Senior Living Professionals Need a Sales Community, So We Built One

In my 30+ years in senior living sales, I’ve found myself in several different roles. For example, I developed, managed, and marketed communities I owned. I also had a chance to do rapid-fill turnaround campaigns for dozens of other providers, for all levels of care, across the US and Canada. Clearly, however, the role that I found most challenging—as well as most impactful and personally rewarding—has been doing hands-on sales.

Sales are vital to the well-being of our communities and of our prospects. Good selling practices are transformative. Yet, this crucial part of the business is all-too-often overlooked in event schedules or within industry resources. While marketing seems to get a lot of attention, many communities have more than enough qualified leads already. Effective, direct, hands-on selling offers a significant opportunity to convert a lot more of the prospects already in our lead base. That’s why it’s my personal mission to support professionals to work for better conversion rates, faster fills, higher occupancies, and to serve more seniors who are ambivalent about the product we sell.

A More Effective Way to Grow Occupancy

There is nothing quite like being part of a rapid-fill leasing team at a senior living community. Nowhere else have I ever seen such a robust package of benefitsturned down by roughly 90% of the very people that they were designed for. At first glance, the predictable and recurring level of emotional resistance to senior living defies logic.

From the beginnings of my senior housing career in 1988 until today, I continue to see a critical need for a more effective approach to how we communicate, engage with and sell to older adults. Reliance on transactional, “volume-and-velocity” sales puts our focus on generating more leads, more call-outs, more tours to increase conversions. And it simply doesn’t work with a customer base that just isn’t emotionally ready to move.

In my quest for a solution that works for seniors and providers, I have dedicated a career to researching, field testing, documenting, and teaching Prospect-Centered Selling® (PCS). This approach consistently produces better conversion rates, faster fills, and higher occupancies, especially with higher-functioning prospects. Today, more than ever, with the active support and collaboration of dozens of the most successful industry sales professionals, I believe that with PCS we can and should do better.

This is the reason that together we are creating a dedicated space for senior living sales professionals to connect, learn, adapt, collaborate and enhance PCS:One On One Sales Academy.

Rather than focusing on how to generate more or “better” leads, One On One Sales Academy teaches and explores ways to convert a lot more of the leads that we already have. The goal is to motivate and guide a lot more higher functioning prospects to “get ready.”

A Members Resource for Senior Living Sales

We created One On One Sales Academy because we saw a need not just for better sales outcomes, but for better tools, metrics and processes to support the people that we rely on to convert qualified prospects into satisfied residents.

The challenge in converting higher-functioning prospects relates to confronting and overcoming emotional resistance. Effective conversions require investment of what we call Time in the Selling Zone® (TSZ). So often we encounter sales professionals who deeply care, but often feel overwhelmed, underprepared, or unable to invest the time needed to build trust and untangle emotional resistance. We've also worked with leaders who want to improve their team’s conversion rates but struggle to adopt processes that promote more time with fewer prospects.

It’s about time that we adopt, teach and support a more effective approach to sales. That is why we are launching One On One Sales Academy with a mission to reach full occupancies and to improve the lives of countless older adults and families who are stuck on making any decision about senior living, until they have no choice to move due to declining health.

Is increasing market absorption rates from 10% to 15% a lofty goal? Maybe so. But if we did, we would not only generate enough sales to fill every vacancy that currently exists but would also drive demand for new construction and higher monthly fees. Moreover, we have the tools to get there, namely a results-based sales methodology. PCS has been foundational to countless turnaround campaigns across the US, Canada and UK for some of the most successful organizations in the industry.

PCS is the subject of the award-winning documentary A Matter of Time. Read the press release here.

Sales Academy’s 5 Pillars to PCS Success

As part of the group membership, members of Sales Academy will help PCS-oriented leaders develop the skills and strategies to increase conversions with fewer leads. We segment our teaching about this unique engagement and conversion approach into five key learning pillars.

1) A paradigm shift. Success in adopting a successful PCS culture begins by shifting our culture, perspective, metrics and processes from being transactional, solution- or product-centric to one that puts an emphasis on understanding, motivating, guiding and investing time with individual prospects. You can think of this as a shift from “hunting for urgency” to one of “cultivating readiness.”

Another way to think about this shift is focusing more of your selling time and efforts on the prospects who aren't ready to move. These so-called "cold" prospects that are stuck in the middle of your sales funnel. The ones that inquired and possibly even toured, but they still aren’t ready to commit. Speed-to-lead sellers tend to give up on prospects that go “cold" and move on instead to generating a new batch of leads. Cultivation of the so called cold leads using PCS can, however, double your overall move-in conversion rates.

Cultivation requires that we learn to use our selling time (TSZ) to build trust…before we offer solutions. Time invested in specific activities came to represent a quantitative measure of engagement. Note TSZ does not include marketing or move-in coordination, even though many companies expect their leasing teams to be involved with these activities. Instead, TSZ does include planning advances and creative follow-up, important sales-driving activities that are often overlooked by speed-to-lead sellers.

2) Connection. Before offering logical, product-based solutions, PCS teaches us to first build authentic, trusting relationships. We use empathy and seek to truly understand our prospects as people filled with life stories, themes and values. People who are experiencing an extremely vulnerable time of life, one filled with loss and uncertainty.

3) Untangling. Building connection builds trust and enables us to help prospects identify, assess and work through the emotional barriers to a logical decision about whether, when and where to spend their remaining years. This is really where the magic happens, and it takes special skills, adapted from motivational interviewing and the psychology of change, to identify and navigate a path towards a decision to buy.

4) Planning advances. Together with prospects and their decision-influencers, we can then come up with incremental, proactive and meaningful advances to guide our prospect towards being ready–ready to make a logical decision about whether, when and where to move.

5) Relevant metrics. Practitioners of PCS have done extensive research of what factors cause higher conversion rates. One On One Sales Academy will share this research and encourage further studies about the factors that truly drive better, more effective sales performance.

Learning From the Sales Masters

PCS was never intended to be a static model. Rather, by its nature, PCS was designed to be iterative and responsive to ongoing sales challenges and opportunities. To ensure that PCS can continue to grow and remain effective, One On One has brought together many of the top senior living professionals in their fields of expertise. They are sales-oriented professionals who have proven success at adapting PCS into their own strategies or consultations.

A key ingredient to bring success to Sales Academy was the selection of Reed Davis to lead our efforts. Reed Davis is a naturally curious, empathic and helping person. He has studied, researched and practiced the art of communication and sales to older adults. He loves teaching others. I am honored and proud to have Reed join One On One Sales Academy as our Chief Learning Officer.

Following is a list of other successful industry sales professionals who have already contributed their knowledge and enthusiasm to Sales Academy. Our intention is to continue to clarify, refresh and grow PCS as we continue to identify and recruit other contributors and masterclass presenters. Together, I hope we can help significantly increase overall market absorption rates, helping hundreds of thousands more older adults enjoy the benefits of senior living through more effective selling.

• Aaron Catoe, 12 Oaks Senior Living
• Jeff Gronemeyer, Harmony Senior Services
• Lacy Jungman, Heritage Communities
• Sylvia Kurinsky, Charter Senior Living
• Kristen Kutac Ward, Austera Group
• Patrick Leonard, The Gatesworth Communities
• Mike Miller, Primo Solutions
• Stacy Muehlher, The Gatesworth Communities
• Kent Mulkey, Elevate Coaching
• Dave Permuter, The Gatesworth Communities
• Julie Podowitz, Grow Your Occupancy
• Kelly Singleton Myers, KJB Sales Consulting
• Edie Smith, ProMatura

A New Era for Professional Sales Learning

As an industry, there is a lot of opportunity ahead of us to personalize and professionalize the sales process. Years ago, my friend and mentor Tony Mullen set the stage for focusing on more effective sales conversions.

His annual Sales Summit created a hub for industry professionals to collaborate, network and learn from each other. When he created the nation’s first professional education programs for senior housing executives, first at Johns Hopkins and later at the UMBC Erickson School of Aging, he made sure that there were modules focused specifically on sales.

One On One Sales Academy will create unique and ongoing opportunities to connect with and learn from other senior living sales professionals. In this sense, Sales Academy will complement existing conferences and initiatives that are focused on other critical areas related to senior living success: operations, technology, policy, financing, new lead generation, etc.

I believe, and many successful operators would agree, that PCS is the most effective approach to boosting conversion and market penetration rates. That’s why we are creating Sales Academy for members to learn, connect, and master PCS for themselves. We are determined to increase occupancy and deliver an incredible life change for countless more seniors and their families.