By Laureen McGuire, Vice President of Sales Services at Love & Company
As competition for prospects in the senior living space continues to grow—with more rental communities under development and new senior living providers entering the field—it has never been more critical that senior living organizations meet their sales goals.
Just as critical, though, is being able to quickly understand and course-correct your sales team’s process when weekly and monthly numbers begin to slip.
Capacity Blocks: Assessing Sales Performance
Timely diagnosis to identify the roadblocks preventing your sales team from reaching or exceeding its sales goals is critical for your organization to stay on the right revenue track. Often, missed sales goals can be traced back to one of two challenges: (1) a lack of prospects for your community (lead generation) or (2) the sales team failing to convert those prospects to sales effectively (sales conversion).
The optimal place to begin identifying barriers to reaching your sales goals is in your community’s CRM – this is where your accurate recordkeeping and CRM management will pay off in dividends.
An analysis of your CRM will quickly reveal three critical pieces of information:
- If the sales team has the right volume of quality leads to enable it to achieve its goals
- If the sales team is achieving sales conversion ratios that align with industry benchmarks
- If the sales team is effectively advancing prospects through the sales continuum
A review of sales team processes is also a valuable exercise to ensure the team is running efficiently and using the bulk of its time to focus on revenue-generating tasks. And as you’re about to see, understanding these data points for efficiency can have a significant impact on your organization’s bottom line.
Hitting and Exceeding Sales Goals – The Rule of 78
To better quantify the impact on revenue to your organization when sales goals are exceeded, consider The Rule of 78 and its cumulative impact on revenue generation for your organization. One additional move-in per month for a year over current monthly revenue will provide 78 months of additional revenue at the end of a year.
For example, if your organization goes from 4 move-ins per month to 5 move-ins per month, you’ll realize 78 months of added revenue. In addition, if your average monthly fee is $3,000 per month, you will gain $234,000 in added revenue (78 x $3,000 = $234,000).
Looking at these figures, it’s easy to see the positive economic impact a fine-tuned sales team can have on your organization. So how do you most quickly identify the factors that are negatively impacting sales efforts?
Sales Team Support
For sales teams to be successful at every step, they need more than just foundational senior living sales training; they also need ongoing support, continued reinforcement of senior living sales best practices, and guidance on how to use their CRM data to identify opportunities and resource needs. The most successful senior living sales teams we’ve worked with have benefited from one-on-one time with an experienced senior living sales mentor.
When we do this for our clients at Love & Company, we’re able to shadow sales team members on tours, during calls and at lead-generating events, so that we can offer valuable feedback that enables them to improve their performance and develop a solid formula for repeat success, month over month.
If you think your sales team would benefit from a deeper understanding of their opportunities, we’d love to talk about it. Reach out to contact Tim Bracken at 410-207-0013, or click here to contact us.
