Admissions Automation

Ditch paperwork, improve sales

By Yardi Blog Staff on Oct 16, 2018 in News, People

With senior housing occupancy at its lowest level since 2010, attracting new residents to your community can be challenging. Staff must work harder than ever to get prospects into the pipeline—but getting seniors in the door is just the first step for your sales team. They call it the sales process for good reason. Moving senior living prospects through the funnel and closing the deal requires, on average, 25 contacts—calls, emails, appointments, tours—over the course of two years. Conversion is a marathon, not a sprint. And as many salespeople will tell you: a lot can happen during those weeks and months leading up to a signed lease. Prospects can change their minds, become frustrated or disinterested, or find another community or course of care, among other things.

How can sales teams mitigate prospect fallout and increase conversion? Shorten and simplify the sales cycle. One way to do that is using automation to reduce paperwork and streamline the closing process. Because when so much effort goes into the pipeline, dealing with fall through in the final stages is not only heartbreaking, but also costly to the business. That’s why 68% of best-in-class sales teams have made the switch to electronic signatures to improve the customer experience and close deals faster. In fact, companies who use automation tools like e-signatures during the admissions process are 18% more likely to shorten their sales cycles.

According to an IDC white paper on bridging the document disconnect in sales, there are plenty of opportunities for companies to impact their sales process by going paperless. Here are a few ways automation in the sales process can benefit your business:

1. Increase staff efficiency

Salespeople spend more than 36% of their time on administrative tasks—and less than two thirds of their time on their core job function: completing the sale. If that’s not concerning enough, consider that 43% of office staff say they need to use several disconnected systems and often have to copy and paste or rekey information, an error-prone and time-consuming process. Employing automation, like templatized electronic leases and e-signatures, during the sales cycle not only takes the guesswork out of document generation, it eliminates the frustrating use of disparate systems that draws out the closing process.

2. Build prospect rapport

The typical senior living community receives 31 new inquiries per month. That’s a lot of prospects to keep track of week-over-week, all year long. Fostering a positive relationship with a would-be resident is critical to winning their business. Automating the capture of information as a step in the sales cycle not only ensures that personal details are collected, it guarantees they’re retained and visible to the entire sales team.

3. Reduce errors

We love office supplies as much as the next person, but those little “sign here” sticky arrows aren’t doing your community any favors. Consider that 36% of sales leaders say agreements are missing signatures or dates—or have been signed by the wrong person altogether—and another 51% say that documents are often misfiled or lost. Systematized residency agreements and e-signatures, like those found in Yardi Senior CRM, eliminate paperwork and reduce the disorganization and disarray that come along with paper records, curtailing costly mistakes and missed opportunities.

4. Optimize customer experience

40% of front office staff say the documents they send to prospects don’t always display or print correctly, and 38% say recipients sometimes can’t even open them. Imagine a lengthy sales process involving emails and call follow-up, meetings and tours, family visits and stacks of paperwork—and all that’s left between you and closing the deal is a required signature on the lease. You’ve completed the document, crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s, and sent it to the prospect to print and sign, only to find out that the images won’t render, and the lease cannot be inked. A deal that was all but done is now in limbo, and you’ve left your prospective resident with a bad taste in their mouth. Moving to e-signatures makes it easier for the customer to sign on the dotted line. A smooth process yields happier residents and a quicker path to realizing revenue for a rented unit.

Learn more about how to streamline your sales process with Yardi Senior CRM.