Key takeaways from the SHN Sales Summit - Plus thoughts on an evolved sales process
The Vectre was a proud sponsor of the 2022 Senior Housing News Sales Summit last week. Several of senior living’s shining stars presented really valuable insight into their organizations’ successes and challenges as we are nearly 1/12th complete with the year already! Here are 5 key takeaways that we heard from those sales leaders during the Summit. These takeaways lead me to believe that our sales process should continue to evolve. My thoughts are below.
Challenges with maintaining sales momentum, an evolving sales process, and selling to a different prospect are dynamics that every community is facing. The investment and shift to digital has ramped up significantly. Communities are managing digital leads much better than in the past to create more meaningful sales conversations. Many communities are working from behind with regard to content to showcase what's happening at the moment in the community. Communities need to think about budgeting photo, video, and virtual tour production yearly to keep fresh, relevant content across their digital marketing and sales tools.
Many organizations have been challenged by burnout causing sales turnover that required continual recruiting, onboarding, and training - thus impacting occupancy recovery. Staffing shortages and retention issues are significant challenges in departments across the community. Life plan communities generally seem to be less impacted by this dynamic.
Sales concessions directly compete against the revenue that many communities need in order to maintain the expected resident experience, with increased labor and inflationary pressures, while competing with the community down the street. Prospects might dismiss some of the value proposition that they don't fully understand when only analyzing price, but sales teams need to be equipped with the appropriate messaging to address those additional expenses in the P&L statements. Our prospects are becoming increasingly well-educated on senior living and understand labor market dynamics that are affecting additional industries.
Sales teams that are working for the quick sales to ramp up occupancy may find themselves on the hamster wheel simply due to acuity. Short-stay attrition and length of stay data for 2021 and into 2022 will likely be impacted based on the demand (aka increased acuity) that the pandemic created when folks held off on decisions to move.
Inquiries are high to start 2022. In-person tours have been a mixed bag in part due to the COVID Omicron variant; however, message points are shifting back to the value proposition of socialization and life enrichment, while safety messages are becoming secondary due to vaccination rates.
With challenges across the industry, one key component to remember is that our prospect is continually changing. COVID has enabled tech adoption among our prospects at an alarming rate. Yet, in most communities, we are reverting back to a sales process established 30 years ago where the major win for a sales counselor was the in-person tour. Benchmark data from pre-pandemic 2019 states that only about 20% of those prospects that inquire for more information (via a phone call, email, website for submission, referral, etc.) actually visit the community to take an in-person tour. Perhaps those numbers are skewed by averages; however, we’re missing the boat on a substantial amount of those key sales qualified leads that reach out to us. Perhaps those we’re missing out on are simply not ready to commit to an in-person tour. Consider the waterfall of numbers that result if you move the needle just 10 percentage points from those that decide not to tour in-person right out of the gate.
So my questions to the senior living industry: Are we selling too hard for the in-person tour - an experience that often is exhausting and overwhelming to our prospect, time-consuming on behalf of our sales team members, and frequently the subject of feature-dumping versus solution selling? Should we augment our sales process so that we better understand that prospect’s interests and needs before we get them to come into our community? What tools would we need to rethink our process and better align the community’s value proposition with the prospect’s interests and needs? How are you working with out-of-state prospects? How are you aligning the conversations with multiple influencers that are getting involved in your sales effort? Are the logistics of scheduling an in-person tour with these influencers extending your sales process? Are you tired of executing those three-hour tours only for the prospects to stop the conversation because they are overwhelmed by tour fatigue and information overload?
We believe YourTour is the platform that allows the counselor to efficiently guide the prospect through the sales process from early discovery conversations all the way to specific decisions about a specific residence. Want to learn more about what we’re doing to change the senior living sales process? Schedule a demo of the YourTour platform for your own community!
Personalization features within YourTour allow sales counselors to favorite amenities that match each prospect’s interests.