Sponsored by
Successes & Struggles: What’s Working? Adapting your tactics to meet these new consumer needs is vital, but communities are having an easier time applying some tactics than others. Following the initial onslaught and response, we’ve seen a few commonalities surface in communities’ performance. Many senior living communities are facing the same struggles in a few key areas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those communities are also having similar successes.
The recent survey of community sales and marketing leaders shows that social media response, crisis management, hot lead outreach, and lead database maintenance are all high points. Many com- munities are excelling in adapting and shifting to meet the needs of this new normal.
To set up your community for success both now and later, it’s vital to recognize and adapt to these catalysts for change. Many of the technologies and strategies that will help your community succeed and keep up with competition going forward are already available to you — they just need to be adapted and streamlined. You must meet new challenges with new solutions; if you use the same tools in the same way, you may fi nd yourself falling behind.
To meet the new needs of consumers and keep up with the vir- tual shift happening across all industries, communities must fully embrace technology and the tools it provides. It’s important to be nimble, be prepared, and focus on taking control of what you can. Train your team how to keep prospects motivated without in-person methods, enable them to learn how to hold virtual tours and conduct better virtual calls, continue to create helpful content, clean up your processes, and keep your pipeline open and fi lled.
Future Strategies: What Will Continue? Creative and innovative solutions may be urgent now, but we won’t see them go away when the immediate danger of COVID-19 sub- sides. Even when in-person, face-to-face engagements become a reality once again, the virtual tools that were born from necessity will be at all communities’ disposal and can be leveraged to stay competitive.
Many communities don’t feel confi dent in the proper adoption and use of technology, and the ability to nurture and educate leads eff ectively.
The pandemic jump-started the embrace of technical infrastruc- ture and increased adoption of educating and nurturing tools for the senior living industry. Now that the groundwork has been laid for new strategies and new mindsets, this shift in philosophy and business acumen will continue to evolve as we move through the fallout … in whatever form that may take.
Virtual selling isn’t going away. Nurturing and educating leads and the ability to adjust the selling mindset properly aren’t going away. The more resilient and adaptable your sales and marketing eff orts are now, the better set up for success you’ll be after you’ve weathered the storm. If you empower your community to grow, become more buoyant, and take steps forward each day in the pursuit of realistic goals, you’ll come out on the other side stronger, more competitive, and with a greater skill set than ever before.
When it comes to virtual sales events, virtual calls, and making more personalized, nurtured connections with leads, sales and mar- keting eff orts have faltered. These aren’t brand-new problems, but they’re being ushered to the forefront, and in turn are causing us all to propel change and innovation in areas that have previously fallen to the wayside.
Forward Focus: What Can Be Done? This is uncharted territory for many in the senior living industry. Right now, a top priority for communities across the nation is the need to learn to use virtual technology, and personalize strategies to better meet consumers where they are in the buyer’s journey.
26 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE MAY/JUNE 2020
Change can be overwhelming. Adding the unfamiliarity of new processes and technology to the mix during an already stressful time is even more uncomfortable and diffi cult. Just remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. We’re in this together, one step at a time.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
