Occupancy in senior living may be trending low, but some providers are up to the challenge. Case in point, Stage Management. With a little help from Yardi Senior CRM, this senior housing owner and operator has fast-tracked its sales cycle and boosted its occupancy rate. “With Yardi Senior CRM, we can see where we are in our sales cycle and what activities we need to complete to help move more people in the door,” said Troy McClymonds, partner at Stage Management. “Our numbers prove that over and over again.” Meet Stage Management Based out of Centennial, Colorado, Stage Management is committed to care. “Our mission for staff is care comes first. We’re not a real estate business — we’re a care company,” said McClymonds. This focus on quality care is clear at Stage Management’s full-service retirement community, Golden Pond, which offers 115 units of independent living, assisted living and memory care in Golden, Colorado. The staff encourage residents to follow their interests while providing comforts to make everyone feel at home. Paperwork presents challenges When new prospects used to walk in the door at Golden Pond, front-desk staff would capture their information on paper cards, making handwritten notes on the back. The hand-off to sales took extra time as a result. When prospects did decide to move in, they were asked to share similar information repeatedly. “There was a lot of duplicate work,” said McClymonds. So Stage Management turned to Senior CRM. The senior living sales and marketing solution ties the resident record together from lead to lease, so staff at Golden Pond no longer need to re-enter details or search through paper files. Measurable, profitable results Thanks to Senior CRM, the paper trail is now just a memory for Stage Management. The mobile,...
Smart SMS Marketing
Texting Senior Living Prospects
You know how the stereotype goes. “Older people don’t use technology.” “Smartphones are too complicated for seniors.” “A flyer or a phone call is the only option.” Reality, as it turns out, begs to differ. According to an AARP survey, over 90 percent of older adults use technology to stay connected. And among those surveyed, text messaging has overtaken email as the method of choice for communication — 86% say they regularly text with friends and family. Clearly, today’s seniors are on board the technology bandwagon. The question now is, are your senior living sales counselors on board as well? SMS text messaging for senior living marketing is not new, but it’s quickly growing in prominence as more and more providers recognize its effectiveness. Text messages have open rates as high as 98%, while emails hover around 20%. If you’re not texting your prospective residents, you’re missing real opportunities to connect. But before you dive in and start sending texts left and right, take note. There are laws in place that regulate what’s allowed, and some property management businesses have already landed themselves in hot water. What’s the law on SMS text messaging for marketing? The Telephone Consumer Protection Act protects people from unwanted communications from any business. That means service providers must receive prior express written consent before cold calling or texting. And they can’t make agreeing to receive these marketing messages a condition for moving in or otherwise purchasing services. So how do you stay on the right side of the law? How do you ensure you’ve gotten permission from your senior living prospects to send them marketing texts? SMS text messaging in Yardi Senior CRM Yardi Senior CRM helps senior living providers manage their entire sales and marketing process — including...
Call Center for Senior Living...
5 Reasons RentCafe Connect Rocks
The internet has certainly made a splash in senior living. The majority of prospects research options online, according to Google. They’ll browse listing services. Check your own website. Scour reviews. But when it comes time to make a decision, those who call in for more information are the most likely to convert. In fact, they generate 10-15 times more revenue than web leads do, and they convert 30% faster. The internet may be the new hot, but the phone is still king of conversions. Which makes you wonder why so many senior living operators don’t focus more on excellent phone service. Our clients have told us – and we’ve seen on our end – that about 50% of inquiry calls are missed. And a good 20% of calls come in after hours. These are missed leads, pure and simple. The problem extends to resident calls, too. Poor or slow responses from management factors heavily into resident satisfaction. In an industry where quality care is often the differentiator, you can’t afford to ignore service requests or emergency calls, no matter when they come in. So what’s the answer? A flexible contact center solution that can pick up the phone for you. It’s called RENTCafé Connect. Built into the Yardi Senior Living Suite, the digital answering service acts as a seamless extension of your office. From auto-attendants to live agents, RENTCafé Connect can handle your phone lines whenever your own team is unavailable. That means no more missed calls – and no more missed opportunities. Not convinced? Here are five ways RENTCafé Connect can help you grow your occupancy while keeping your current residents happy. Track the source of incoming calls. You get 15 toll-free tracking numbers with RENTCafé Connect, which means you can use...
Culture First
At Bloom Senior Living
Bloom Senior Living has a simple, yet aspirational mission: to help residents flourish. The family-owned and operated company, started in 1963, is dedicated to helping seniors live full, meaningful lives. But just as important as it is to make sure residents feel like family, at Bloom, staff members feel like family too. The leadership team has made creating a nurturing company culture their priority, because they believe if the culture is right, everything else—including delivering on their brand mission—will fall into place. That’s why it’s critically important to Tony Kantor, principal and director of finance, and Brad Dubin, principal, director of acquisition and general counsel, to create an office where employees feel valued and have all the resources they need. With eight communities across five states, Bloom began using Yardi to create a scalable business model that put people first. “We wanted a fully integrated product, one system throughout the entire cycle. It’s more seamless and efficient for our team, who already have to learn lots of different systems. Streamlining is a major benefit,” Dubin explains. It’s that efficiency that’s helped the company’s 40 Yardi users simplify processes and eliminate tasks in order to do what they love most: deliver great customer service to residents. “We use Yardi for everything,” says Dubin, who handles Bloom’s marketing and sales. “As soon as we get a prospect, we enter them in the system and start tracking all their data. All the calls, all the marketing activity. Sales one hundred percent relies on the CRM system. I can’t imagine not having it.” What the team likes most is the structure the software has helped create. Having an automated process takes the guesswork out of the sales cycle and keeps prospects moving through the pipeline. “It’s helped us systemize the...
Admissions Automation
Ditch paperwork, improve sales
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: 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. 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. 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. 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...
