering between your community and another one, this offer might help them decide.
  • Bonus tip: The sales rep should follow up with the prospect after the person has “used” the backstage pass. Again, inquire about the person’s experience and see if they’re any closer to a decision.

Senior Living Marketing Event Ideas for Thanking Referral Sources

Coffee and Donuts On Us

Don’t underestimate the value of your existing referral sources. It’s always good to thank them and remind them you’re there. Invite them to a quarterly “drive through breakfast” at your community. The goal is to reconnect with those you know and to show your gratitude for their referrals.

  • How it works: Buy boxes of coffee and donuts/bagels ahead of time. (It’s always good to order them ahead.) Have a team managing a booth at your entrance with all the goodies between, say, 6 and 9. Invite your referral sources to stop by and pick up breakfast—on you. Offer a little swag bag with a gift card to Starbucks and some collateral that they can use to promote your community (like a stack of postcards or brochures).
  • Who to invite: Referral sources—active ones and ones who’ve gone quiet.
  • How to promote the event: Create an ongoing email list of your referral sources and do a three-prong email blast. Send the first a week out. Send the second a few days before. Send the final one either the night before or early AM on the day of. The gist is simple: Go for a “thank you for your referrals. Enjoy donuts and coffee on us” message.
  • Bonus tips: Record who shows up! Get names. Then, follow up with the person individually via email saying you hoped they enjoyed the coffee/donuts, and you’d love to have them over to the community for lunch sometime. Again, you’re trying to stay top of mind in these folks’ heads while also giving them reasons to promote your community (by experiencing the great food, seeing the gorgeous grounds, and so forth).

After-hours Networking

Hosting an after-hours networking event is always a great way to mingle with referral sources—and possibly meet new ones! In terms of how to set it up . . . you can be in charge of doing everything—securing the location, food, etc. Or if your community is a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, they often have sponsorship opportunities for after-hours networking events.

  • How it works: Host a cocktail hour at your community or a nearby restaurant. Invite referral sources and prospective referral sources for an evening of cocktails and networking. Make sure everyone leaves with a swag bag (filled with a promo item, something special like a gift card, and collateral about your community that they can hand out on your behalf).
  • Who to invite: Your current referral sources and a list of referral sources you’d like to get.
  • How to promote it: Follow the same steps as above for your current referral sources. For your prospective referral sources, create a separate email list. You’ll use similar messaging—”Join us for a night of networking. Sponsored by Awesome Senior Living Community.”
  • Bonus tips: Have several team members at the event and make sure they mingle. They should pass out business cards and get cards from whoever is there. Then, the next day, they should send a personal email to each person they met (new referral sources and existing ones) and ask to set up a one-to-one coffee chat to foster the relationship further.

Senior Living Marketing Event Ideas: Don’t Underestimate the Value of Virtual Events

As we emerge from the pandemic, we’re all itching for more in-person events, which is why we focused on those sorts of ideas above. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s this: Virtual events can be effective—and can sometimes even work better for certain personalities (like introverts) or for people who want to explore your community from afar.

So don’t stop hosting virtual events. Your best bet moving forward is to offer a combo of in-person events and virtual events—and to monitor the results.

Check out these helpful articles for more info:

Remember, the Key to a Successful Event is Starting with a SMART strategy.
Be strategic in your planning—from the purpose of the event, to how you’ll market it, to how you’ll follow up. Need help along the way? Reach out. We love helping our clients develop and execute effective senior living marketing events.

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Senior Living Sales Tips: The Problem with Third-Party Leads

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Many senior living sales teams have become dependent on third-party lead aggregators to generate leads, tours, and move-ins. On the surface, a lead-gen aggregator sounds super appealing. You get more leads without lifting a finger, right? But as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

In today’s edition of senior living sales tips, we’re going to discuss the many problems with third-party leads (including how you should approach them if you’ve decided you simply can’t give them up).

1. All third-party leads are SHARED leads.

Unfortunately, it’s easy for senior living sales teams to buy into the illusion that they have plenty of leads if they’re only looking at the total number rather than the quality or the lead source itself.

Keep in mind, however, that lead aggregators aren’t sharing leads with just your community. They’re sharing the leads with five to seven other communities as well. Not to mention, a shared lead actually represents only 1/5 or 1/7 of an organic or exclusive lead. So you can’t consider any shared leads as “full” leads since doing so will artificially inflate your lead database or senior living CRM.

2. Third-party lead generators might provide a high volume of leads, but these leads typically have extremely low conversions.

It is not unusual for communities to attribute 80% of their total leads to third-party sources but only convert three to six percent of those leads to residents.

Think about that for a moment.

Your senior living sales team is spending eighty percent of its time working on leads that convert only three to six percent of the time! Organic leads, professional referrals, and friend and family referral sources all have significantly higher conversions.

3. Being first is the only one way to improve conversions (and that isn’t as easy as it sounds).

By “first,” we mean contacting the lead within 10 minutes of receiving it—and doing this on a regular basis day in and day out with all leads that come in. Talk about adding stress to your sales team!

And even if you are first, that might not get you very far since most marketing leads aren’t sales-ready until after six to eight marketing interactions.

4. You might already have the same lead in your CRM.

The lead the third-party aggregator provided might already exist in your senior living CRM because it came in another way, such as organic search or paid advertising.

And yet if you don’t promptly notify the third-party provider about the duplicate lead, you’ll end up “buying” a lead for a prospect you already have. Talk about a waste of valuable marketing dollars for your senior living sales team.

5. Third-party leads are expensive.

Most communities are paying the equivalent of one full month’s rent and care for third-party leads. Couldn’t you put that money to better use with marketing initiatives that bring in organic leads who are genuinely interested in your community? (Short answer: YES!)

Not ready to give up third-party lead aggregators just yet? At least be SMART about it.

If you’re going to continue with third-party lead aggregators, you need a smart strategy to convert leads faster using marketing automation technology. Luckily for you, we’ve created a solution that can help.

We call it “Speed to The Lead.” This solution will help your community respond quickly to third-party leads, deliver brochures immediately, and follow-up using an automated five-step lead nurturing workflow that nudges people along the sales funnel and encourages them to request a tour. Interested in hearing more about it? Get in touch and let’s chat!

Robot helping sales person write emails and complete tasks

Senior Living Sales Strategies: 3 Surprising Benefits of Marketing Automation

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We don’t have to tell you that senior living is an ultra-competitive industry. You live and breathe it every day, right? Which is why you always need to find ways to enhance your senior living sales strategies. Good news! Marketing automation is an effective budge-friendly way to do exactly that.

Here are three surprising benefits.

1. Say hello to your “always on” sales assistant.

When it comes to successful lead conversion, here are the two biggest factors:

  • How quickly leads are responded to
  • The persistence of follow-up attempts

Let’s tackle that first factor. Marketing automation ensures that your senior living leads receive an instant response after they take an action on your site. If they fill out a form, for example, they’ll automatically be redirected to a thank-you page that speaks directly to them. AND they’ll receive an auto responder email.

Everything happens automatically in the background—whether it’s 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. And it happens no matter what’s going on in the world, like a pandemic. In other words, marketing automation becomes your 24/7 sales assistant.

Now, let’s discuss the second factor: persistence of follow-up attempts. Remember, you want to implement effective senior living sales strategies. With marketing automation, instead of lumping all leads together and handling them the same way, you can segment leads, score them appropriately, and create custom lead nurturing workflows.

Gone are the days of treating cool leads the same way you do hot leads. Truly hot leads—for example, someone requesting a tour tomorrow—can be passed off to sales and handled ASAP. But cooler leads can be nurtured according to their needs, interests, and timelines. You can customize your messaging so it speaks TO the person (rather than simply some generic message that you share with everyone).

BENEFITS RECAP: Marketing automation ensures that every prospect gets an almost instantaneous response and a reliable follow-up plan. Follow-up effectiveness and timeliness no longer depend on the availability or skillset of the community sales person. Now, the sales team members can focus on their strengths, such as building relationships with prospects, rather than performing rote tasks (like sending brochures).

2. Eliminate the blind spots in the sales process.

Marketing automation provides visibility into every action a prospect takes on your site. Think the number of times the person visited a specific page, the blog posts they read, how long they spent on a page, and so forth.

So, for example, if someone requests a tour and the sales person can see that the prospect spent a lot of time consuming financial-related info as well as articles about amenities your community offers, the sales rep can be sure to discuss those two areas.

In addition, when you integrate your marketing automation software with your senior living CRM, you’ll get an excellent big picture regarding sales conversion points (i.e., tours, deposits, and move-ins). With this knowledge, you can measure the ROI of every marketing effort and channel. This is critical since more and more marketing budgets are being slashed and/or coming under greater scrutiny.

BENEFITS RECAP: Building a profile of each prospect and passing that information on to the sales team empowers them with relevant information to personalize their interactions.

3. Nurture “not ready” leads until they ARE ready to decide.

We touched on this in the first point, but let’s take a deeper dive. The majority (up to 90%) of the prospects visiting your website are “early stage” opportunities. They want to remain anonymous and gather knowledge, information, and resources in a self-directed way.

Your website should provide everything the early-stage prospect seeks. You should provide this info without requiring the prospect to engage in a sales interaction.

Once you get people’s info, you need to be thoughtful in how you handle it. Your sales team shouldn’t be wasting valuable time pestering “not ready yet” leads with calls and emails.

Instead, marketing should handle these leads by entering them into custom lead nurturing workflows. When we say “custom,” we mean custom, too. The workflows shouldn’t be one size fits all. You should have a set of workflows to match specific lead attributes, like buyer persona and timeframe. Robust marketing automation can ensure the right person gets the right set of emails at the right time.

BENEFITS RECAP: With strategic lead nurturing, you’ll build trust and demonstrate your community’s expertise. When the person is ready to book a tour, request pricing, or make the leap and move in, your community will be top of mind. (BONUS: We’ve designed a turnkey lead nurturing program for SUPER COLD senior living leads. We’re talking leads that have been sitting in your CRM for over six months. LEARN MORE.)

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Senior Living Sales: How to Cater to the Prospect’s Journey

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When it comes to senior living sales and marketing, understanding what your prospects want and need at any given moment is critical. But here’s the thing: The prospect journey is rarely linear. A prospect doesn’t wake up one day and decide to move into a senior living community the next.

For some prospects, they might research and think through options for several years before making the move. Other prospects might be on a tighter timeframe and make a decision within six months. For others, it might be three months.

Plenty of prospects aren’t even buying for themselves, but rather someone they love. Not to mention, many prospects often go back and forth between being “sales qualified” and “marketing qualified.” And, of course, the sales cycle for all of the above has grown more complex, thanks to COVID-19.

The biggest challenge for senior living marketing and sales teams is finding a way to meet each prospect wherever they are on their individual journey. This level of customization was impossible two decades ago. But now, thanks to marketing automation, you can create custom experiences based on a prospect’s actions, interests, and motivations.

How marketing automation enhances the prospect journey

1. Keeps prospects engaged with your brand

Even if the prospect doesn’t always open your lead nurturing emails, simply seeing your name show up in their inbox helps to keep your community front and center in their minds. For those who do open the emails, a personal touch and warm, reassuring tone can go a long way in helping the prospect feel positive about your brand.

2. Entices prospects back to your site

Through engaging lead nurturing emails, you’ll offer helpful content that entices prospects back to your site. Once there, and depending on how well your site is developed, you can engage with them further by offering more content or by providing ways to interact with the site (through live chat or interactive surveys, for example).

3. Automatically matches the right content/message to the right prospect

Again, the main tenet of successful lead nurturing is providing the right content to the right prospect at the right time. You can gather much of this intel through your website opt-in forms and lead scoring. This info will automatically funnel to your marketing automation system. From there, every lead will enter a workflow that makes the most sense for them.

4. Provides real-time insights on what’s resonating and what isn’t

Instead of cold calling all leads (regardless of their level of interest), your sales team can dip into the backend analytics and see how prospects are responding to lead nurturing in real time.

For example, maybe your sales rep notes a prospect who has opened the last three lead nurturing emails and clicked on each offer inside. From there, the person ends up spending 10-15 minutes on the site. This person might indeed be a “hot prospect” and the sales rep might actually get somewhere if they call the person.

In addition, marketing and sales can get a good sense of what type of content works best. Perhaps your prospects love videos. Or maybe they love free guides. You can develop more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

5. Helps move marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs) over time

Lead nurturing’s main purpose is to move MQLs to SQLs over time. A thoughtful approach and robust marketing automation can help make sure you achieve this goal.

6. Offers a much less intrusive way for your brand to stay in front of prospects

People will often engage with a brand a half dozen (or even more) times before they’re interested in taking a call with a sales rep. Lead nurturing caters to this shift by providing a much less intrusive way for your brand to stay connected with prospects.

Of course, before you can create the right customized journeys, you need to understand your prospects.

We call this work persona development. Think about your favorite residents. Wouldn’t you want to fill your community full of residents just like them? You can! Persona development helps you identify the traits and behaviors of your ideal prospect. You then develop a customized journey that will attract and nurture more of these ideal prospects.

Remember, when it comes to senior living marketing and sales, it’s not about getting more leads. It’s about getting the right leads—those that match your ideal prospect persona and are a good fit for the lifestyle services that you provide.

 

 

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Senior Living Marketing Leaps Into Digital Age With Innovations, Investments

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Excerpt:

Before Covid-19, providers commonly treated their digital presences and social media channels almost as afterthoughts. Over the past six months, however, these platforms have become essential to operations. Much like demand for telehealth services has exploded during the Covid-19 outbreak and could have long-lasting effects on how clinical services are delivered in senior living, the pandemic may have finally ushered in the digital age of senior living sales and marketing.

Tours have gone virtual as providers restricted access to communities to non-essential personnel. Marketing campaigns are increasingly balancing selling the lifestyle that senior living offers with transparency regarding resident safety. Digital campaign spending is growing, and providers are using websites and social media channels to interact more with resident families and prospective residents, and capture information to generate new leads.

With that comes new challenges. The growing importance of digital marketing is resulting in higher provider spends, and digital advertising companies are beginning to charge higher rates for ad placements.

Some providers are now seeking a new balance between increasing digital spending and updating websites to capture visitor information, generate leads and convert those into move-ins.

“We’ve probably seen more innovation in the last six months than we have in the last 10 years of senior living marketing,” Senior Living SMART CEO Deborah Howard told SHN.

Full story from Senior Housing News →

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Re-Engage Cold Senior Living Leads with Our Stay in Touch Program

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When it comes to the senior living leads in your database, does any of this sound familiar?

  • You have a CRM filled with hundreds of leads that fizzled and went cold—and you don’t know what to do with them.
  • Your sales team has strategies for nurturing leads that come in now—but no strategies for nurturing leads that are eighteen, twelve, or even six months old.
  • You don’t have the people-power to manually call or email all your colds leads, yet you know that you’re missing out on good opportunities.

If you were nodding your head YES as you read through the above, you’re not alone. Your senior living CRM is likely home to many old/cold leads—leads that never received any follow up.

Why didn’t they receive any follow up?

Well, as you know, prospects inquire at various stages of readiness, but sales people can only work 10 – 12 active leads at a time, so they focus on leads closest to decision. Providers know this is a problem. But most don’t have a strategy for addressing it. So, what do they do? They just keep buying new leads.

This isn’t a SMART approach.

And that’s precisely why we created our “Stay in Touch” program-to help busy sales and marketing teams re-engage cold senior living leads through a SMART marketing automation solution.

All you have to do is provide the list of cold leads, and we take it from there. Sounds great, right?

Below are some FAQs about the program.

How does the Stay in Touch program help re-engage cold senior living leads?

We’ve already created a series of surveys, offers, and emails that have proven to re-engage colder senior living leads. This content will help score and segment the leads according to their level of interest.

  • Leads with good potential get served up to your sales team.
  • Cooler leads continue through the various lead nurturing paths until they’re closer to decision and ready to talk to sales.

Why should my community use the Stay in Touch program?

We’ve done the heavy lifting for you! We’ve thought through the messaging that will most likely resonate, the offers that will entice people to take action, and the branching “logic” for the workflows.

We customize all pieces according to your community’s branding guidelines, set up everything (from emails to landing pages), and schedule emails at a rate that makes sense. Once it’s set up, it works on its own. (That’s the power and beauty of marketing automation!)

What will my community “get” from the Stay in Touch program?

The benefits are many. You’ll get . . .

    • A turnkey solution to engage cold leads and turn some of them into warm and hot leads that convert into tours and move-ins
    • More accurate views of your sales pipeline
    • A cleaner, nimbler database/CRM
    • Buy-in from marketing and sales regarding marketing automation
    • And did we mention cold leads that actually CONVERT?

I want the Stay in Touch program. What should I do next?

Let’s set up a 30-minute brainstorming session. There’s no cost for this session (and no obligation, of course). It’s simply an opportunity for you to get to know us and for us to get to know more about your community (or communities) and how you manage your senior living leads. We can also walk you through how the various elements of the Stay in Touch program work.

YES, I WANT TO SETUP MY BRAINSTORMING SESSION NOW!

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