By Steve Moran

These two stories about the two most important challenges in senior living should blow your mind.

Story 1: SALES

There is a marketing company that uses very unique tactics to generate leads. Enough leads that aggregators are no longer needed. Enough leads to fill every community they work with.

Sounds good so far, right? Actually it sounds SPECTACULAR!!!

Of course, more leads also means more unqualified leads that have to be weeded out. But it also means more good leads. Leads that represent real people who have real needs and real financial capacity.

Here is the head-exploding part … when they turn on the lead spigot at communities, salespeople complain about unqualified leads wasting their time — and pressure management to turn the spigot off. So they do.

On one hand, I get it — working unqualified leads is not very much fun. But here is the thing: While you as an operator would love to have a high move-in-to-inquiry ratio, because it means more efficiency and less work for salespeople, what really counts is helping older people and filling apartments, whatever it takes.

Turning off that lead flow is “management by sales metrics” gone awry.

In truth, salespeople should welcome more leads, because those leads ultimately mean more move-ins. And when you come right down to it, the #1 task for salespeople is working leads. Instead of turning the spigot off, the right answer would be to hire more people, or for salespeople to work harder.

Story 2: STAFFING

There is this company that we are doing some work with that bills themselves as a 24/7/365 recruiting partner who can fill empty positions in a day or two. This means posting the job in the morning, getting candidate responses, going through a series of qualification steps, having a screening interview, inviting them in, and putting them to work — in less than 24 hours.

The problem: Senior living team members are “too busy” and ignore these qualified candidates that could be filling shifts. The company looks bad, and the candidates go somewhere else. There is this sense that candidates are flaky and won’t show up. There is a sense that there are not enough people who want to work in senior living.

Have you ever considered that the concept of flaky job candidates is 100% wrong … that the problem is that senior living companies are the flaky ones waiting too long to act? These candidates need a job today, not two weeks from now.

The Reality

Phenomenal success is within your reach if you are willing to harness the power of speed-to-lead and go the extra mile. If you want more information about these organizations, shoot me a message or email.