Metrics that Matter #13: Taking Sales from Reactive to Proactive
One of my favorite things about the senior living industry is how everyone is willing to share their expertise. For this week's Metrics That Matter post we partnered with Jennifer Dixon, Founder at JD Solutions Group and an expert in senior living sales & marketing. We talked about how to take sales from REACTIVE to PROACTIVE by looking at different (and overlooked) data to get the full picture. Read on to learn more!
Everyone knows the basic sales KPIs: inquiries, leads, tours, deposits, move-ins, etc. These KPIs give you the performance of your current sales strategy: but what if you want to understand if it’s even the right strategy?
That’s where a different approach is required! You need to look at data OUTSIDE of your CRM to understand where to double down. Here’s how it works:
* Which lead sources are most efficient? It’s not just about tracking the volume or conversion rates for each lead source. You also need to consider the cost per lead, and that information might be in your general ledger rather than the CRM. If you can break out the marketing / referral fees by lead channel then you can get an accurate sense of cost per lead and cost per move-in.
* You can also review past move-ins to see if there are similarities of residents who thrive. You can assess this in a few ways: average length of stay, resident satisfaction surveys, and move-out reasons. Ideally you are trying to find traits that can be used to target future sales strategies or rule-out other strategies.
* Here’s a specific example: one larger operator was heavily reliant on paid referrals for leads. It felt great to have a strong pipeline of leads (and move-ins), but those move-ins were expensive (due to referral fees) and actually not a good fit: they were typically higher acuity and thus had a lower average LoS vs. other residents. If you only looked at CRM data you might miss this!
We can borrow from the idea of “Revenue Operations”: the team that supports your sales team by bringing in additional data to enrich what’s in your sales funnel (and your CRM) to drive more revenue beyond just closing leads. This is a common concept in the Tech industry but still relatively new in senior living where teams (and data ) are more siloed. For example, the Sales team looks at the CRM (but it only tells part of the story) and Marketing may use Hubspot while Operations tracks length of stay, rates, and resident outcomes in the eHR / rent roll. A “Revenue Operations Approach” brings together these pieces of the customer journey and leverages them where needed – all for a better prospect and resident / family experience!
To wrap it up: finding the right sales strategy requires looking at more than just CRM to get a full picture of the customer journey. With the full picture you can plan for the future and go from reactive to proactive!