This story is part of your SHN+ subscription
In 2025, senior living sales and marketing leaders are adapting to the rise of grandchildren as decision-drivers; pondering new strategies for pricing, engagement and education; and implementing new technology to aid their efforts.
These are just a few of the big ideas shared during the recent Senior Housing News Sales & Marketing Summit, held this week in Bonita Springs, Florida.
Senior living operators have a huge supply-demand opportunity ahead of them in 2025 that rivals and potentially exceeds any that has come before it. But to win over the incoming generation of residents, operators believe they must properly convey the value of senior living communities through a combination of new and old sales techniques and strategies.
To Heritage Communities Chief Marketing Officer Lacy Jungman, now is the time to “get into the weeds” and drill down on the basics of selling.
“Q2, Q3, are typically good times of year for us. So we at Heritage are ramping up for how we can accelerate. How do we incentivize our sales team a little bit differently, knowing that we are going to see an influx in occupancy?” she said. “It’s a differentiator for those organizations that do heavily invest in training, and that’s going to be key.”
Based on what I heard during the two-day summit, I believe many senior living sales teams are ready to execute on the demand straightaway ahead, but that it will take more discipline and some creativity to usher in and welcome a new generation of residents.
Indeed, leaders at the conference said their teams are preparing to “buckle down,” get “back to the basics,” and “refine our processes” this year.
I also believe that the performance gap among operators could widen as some level up sales and marketing for a new era of demand, making it imperative for companies to analyze and improve their processes now while it’s still early innings of the incoming demand wave.
In this members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze several of the topics that were discussed at the conference and offer the following takeaways:
- Why senior living operators are stressing sales discipline and focusing on the fundamentals in 2025
- How operators are pushing sales processes into the future through dynamic pricing, new hiring practices and models that give prospects more transparency and control
- How operators are catering to an increasingly shifting customer base, including by going one generation beyond so-called “adult daughters”
Back to the basics in ‘25
Among the ways that senior living operators are tackling the big opportunity ahead is by getting back to the basics of selling. To Jungman, the industry is already awash in good ideas – the challenge ahead is refining those processes to be more efficient in an effort to keep the move-in wheel quickly turning.
Among those processes that need improving is how operators follow up with prospects. While it was once common to get in touch within a few days, today’s prospective residents and their loved ones want to be contacted quickly – often in a matter of minutes or hours. Jungman believes that, on that front, the industry could do a better job.
“Follow-up has to have a really strong cadence. We give up, oftentimes too early,” she said.
In the year ahead, effective follow-up with prospects will be “king” – and operators must find new ways to escape what she coined as the senior living sales “friend zone,” which can stymie new sales. While a resident might lean on a salesperson as a companion or confidant, that doesn’t always translate into a move-in at the end of the day. Instead of being sounding boards, Jungman believes salespeople should be both empathetic and honest.
“We have to be the ones to tell the truth. We are trusted to be the educators, not to be their friend,” she said. “That’s the shift that we’re making in follow-up and our sales process.”
All of this will no doubt be on other operators’ minds this year as they seek to achieve similar sales goals. I think operators are running out of time to level up their sales processes before they are knee-deep in demand from the boomers.
One theme I heard over and over again during the event is that senior living prospects are doing more research than ever before, and operators must be ready to strike while the iron is hot given that even a small delay could mean that a resident moves in with a competitor. And to that end, I think that the performance gap among operators could widen in certain markets as companies increasingly raise their sales games. In my eyes, 2025 is important for setting a pace for the years to follow – and some could find they are moving more slowly than their competitors.
Pricing, tech, transparency evolving
Senior living sales in 2025 is about more than the basics. There are also several rapidly evolving trends that operators are paying attention to, with occupancy and revenue on the line.
Among them is how to price senior living units. In recent years, some operators have begun to explore dynamic pricing, meaning pricing that changes based on different factors. That is already a common practice in some industries, such as hotels that alter rates for rooms and amenities based on demand, or airlines that increase ticket prices as flights are sold.
There are plenty of questions and concerns around the specifics of how dynamic pricing can best be implemented in senior living. For instance, providers are thinking about how to navigate conversations with residents who are upset that their neighbor is paying a different rate than they are – not to mention that algorithm-based apartment pricing has drawn Department of Justice action.
But leaders, including Jungman, believe senior living operators could adopt dynamic models with some creativity. And they say that providers should not shy away from explaining the reasoning behind dynamic pricing to residents, given that senior living companies must operate by sound business principles.
“We can care about our prospects and still care about the bottom line. It’s not a question of either-or, it’s a conversation about ‘and.’ We can do both,” she said.
Technology is also an ever-shifting landscape for senior living operators – that is obviously no secret in 2025 with the continued rise of AI and increasingly sophisticated data platforms. But that evolution has raised the bar for senior living efforts, especially with regard to sales and marketing.
LCS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Rick Westermann also stressed getting back to the basics in 2025 to make good on the opportunity at hand. But LCS is a large operating company and its leaders can’t be everywhere at once. That’s why LCS is investing in better data and analytics.
For example, the company has integrated its prospect survey process into its growing data analytics capabilities to determine where to focus its efforts and how to improve on its processes.
“We can get into the dashboard, look at the trends and the most recent surveys from the last month,” Westermann said. “What are the opportunities right now that we have at this community, and what in the sales process are we missing? Where did we not follow up?”
Data is an especially important tool as senior living communities approach full occupancy. Although it’s one task to take a community up to 90% occupancy, it’s another entirely to grow census from there, according to Benchmark Senior Living VP of Sales Pamela Filby. But data and technology can help give operators a leg up in that effort.
Instead of simply increasing the flow of lead volume to up occupancy, the company has taken a more surgical approach by focusing on leads that are statistically more likely to convert into move-ins. Using that approach, Benchmark has grown its inquiry-to-move-in conversion rate to 13%, up from 10% just four years ago.
“There are a lot of metrics that you should be looking at prior to the lead getting to the sales rep to see what they have to work with,” she said during her panel discussion.
As operators evolve their sales techniques, so too are they giving prospects more control over the process, a philosophy that stems from the fact that the incoming baby boomer generation is doing its research and carefully weighing its senior housing options.
Although a salesperson will likely always be part of the senior living sales process, there are ways that operators can enable buyers to satisfy their own curiosities and drive more of the sales experience.
For example, it’s becoming more common for senior living operators to use online technology to allow prospects to view communities in detail – as if touring – before ever talking to a salesperson.
“We need to be getting all of these tools. If we don’t have them, we need to be getting them in place and equipping our consumers to drive the process, and equipping ourselves at the same time to meet the consumer there,” said Michelle Anderson, vice president of sales and marketing for Provision Living.
That said, she added the industry still must cater to “people who are not quite ready” for an all-digital sales process.
“I do think in the next decade, we will be at a place where everything is digitized, but I just don’t think we’re quite there,” she said.
As the use of sales technology evolves, exactly who senior living sales is catering to is also in a state of flux. One interesting phenomenon at hand is that more grandchildren of prospects – millennials and younger – are playing an outsized role in the sales process. Typically, they are being called in to do fast research or offer their tech savviness.
“The granddaughter is helping her mom, who is the adult daughter, who is helping her parent,” Jungman said. “We’re watching this bubble up a little bit more as we hear and listen to recorded calls that come in on our lines.”
These are just a few of the evolving trends in 2025, and you will hear more about the event in the coming weeks on Senior Housing News. I think the bottom line is that senior living sales is anything but static in 2025. The demand opportunity is indeed huge, but mathematics alone won’t be enough to take senior living operators to their maximum sales and marketing potential.
Based on what I heard at the Sales and Marketing Summit, I believe that there are already companies making good headway on their next chapters. Even so, the best-laid plans will require discipline to achieve in 2025.
