For years, senior living operators have stressed the importance of operational creativity to serve the next generation of residents. But for all their talk of new ideas, operators are still not always iterating on their processes and services in the way I think they need to.
This week, a group of senior living sales professionals assembled a virtual event aiming to change that trend. As the name implied, “45 Ideas in 45 Minutes” was an attempt to share dozens of ideas with attendees in a rapid-fire format.
During the panel, sales and marketing leaders from Heritage Communities, Phoenix Senior Living, Sonida Senior Living (NYSE: SNDA) and Chartwell Retirement discussed a range of topics, from different forms of outreach and follow-up to more efficient discovery and real-world uses for AI.
Although I think the ideas shared during the event were notable, I was also struck by the event’s format. Senior living operators must infuse their operations with new ideas for a new consumer, but I don’t always see them working together and cross-pollinating concepts to push the industry forward. To that end, I understand companies keeping their cards close to their chests given the nature of competition today.
But the senior living industry needs creative and unique new ideas, and it’s through these sort of events that I think operators can widen their perspectives and build a new future for the industry. That’s a mindset that industry professionals like event co-organizer and Heritage Communities Chief Marketing Officer Lacy Jungman are embracing wholeheartedly.
“We don’t look at our competitors as our enemies, we look at them as collaborators,” she said during the webinar. “At the end of the day, we all have the same desired outcome, which is to help more seniors live better inside of our communities and our retirement communities.”
I agree with Jungman and believe that whatever the senior living industry can do now to share best practices is worth it given the current need to reinvent what operators offer in their communities and the difficulty in doing so alone.
In this members-only SHN+ Update, I’ll reflect on the recent webinar and other recent happenings in senior living to offer the following takeaways:
- Rapid-fire ideas from four senior living sales leaders
- Why the industry needs more idea exchanges like this
- Two trends I think are ripe for innovation in the future
Rapid-fire ideas abound
The senior living industry is in the midst of a sales sea change – that’s the notion I got tuning into the June 17 webinar. During the webinar, the panelists shared multiple small sales strategies that, in piecemeal, could make a bigger difference in senior living communities.
Multiple ideas hinged on operators deepening their connections in a local area. For example, Jungman shared how one Heritage community in Sioux City, Iowa, hosts bingo games with cash prizes that come from the community’s marketing budget.
Follow-up is especially important at Heritage, and Jungman stressed the importance of perfecting the little touches, such as phone calls and emails, that keep the conversation going with prospects.
Leaders with Ontario, Canada-based Chartwell Retirement host seasonal tasting events to showcase culinary flavors of the company’s communities. The company does so to help prospects and their families understand that senior living food can be just as toothsome as restaurant fare, according to Senior Director of Sales Strategy at Chartwell Retirement Residences Amanda Richards.
Tours are “pre-season games” for Phoenix Senior Living, said Vice President of Sales & Marketing Justin Harden. By that, he means a tour is just the start of the sales process, and the “real work” of moving in a resident begins thereafter.
All four panelists discussed the need to keep sales teams accountable. Senior living community leaders should make themselves available for questions or other follow-up and track sales staff to make sure they’re hitting their marks and keeping up with a prospect, Sonida Senior Living Director of Sales Operations Kari Wilson
Harden added that typically when a community has a broken sales process, it’s related to a lack of accountability.
“Statistics show that 47% of folks that are contacted by the ED after the after the tour within 24 hours will move into your community,” he said. “That’s a number that I don’t want to gamble with.”
Harden added that it’s important for operators to figure out communication preferences of prospects so they can keep in touch with them. Some people prefer calls or texts, while others prefer emails. Knowing that preference can make the difference between making sale and not.
Senior living sales professionals must also stay curious and learn as much as they can about a prospect. Realizing that early in her career was a “mic-drop” moment for Richards.
“Our job isn’t to tell people what they should do, it’s to inspire them to want to make this decision, because we’ve asked the right questions that guide them down that path,” she said.
Playing it safe by only talking to prospects to “check a box” and not to actually make a move-in is a mistake that some sales pros make, Jungman said. To that point, Richards said it’s a good strategy to identify and pare down non-revenue-generating tasks.
“Is it worth it to make 25 calls and leave 25 messages, or to have one really great interaction with a prospect who’s going to move to the next step?” she said. “We generally have one, maybe two, people who are focused externally trying to bring in new business. So give yourself permission to spend time on the activities that are going to do that, and let’s work with our operations partners to deliver an exceptional experience to our residents.”
Using technology the right way is a hard but important directive for senior living operators. The allure of new tech and AI platforms are powerful, but operators must understand how and why they are using those processes.
For example, Heritage is using AI to analyze and transcribe recordings of tours and offer next steps and notes in a digestible format.
“Using AI to be able to help the director take things off their sales plates and help them focus more on that relationship is critically important,” Jungman said.
Richards noted that Chartwell’s prospects are using AI as a replacement for Google searches, and they are asking such platforms questions they might have asked during an intro call a few years ago.
“By the time your prospects get to you, they already think they have the answers to a lot of the questions that perhaps were burning at the beginning,” she said. “The advantage is that they’re coming to you with those, so they’re more highly qualified and they’ve already asked the hard questions.”
Sonida is using AI to help field after-hours inquiries. The company’s AI agents can even perform some limited discovery.
“Then, in the morning when our team is there, then they can pick up the ball and run with it,” Wilson said. “There’s a lot of preparation that AI can do really to enhance the experience for the prospect and move them forward for us,”
Phoenix is using AI phone agents for a similar aim, Harden said.
“We actually utilize an agent that will answer our phone calls for inbound calls and read and enter everything in the CRM for our sales team,” he added. “We’re actually trying to incorporate some more discovery questions into that agent.”
The importance of brainstorming for the future
While all of the ideas shared during the webinar were worth taking note of – and there are even more I did not include in this article – I thought the rapid-fire format itself was of equal importance.
The senior living industry is ripe for innovation from within. Although I find operators are not typically short on ideas, I do think they are sometimes trying to reinvent the wheel independent of one another. By embracing more cross-operator discussions like this one, I think the industry can better iterate on its best practices.
That might sound like a no-brainer, and we all know the saying about how a rising tide lifts all boats. And yet, I still see and hear companies discussing the same topics, time and time again, without actually moving the ball forward.
One big area where I see this occurring is in the industry’s quest to meet the middle market, or at least make communities more affordable to residents. There are multiple middle-market strategies underway from operators across the country, but I still think other companies can get even more creative to serve cash-strapped future residents.
The senior living industry has a real opportunity to serve millions of residents beyond its current scope by making its services more affordable but still relatively few ideas for the radical transformations needed to do so. I think a rapid-fire format like the “45 Ideas” webinar would benefit the middle-market push and help move the ball forward in that regard.
Staffing is another operational category where I think the industry needs some big new ideas. Operators have shared with me multiple interesting and unique strategies for boosting their workforces, from employees working A/B schedules to housing that helps employees deal with the cost of living in their area.
All of this said, I do think the senior living industry is increasingly embracing these kinds of brainstorming methods. Jungman is taking the “45 Ideas” concept on the road to the next SMASH conference in October, while we here at Senior Housing News are hosting our SHN TRENDS event in August that is all about various industry trends, including a panel on “ghost trends” with Jungman.
Bottom-line, these are the kind of discussions I find myself drawn to these days, and they are ones worth having now before the rest of the boomers move in.