While you may already have a sales process, there are steps you can take to improve your senior living sales, especially assisted living. These seven tips can enhance your assisted living sales process and yield greater results.
How Assisted Living Sales Is Different From All Senior Living Sales
When you’re considering the buyer’s journey for finding an assisted living community, they may have a shorter amount of time from finding the community to moving in than prospects looking for an independent living community.
- There can be a sense of urgency to find the right assisted living community because of an incident like a fall or the person’s needs have surpassed what their caregiver can provide.
- Potential residents and their families will seek peace of mind that assisted living will provide a high quality of life and security.
With these points in mind, think about sales tactics and how to best communicate with prospects to result in conversions.
Seven Assisted Living Sales Tips for Your Best Year Yet
1. Consider Your Prospect’s First Steps
Before you communicate with your prospect, they will likely interact with your website and social media.. Your online content will make the first impression of the brand and the community.
This is where you get to stand out from other senior living communities. What makes your community special? And why should your prospect be excited to live there? Remember that you may be reaching a broad audience of prospective seniors and adult children looking on behalf of their loved ones.
Marketing and sales teams should work together to identify how your community can provide solutions and alleviate common pain points for the prospect.
2. Interact with High-Intent Leads
Marketing tactics will aim to reach a broad audience, but as part of the sales process, you’ll want to focus on high-intent leads who are ready to speak with sales personnel.
While you may be speaking with fewer people, you’re able to hone in on prospective residents who are far enough along in the decision process to have more productive conversations that could result in conversions.
3. Listen to Your Prospect
When you’re handling phone calls, it’s important to make sure you’re not steamrolling through a script and neglecting to listen to what the prospect has to say.
Be sure to give them time to speak. When you hear their concerns, goals, and what they’re looking for, you can tailor your responses to ones that will be most helpful to your prospect, which leads to our next tip.
4. Respond with Empathy
If you’re communicating with someone via phone, paying close attention to your tone and how you’re responding is important. Responding with empathy will show that you’re listening.
Asking follow-up questions or statements to what they say will show you’re paying attention to their needs and triaging them like an individual, not just a number to convert. After all, senior living can be a deeply emotional decision.
5. Establish a Connection With Your Prospect
With intent listening and empathetic responses, you can build a personal connection with the prospect. You can further connect by finding something in common–this could be a similar experience or a shared interest.
6. Ask the Hard Questions
When you’ve made the connection with your prospect, you can start asking more difficult questions. This will help you get to the root of why they’re looking at senior living options.
You can learn about their fears of moving, what they’re concerned about with their health, and anything holding them back from deciding to move to the community.
Key reminders:
- Remember that this can be an incredibly emotional decision for your prospect. Address concerns instead of pushing past them and show understanding that this would be a life change.
- You’re an authoritative source in the community. Be prepared with concrete information that can help assuage concerns or provide more insight into how living at the community will benefit the prospect.
7. Personalize the Creative Follow-Up
The follow-up is your opportunity to make a lasting positive impression on the client. Adding details about your interaction shows you listened to your prospect’s story, understood their concerns, and remembered their likes and dislikes.
When a follow-up resonates with the prospect, you will likely get a response and continue the conversation.
Sherpa at Charter Senior Living
Charter Senior Living uses a customer relationship management (CRM) system called Sherpa that supports your sales team at every step of the way. It provides training and builds out the sales process so you can follow it step by step.
Sherpa is designed for people and emphasizes the importance of human connection. With this person-centered selling ethos, you will be able to connect with your prospects and keep track of their readiness to make the move to senior living.
Charter Senior Living Is Here for You
Charter Senior Living provides expert knowledge on how to be successful in the senior living industry. Whether you’re starting a community, growing your community, or ensuring your community is implementing best practices to be a leader in the industry, Charter Senior Living is here for you. Contact us today for more information on how we can empower you and your company.