By Karen Adams, VP of Market Intelligence and Sarah Fleischer, Data Analytics Director
Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what your prospects were thinking? And not just what you have read about what seniors across the country are thinking and feeling, but specifically your lead base?
Your community is unique, and so are your prospects. A successful next few months for your organization can come from having a deeper, more refined understanding of the current mindset of the people in your lead base.
This is exactly why Love & Company has developed a new lead base survey designed to help you discover your prospects’ concerns, priorities, objections and goals associated with making a major life decision in the current environment.
The primary function of this survey is to support sales counselors amid COVID-19 by inviting people who are on the lead list (this may include waitlist members) to simply engage. The survey not only elicits information from prospects about their fears and concerns, but also about things that are important to them and what has changed in their mind as the pandemic experience has evolved.
With each response, sales counselors get valuable information enabling them to have an authentic, empathetic conversation with each lead. This is especially important because we know that today’s prospects are much less receptive to marketing communications that appear contrived.
The goals of the survey are to:
- Enable executive team members to quantify the degree to which lead list members are receptive to sales and marketing initiatives
- Predispose subjects to engage
- Gain information to guide sales and marketing messaging
- Garner information about individuals to assist sales team members
- Obtain individual requests for a call from the community
This survey is designed to better understand leads, particularly those who at one point have shown interest by inquiring about the community but have not yet been inspired to act or make a deposit.
It also invites them to request a call from sales counselors (we call them “experienced guides” in the survey) and provides discussion points tailored to those individuals’ responses.
Our pilot survey yielded:
- An 11 percent overall response rate
- 148 total responses
- 17 respondents who specifically requested a follow-up call
That last result is significant because typically a sales team member is tasked with making outbound calls without knowing whether the lead is interested. With the survey identifying 17 people who specifically requested outreach, it helped the sales team hone in on those raised hands and be able to call them with confidence.
Armed with the additional discovery and knowledge of the key barriers that each person was facing, the pilot survey’s sales team has so far converted those 17 raised hands into one 10% depositor, one new top-10 lead, and two completed and approved financial applications. None of the 17 has been lost-leaded at this point, so conversations continue.
To accomplish its goals, the lead base survey itself measures:
- Prospects’ interest in moving to the community before—and since—COVID-19
- How appealing prospects find their current residence and how that may have changed since COVID-19
- Respondents’ degree of concern about four key factors in today’s environment:
- The economy and its impact on their financial resources
- A prospect’s home value
- A prospect’s ability to sell his or her home
- The continued spread of COVID-19
- How interested respondents are in having a plan for the next 10-15 years for learning, teaching, growing, contributing
- What prospects are thinking about how they will use their time and energy when the crisis passes, in terms of what’s most important to them
- If the importance of access to various Life Plan Community amenities and resources has increased, decreased or stayed the same compared to before COVID-19
Overall, this survey generates contacts as well as the intel to inform discussions with them. It will also help refine your community’s marketing and sales messaging—even with leads who did not request a call or are not currently in your CRM.
By asking the types of questions above, it also helps sales counselors tailor empathetic, authentic conversations with prospects. Today, this type of interaction is more valuable than ever.
Whether your organization wants to gather usable intel from its broader lead base or find out what will keep depositors and waitlisters committed, Love & Company has the survey tools to help. And because we funded the development of these surveys, you can learn a lot about the mindset of the people in your pipeline with just a modest investment
To learn more or to inquire about conducting one of these unique surveys at your community, please contact us by clicking here or calling Tim Bracken at 410-207-0013 today.
