![4 Things That Can Make Your Senior Living Sales Team Olympians!]()
by Diane Masson | Aug 5, 2012
1) A great Olympic attitude – every single day! The attitude of a senior living sales person can literally increase or decrease your occupancy. Every gold medalist Olympian has an amazing story of adversity that they overcame with a great attitude. Some of the new Olympians even gave up on their sport for a year or more and then came back to win with a positive team spirit and an amazing coach! Does the senior living sales coach at your organization have a winning attitude that is contagious to the team? Can you feel the energy in the office and at your retirement community marketing events?
2) Believing like an Olympian in the community with 100% conviction! If the targeted occupancy goal is 95 percent at your assisted living and you are running at 90 percent, 85 percent, or less, how can you function under this pressure? How can you keep this stressor out of your interactions with the customer? Are you Unbelieving Ursula—wringing your hands and scratching your head? Or are you Believing Betty—charming prospects by painting a pretty picture of their potential lifestyle in your amazing community?
3) Having the work ethic of an Olympian! Move-ins don’t happen without follow up calls and tours period. Are you personal texting and chatting with residents or making 15 to 20 calls a day – EVERY DAY! This will result in a minimum of 5 tours a week! With enough potential residents walking in the door of your Continuing Care Retirement Community, it’s just a matter of them recognizing that your community is the best! Olympic senior living sales people ALWAYS ask for the deposit at every single appointment!
4) Emulating a selfless attitude like an Olympian! One hundred percent of the marketing team’s focus should be listening to customers and understanding their needs. This information is helpful in customizing your retirement community’s features and services to satisfy those needs. There’s no greater fulfillment in life than to help other people improve their lives. If you bring this attitude to every appointment, and there are enough people walking through your doors, occupancy will take care of itself. Many sales people believe their work is more than a job. They consider it a social service or a ministry. These folks are making a difference in the world, building one relationship at a time. Are you this type of senior housing marketer?
Your prospective customers will feel your Olympic attitude and passion. This alone will intrigue them and keep communication progressing with strength. They know intuitively if you are looking out for their best interests or merely want to fill the building for a commission. Your verbal and nonverbal communication in a customer meeting says it all. If you’re listening 100 percent, you don’t have time to talk about yourself. Every word that comes out of your mouth will be for the prospective resident’s benefit.
Please share how you or your senior living team is performing to a gold medal standard of excellence!
Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com. If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to speak at a senior housing conference (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net. Diane is currently consulting in Southern California for Freedom Management Company, the proud debt-free owners of Freedom Village in Lake Forest and The Village in Hemet, California. For more information:Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.netBlog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/
by Diane Masson | Jul 30, 2012
Does your team need to recharge their enthusiasm? Has the marketing team gotten off track? Do you need to sharpen your sales techniques?
Try a weekly marketing book review. Whether your senior living team is one sales person and the executive director or your team consists of three to six marketing people, it’s time to get the creative juices flowing again! If a sales team is not learning and growing, it becomes complacent and stagnant.
First, select a book to review. There are lots of great choices out there. Look around on Amazon.com, ask your sales people for ideas or get suggestions at senior housing conferences. My marketing teams are currently reading “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” by Diane Twohy Masson. (Yes, this is my book.) We have completed four chapters in five weeks. Our next book review conference call is chapter five scheduled for Tuesday.
It has been wonderful to watch the teams grow together. Participants include entrance fee sales people for independent living in Continuing Care Retirement Communities, assisted living marketers and skilled nursing admissions. They come from five areas and as the weeks progress the team members feel freer to share what has worked or has not worked in their area and other team members benefit from their experience.
We have had some great discussions including how many calls (in the existing database) it takes to get X amount of tours or people coming to the community for events. Best practice numbers for one team member were 157 voice-to-voice calls in 3 weeks, which resulted in 23 families coming into view the community. These are great numbers and after the call, other team members started asking for help on how to do this themselves. It seemed to bring out a natural – healthy – competiveness amongst the team.
Everyone starts thinking team and has a better understanding of the goals, because they are discussed at the weekly book review meeting (if you have multiple teams – do a conference call). Executive directors, regional marketing directors and directors of sales and marketing in senior housing often assume that everyone on the team knows the goals. Maybe they do or maybe they don’t. Why not review the goals weekly during your team book review? The number one goal is to have 100% occupancy, but what do they need to do this day or week in order to hit that goal this month or this year? Break it down for them and be their coach and mentor during the book review…try it… it works like a charm!
Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com. If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to speak at a senior housing conference (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net. Diane is currently consulting in Southern California for Freedom Management Company, the proud debt-free owners of Freedom Village in Lake Forest and The Village in Hemet, California. For more information:Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.net Blog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/
by Diane Masson | May 7, 2012
Please enjoy this published article I wrote for seniorhousingforum.net for my friend Steve Moran. – http://seniorhousingforum.net/
Here are my top 10 positive and negative first impressions after touring 15 senior living communities in 3 days. (Part 2)
By Diane Twohy Masson
My top 10 positive first impressions of touring 15 senior living communities were talked about in Part 1. My goal was to put myself in the shoes of the adult boomer child looking for the right retirement community for an aging senior parent. What would be his or her overall impression after viewing 3 to 5 senior living communities in a couple of days? Now, in part 2, let’s talk about how some senior living communities chose to put their proverbial foot in their mouth and some of the reasons why they did not make a good first impression for this adult boomer child.
What were my top 10 negative first impressions of 15 senior living communities?
1) Driving up and seeing a weed filled garden, the lawn too long or the building in any type of disrepair. (If they can’t weed the garden on a regular basis, maybe they won’t be able to take good care of my mom on a consistent basis.)
2) A sea of people in walkers and wheel chairs staring at me as I walked in the building or looked in the dining room. If they were having a stimulating dining room conversation with their fellow residents or staff, they would not even have looked up at me (instead they were bored and ALL looked at me).
3) Bad smells – from walking in a dining room and knowing someone needed his or her depends changed to smelling that old building smell.
4) No activities happening and the residents looking bored.
5) Having a resident say the food is bad (this literally happened).
6) Being shown an apartment that was not rent ready with equipment lying around or was being used as a storage room. This was surprisingly very common!
7) Not being offered a cold refreshment when it was 90 degrees outside. This happened at half the communities.
8) The majority of marketers sat me down and started grilling me on my mom’s medical needs. It was all about medical questions and they didn’t focus on her as a person or my concerns as an adult child.
9) Seeing a resident eating alone in the dining room.
10) Experiencing a receptionist on the telephone, hold up her finger to me to wait, say something rude to a resident, hang up, roll her eyes and then ask me what I wanted…
Most of these negative first impressions can be easily corrected with good management and coaching the senior living marketer. Even the best communities out there can’t predict what some of your residents would say to a tour. But if your residents don’t look happy – what can your team do to redirect the seniors into an engaging activity? Look around your retirement community with the fresh eyes of an adult boomer child. What do you see? Can you say that all of the first impressions of your new future residents are great?
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Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com. If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to coach your senior living marketing team (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) or have her put on a sales retreat for your organization – please call: 206-853-6655 or emaildiane@marketing2seniors.net. For more information: Twitter: @market2seniors Web:www.marketing2seniors.net Blog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/
by Diane Masson | Apr 27, 2012
Please enjoy this published article I wrote for seniorhousingforum.net for my friend Steve Moran. – http://seniorhousingforum.net/
Top 10 positive and negative first impressions after touring 15 senior living communities in 3 days. (Part 1)
By Diane Twohy Masson
My goal was to put myself in the shoes of the adult boomer child looking for the right retirement community for an aging senior parent. What would be his or her overall impression after viewing 3 to 5 senior living communities in a couple of days? What community would rise to the top and be their first choice?
What were my top 10 ten positive first impressions?
1) Smelling freshly baked chocolate chip cookies when I walked into the lobby.
2) As I drove up seeing perfectly manicured lawns, a good-looking building and some colorful flowers out front. (Flowers in pots by the front door looked great.)
3) Some kind of “wow” when I entered the lobby that would direct my eye to the beauty of the community and not see the walkers and wheel chairs. An example was seeing a gorgeous/expensive flower/plant arrangement on a circular table as I entered the lobby. Another retirement community had a beautiful living room area with a fireplace, a FRESH flower arrangement on the coffee table and happy residents conversing.
4) Having the receptionist stand to greet me with a smile and a handshake.
5) Being offered refreshments immediately (I was parched from all my touring!)
6) Having a marketer tailor the tour to the needs of my mom. They would bring each community space to life by painting a picture on how my mom would enjoy using it (based on her capabilities).
7) Being introduced to important staff that would be caring for my mom. It was especially impressive if they said, “We would love for your mom to live here.”
8) Having a housekeeper or caregiver smile at me as I walked down the hall. It gave me the impression that they were happy to work there and would smile at my mom.
9) Hearing the residents being called by name and looking happy.
10) Seeing vibrant activities taking place in a variety of community spaces.
First impressions are everything to an adult boomer child trying to evaluate the best place for his or her senior parent. What first impressions are your senior living staff and community giving out? Would you want your own mom to live there? Could you sleep at night, knowing your own mom lived at your community?
Next week:
Diane Twohy Masson’s top 10 negative first impressions in touring 15 senior living communities in 3 days and how some senior living communities chose to put their proverbial foot in their mouth will be coming in part 2.
Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com. If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to coach your senior living marketing team (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) or have her put on a sales retreat for your organization – please call: 206-853-6655 or email: diane@marketing2seniors.net. For more information: Twitter: @market2seniors Web:www.marketing2seniors.net Blog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/
by Diane Masson | Apr 19, 2012
One of the reasons your occupancy may be down is because you may have reactive marketing. What does this mean? Do any of the following scenarios happen at your community?
- You walk into Bored Brad’s marketing office and he’s sorting paper clips. He just wants to give a tour but no one is coming in or calling the community.
- When you stop by Blabby Barbara’s office, she is on the phone, but you quickly determine that she’s talking to a friend and not a potential resident.
- Residents complain to management that phone calls to the marketing department are not returned in a timely fashion to friends they have referred and who are prospective residents. You march right over to Moody Marbella on your marketing team to address the residents’ concerns. She responds by changing the subject and, worse, blaming you with her explanation, “Events won’t work. Low occupancy is not my fault.” Do you think she missed the point?
Does this really happen? Yes! Reactive marketing people truly exist and I have worked with some of them. It can be a challenge to determine if the new team you are managing is reactive, but once you know the symptoms it’s easy to identify:
Symptom 1) Reactive marketing does not have programs or policies in place to make a certain number of outbound phone calls per day. This means every day.
Symptom 2) After conducting a tour, reactive marketing people wait for prospects to call them back to say they are interested in moving in. This is really the function of an order taker and not the attitude of a professional salesperson.
Symptom 3) Reactive marketers urge spending money on advertising because they claim they don’t have any leads and therefore no new sales.
Symptom 4) Reactive marketers exhibit a lack of urgency to answer the phone within two rings.
Symptom 5) Reactive marketers have a lackadaisical attitude returning phone, web, and social media inquiries.
These reactive marketing teams are waiting for walk-ins and call-ins. They believe the customer should just say, “Yep, here’s my deposit. Let’s call the moving company right now.”
Spending money on new leads is a waste of the marketing budget for a reactive marketing team. Many prospects can be slow (which is normal) to make a decision. A reactive marketer does not initiate calls with the non-hot prospects, so a cool or lukewarm prospect will never be contacted again. This means that 20 percent to 30 percent of sales can just slip through the fingers of this type of marketer. This really does happen, and it can be affecting your financial performance. Is it?
This was an excerpt from “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full.“
Diane Twohy Masson is the author of “Senior Housing Marketing – How to Increase Your Occupancy and Stay Full,” available for sale at Amazon.com. If your curiosity is piqued to inquire on Diane’s availability to coach your senior living marketing team (CCRC, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing or memory care) or have her put on a sales retreat for your organization – please call: 206-853-6655 or email diane@marketing2seniors.net. For more information: Twitter: @market2seniors Web: www.marketing2seniors.net Blog: http://marketing2seniors.net/blog/
