See the Future with Forward Looking CRM

A Different Kind of CRM

Continuum CRM changes the way you'll view customer relationship management tools in Senior Living. It goes beyond activity tracking for the Marketing & Sales department. It helps sales people manage relationships and marketers track campaigns. For managers and corporate team leaders, it’s a powerful data-driven machine capable of providing insights to achieve better budgeting and strategic measures.

See the Future with Forward Looking CRM

Forward Looking CRM Software Tools

Sales managers in Senior Living and CCRCs are always trying to see into the future.

When will we get new leads? Where will new residents come from? How will new business benefit the stakeholders?

The Senior Living industry spends lots of time and money on tools that help with their desire to see into the future. In many cases, these systems only provide a guess as to future business.

Marketing tools are purchased to build a pipeline of potential clients and have no real capabilities of giving management a vision into future sales. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are purchased to help the sales team track prospects and hopefully give management a vision into future business. Far too often, marketing and CRM tools fall short of accurately predicting future business.

What Does a CRM Tool Do for the Salesperson?

Traditional CRM tools help the salesperson record what they have done with each prospect and maybe lets them schedule the next activity. They also allow users to forecast new business with time frames and probability of closure. The biggest downside for traditional CRM tools is that the forecast is subjective and future planning is limited.

What you need is a system that will allow for an unlimited future planning base on your sales and marketing workflow while also giving you a forecast tool that is not subjective.

When we developed Continuum CRM, we wanted to make sure that the system allowed the salesperson to look forward instead of just recording what has already been done. We also wanted to make sure we developed an intelligent tool for determining when a prospect is ready to deposit. We call that the “Readiness Indicator.”

This Readiness Indicator helps ensure that the forecast time frame and probability are based on analytical data versus a subjective guess from the sales person.

As a salesperson, I also want a tool that helps me do my job and has a workflow engine that helps me determine and schedule what my future activities should be. I need a system that helps all my activities around selling while at the same time automatically gives my management the information they need for an accurate forecast. This information should be provided to management without me as a salesperson having to do anything beyond what is needed to get the business.

One of the things I hear from most sales people is that first and foremost they want the CRM tool to be easy to use. I agree that the system must be easy to use, but we all know that salespeople will likely have to do more work in the CRM than they would like.

As a salesperson, in a perfect world everything would be done automatically without me having to enter anything into the system. Maybe through some type of mind sync.

With a current lack of mind sync technology, salespeople will have to enter data into the CRM system. Our goal should still be to provide a system that is as easy to use as possible while providing maximum value to salespeople and managers.

As a Sales Manager, What Do I Want From My CRM?

I want to know what my salespeople are working on, where the prospects are in the sales process, what is going to close, when, and for how much. This requires that I have dashboards and reports that use analytical data from the system to give me a realistic look at the future forecast. I might also want to know how hard the sales people are working to help gauge how successful they’ll be in the coming weeks and months (phone calls, appointments, site visits, etc.).

The owners and developers of Continuum CRM have been in the CRM business for many years. We realize that no matter how pretty our reports and dashboards are, without underlying accurate data, they are worthless.

Making the system easy to use and still providing value to management requires that the right data is entered at the right time. One of the ways we accomplish this with Continuum CRM is to provide Smart Forms that present the right data fields to the sales person at the right point in the sales workflow. This makes it easy for sales people to enter the data needed without having to try to remember what information is needed at what point in the process and where that data is located.

We also understand that the reports and dashboards can’t just be pretty and rely only on the raw data in the system. The CRM system needs to have the ability to analyze the data to determine when business is most likely to close. Again, less subjectivity and more analysis tools. That’s why we developed the Readiness Indicator based on statistics that tell you when a client is ready to buy.

We also understand that our CRM tool needs to go beyond just recording what the sales person has done. We gives salespeople a solid planning tool that lets them plan each step they’ll take with their client as they work with them to find the right package for their needs. When we’re talking about Senior Living sales, it’s all about helping the client make the right decision for themselves and their family.

As you try to decide on your future CRM needs, keep the following in mind:

  • Do I want a system that just tracks what has happened or do I want a system that allows for forward planning around my sales and marketing workflow?
  • Do I want a system that forecasts based on smart analysis on what has happened to date and should happen in the future?
  • Or do I want the standard subjective forecast driven by how the sales person feels about the prospect becoming a resident?

I think the choice is clear: Continuum CRM. Schedule a free demo today.


Scott Farmer

Scott is one of the co-founders of Continuum CRM. In addition to being a US Navy Veteran, Scott is a seasoned sales professional who has more than 35 years of sales, sales management, and operations experience working at Westinghouse Electric, ABB, Invensys, Formation Systems and SFA Strategies.