Converting prospects to qualified leads is a little bit like planting a garden. You get the soil prepped and ready and you plant your seeds. But it doesn’t stop there – oh, no. In order to get your flowers blooming, you have to care for them. Nurture them. Give them everything they need (not too much, not too little) so they can fully germinate from seeds to shoots to beautiful flowers. The same thing needs to happen to your prospects – those seeds you’ve gathered – in order to help them grow into qualified, valuable leads.
You’ve learned how your sales team is operating. You have a steady stream of prospects flowing in from the myriad of surveys you’ve sent out. Now, it’s time for that final step – preparing your sales team to inform and nurture your prospects into leads and, finally, to residents of your senior living community.
“Now, more than ever, traditional tactics that once worked for senior living operators are proving to be less and less effective,” says Malissa Illiano, Vice President of Market Research at SageAge Strategies. “The next step is to utilize our GROW sales training program to grow the team so they have proper support to obtain leads and move them through the pipeline.”
GROW is the growth-focused and change-inspiring sales training developed by SageAge Strategies specifically for providers across the senior living spectrum – Independent Living, Assisted Living, Memory Care, SNFs, CCRCs and Home Care.
“As experts in the senior living marketing space for more than years, we’ve seen and experienced almost every senior living sales approach and training out there,” says Malissa. “As a result, we’ve discovered one overarching truth: sales cannot happen without the ability to begin and navigate difficult, meaningful conversations and create an authentic connection with the prospect and family.”
Unlike selling and nurturing prospects in other businesses, sales in senior living are driven by discomfort and a need. Your potential prospects are connecting with you at a time where they’re feeling bewildered, inconvenienced or even grieving. Your sales team’s job is to help your prospects discover and make sense of their feelings and thoughts so they can take appropriate steps. It sounds easy and straightforward – and it can be, once you and your sales team have shifted your approach accordingly.
GROW helps your sales team learn how to prompt and guide conversations while also creating connections via sincere empathy. By building that rapport, you and your team members become partners in each family’s decision-making. It’s a big shift from simply selling your services to helping provide a solution.
Empathy isn’t something that can be studied or learned from a book. In order to gather those skills, it needs to be experienced and practiced until it becomes second nature. GROW is built on that insight, providing opportunities for your sales counselors to deepen their empathy, develop skills and provide ways to open the right conversation, and teaching the strategies for handling and navigating what comes next. It’s an inward-focused approach that works with any system you currently use from Bild to Sherpa to Action Selling.
“GROW is about developing a human connection, empathy and authenticity that fits inside any transactional process you’ve already been using or want to use,” says Malissa. “You can keep your current marketing stages and approaches without making any changes to the transactional side of things. GROW is simply adding an emotional depth to your current structure, allowing you to partner with families and seniors to create readiness – no matter where they are right now.”
GROW is an ongoing approach, and the sales training is just the beginning. That’s why SageAge Strategies has developed binders and ongoing classes to help welcome your sales team into this new way of thinking by engaging them with new, strategic and revenue-producing habits.
To learn more about how you can use GROW to – well – grow your sales team into a well-oiled, empathetic partnership, please contact SageAge Strategies for a list of our services and pricing.
SageAge Strategies is a multiple-award-winning, strategic growth, marketing and consulting organization that operates exclusively in the unique senior living marketplace. For more information, please call or email Melinda Schmitz at (816) 349-0464 or [email protected]. You can also visit us on our website at sageage.com.
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