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Thursday, July 9, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
SENIOR HOUSING SALES CONFERENCE
Super Conference Overview
The goal of our Sales Conference is to help Senior Housing providers understand what is required to fill their communities to 100% occupancy. Selling in 2009 is completely different than selling in years prior. Companies today are dealing with intense competition, a devastated economy, & Marketing Directors who are ill equipped to cope with a dramatically changed market. Attendees will walk away with a complete sales system designed to drive traffic & move ins.
What To Expect
1.How to drive qualified traffic to all time highs with our proven Referral Prospecting System.
2.How to double industry inquiry to tour & visit to move in conversions within your portfolio.
3.How to cut the length of the sales cycle in half.
4.How to make Zero Lost Revenue Days a reality in your individual communities.
Learn How to Create a Sales Centered Culture, Compete in a Drastically Changed Market, & Manage the Sales Process with a Time Tested, Recession Proof Sales System That is Proven to Drive QUALIFIED Traffic & Move Ins in RECORD TIME!
To bring real & lasting change, Executive Directors must understand what is required of them & their Marketing staff to drive revenue. Without proper guidance & buy in from everyone, buildings will find it impossible to fill to capacity. We are so passionate about the impact Administrators can make that we have two, separate breakout sessions exclusively for this critical management level.
WHERE THERE’S ACTIVITY – THERE’S SUCCESS!
A few weeks ago, everyone was talking about those supposed “little green shoots” that are a sign the economy’s growing. Because everyone’s waiting for a sign that it’s okay to do business again.
Why wait? You don’t need a sign. The time to do business is always now. And you always have a choice: you can choose to be discouraged & accept excuses– or you can start growing the revenues of your seniors community today.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out my new article, “Three Success Stories: This Economy Can Be Beat,” I think you should. You’ll find out about three very different seniors communities that took our coaching and training on board, and, through effective leadership and marketing, boosted their bottom lines in amazing ways.
And it demonstrates that you can turn things around now by making the right effort with the right tools.
I like to say, “Where there’s activity, there’s success.” The marketing teams at all three of those companies increased what we call “Income-Producing Activity” – that encompasses everything you can do to make sales happen. And the result? Well, guess what? Sales happened!
The fact is, by not doing everything you can to fill up empty units, you’re letting money fly out the door. Say you have 10 apartments empty that go for $3000 a month – that’s $30,000 you should be making every month, but aren’t! Not investing in your marketing team is actually costing you more money – because if you don’t up your sales efforts, those apartments will most likely stay empty until the economic picture improves.
Again, why wait - and why continue to lose money you don’t have to lose?
In times like these, you have to work smarter – and harder. That’s the simple “secret to success” for difficult times.
That means breaking down the sales process into stages, and making the most of every step along the way. Personalizing each call or visit and engaging your potential customer to evaluate their needs so you can meet them are the most powerful tools at your disposal. Developing an effective Outreach program that yields the most productive referrals, as well as doing effective follow-up on every sales call or visit. It’s what I call “The Science of Selling.” It’s not rocket science – but it sure is a profitable science.
Make the investment. Make the effort. Make the most of now.
That’s how you prosper tomorrow.
EXECUTIVE MUST READ: WORK ON YOUR BUSINESS, NOT JUST IN YOUR BUSINESS
You’re a marketing director at a senior housing community and you spend your workdays running around showing units, talking with leads and trying to fill vacancies. No time to think about how you’re trying to market your community or what you might do differently to increase your growth.
Or you’re responsible for the budget and spend your day fielding calls on your Blackberry and crunching numbers on spreadsheets. You’re so busy reacting to day-to-day events and putting out fires that you’ve starting to lose sight of what all those numbers really mean…
Both those scenarios scream to me that you need to take time out to work ON your business, rather than just IN your business.
When you’re only dealing with the moment - and not the long-term direction of your job or your company - it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Think about those bank executives processing all those subprime mortgages – maybe if they had actually thought a little harder about what they were doing, we might have averted our economic meltdown!
One of the absolute greatest things I was ever taught by one of my mentors was to block out some time every single week to take a look at my business from a different perspective – without the immediate pressures of daily tasks, emails and phone calls.
I took that advice on board – and for the past 3 or 4 years, every Friday, I pack up my laptop and head off for the nearest Starbucks. I avoid email, I turn off my phone and I spend three hours working ON my business. What am I doing, where am I going, what do I need to do to move forward? Is there an innovative product or service I can offer that I’m not…? In other words, I take a big picture assessment of where my business is – and try to do necessary outside-the-box thinking to create new long term strategies to take things to the next level.
I can’t tell you what an incredible difference those few hours have made to my business. During those years, we’ve experience phenomenal growth and doubled our sales.
Now more than ever, this is a time when the senior housing industry needs to change and adapt to today’s economic challenges. We need new “big picture” thinking to cope with the rise in vacancies – and we can’t make a change for the better by continuing to blindly do what we’ve done before.
We’ve just started offering coaching services designed to do just that – take our clients outside their business and help them view it from a completely new perspective. I personally coach executives and CEO’s, while my marketing team coaches marketing directors. We hold our clients accountable for following up on agreed-upon plans of action and modifying patterns and behavior that aren’t advancing their companies or their careers. Most of them begin to see the difference in their thinking immediately - and it ends up paying off like gangbusters.
I challenge you, whatever your role in your company, to take some time every week and examine what you can do to stand apart from your competition and create the business growth that’s required. Get out of your work environment – away from the daily pressures and hassles – so you can clear your mind and do some real brainstorming. It could be a bookstore, a coffee shop…wherever you feel comfortable and it’s the right atmosphere for thinking things through.
When you think ahead…you’ll find you don’t get left behind!
TOO MUCH PRESSURE, TOO LITTLE PLANNING
Everyone’s feeling the pain of today’s economy - and the senior housing industry is no exception. We had it very good for a very long time and now, executives don’t quite know how to cope with a situation where new residents aren’t just coming through the door – as a matter of fact, some are going out the door and back to their adult children’s homes, due to financial strains.
The fact is we may be used to competing with other communities – but we’re not used to competing with a depressed economy. It’s an entirely new situation and adapting to it has unfortunately been a frighteningly slow process.
And actually, adaptation hasn’t been the rule. Panic has been. Executives at some communities are looking at multi-million dollar losses – and they need to turn around those numbers fast. That kind of fear leads to two basic responses:
1) They slash rent prices- which is risky business and could haunt the bottom line even longer than the current recession.
2) They pour on the pressure to their marketing directors – without giving them any tools to help turn things around.
Number 2 is what I want to focus on in this blog. Let me say straight out, pure pressure doesn’t do anyone any good. Not the executives putting it on or the employees forced to put up with it. Without any kind of accompanying change in strategy or planning and no additional training or direction, a marketing director is left with only a lot of extra tension – and not productive tension.
I know many marketing directors at senior communities that are just plain freaking out – to the extent where they’re actually getting rashes from all the stress and strain. They’re good, talented people – but they have no idea how to produce more for their bosses!
The challenge is to adapt to these new times – to offer the vision and leadership to seek out new sales strategies and training – and to believe that things can be turned around. Yes, times are tough – but if we believe we can overcome them, we will.
Shannon Duncan, in her book, “Present Moment Awareness,” says, aside from the obvious laws of nature, we are only limited by our beliefs. “Beliefs,” she writes, “can be as real and insurmountable as the walls of a jail cell.” I happen to believe that is right on the money
For example, did you know that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest geniuses who ever walked the earth, was diagnosed as being “mildly retarded” as a child? What if he had held on to that belief? The only way he would have come up with “E=mc2” is if he had lined up his building blocks in that order.
If you or the leadership of your community holds to the belief that you can’t change the current climate and there’s no way to boost your occupancy rate, to me, that comes under the heading of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Our training programs have turned around many, many communities – because they believed in our programs and implemented them effectively. They believed things could be better – and that belief didn’t act as a jail cell. It was more like a jail break that helped them see some daylight when it came to improving their bottom line.
So think about your community. Are you locked into the old way of doing things that just don’t work anymore? Or are you open to trying the new?
And can you really afford not to do anything?
THE VISION TO LEAD
I received an email today from a client we just started working with – someone who is losing $5,000,000 per year in rental income. As I read his email, I felt his pain and clearly understood his sense of urgency in turning this around. As CEO, he knows this is simply unacceptable – and clearly that is why he has chosen to take action to get his people the systems needed to recapture this lost revenue.
I have the opportunity to work with many amazing companies within the Health Care industry every single day. In any given week, we are coaching well over 200 professionals from a variety of companies all over the country. What this does is give us perspective – and serves as a “Lab,” where systems can be tested, reformulated, and perfected. We, in turn, improve what we do at least 1% every single day. That means we never stop growing our training - and neither should you.
I find it very interesting to observe people within our industry at this critical moment. I believe leadership has never been more important than it is right now. People are scared, investors are in panic mode, and executives are under more pressure than they’ve experienced in decades. More than my training, what companies need right now are strong leaders with a vision and a plan - to not just survive, but thrive in this economy. The good news is that we are in one of the very few industries that is doing well, despite the Wall Street meltdown. Depending on how you navigate the waters, this could potentially be a time of incredible growth for your organization!
So, as I read the email from my new client as well as the many others he has sent out to his organization to buy into the training and to create urgency regarding the new systems being rolled out, I could not help but admire his spirit. He’s rallying the troops, he’s putting forth a vision, he’s not afraid of what might happen. He is truly the captain of his ship, steering it where he wants to go versus where the tide chooses to take it.
For many years, our industry was growing at record levels and sales came easy. That kind of smooth success doesn’t prepare you for the economic storm we face today. Today, Marketing Directors are frustrated and many have lost their confidence. Executive Directors are working with smaller budgets and employee morale is at an all-time low. People are facing both personal and professional pressure like never before.
Whether you run an Assisted Living Organization, Home Health Care, or Skilled Nursing Centers, the #1 thing you can do today is set your vision in stone, scream it from the mountaintops every single day, and keep screaming - until people begin to lock onto your vision, your passion and your message and follow through on it. The more fired up you are, the more energized your organization will become.
Helen Keeler was once asked, “What would be worse than being born blind?” She replied, “To have sight without vision.” Sadly, too many people are placed into leadership positions lacking a vision for the organization they will lead.
According to John Maxwell, all great leaders possess two things: they know where they are going, and they are able to persuade others to follow. I cannot stress enough the importance of your leadership right now. I am certain that one year from now, my client will not be losing $5,000,000 in revenue annually but netting an additional $5,000,000! Yes our training is a key component - but his leadership and vision are the crucial catalysts to make it all happen!
What about you? Do you know exactly where you are going? Are you persuading people within your organization to follow?
Now, more than ever, your people need your leadership!
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