This pandemic has created an occupancy roller coaster for many senior living communities. On one hand, we have experienced tragic losses to COVID, especially in long term care. And yet, some communities are reporting an influx of emergency, acute need residents.
If you are in the middle of all this, the distractions of managing this dynamic environment may be causing you to miss some of your best prospects. Who are they? They are your “not-yet-ready” prospects or “COVID-waiting” prospects, as some of our clients are now beginning to call them. These are prospective residents who may have been looking into senior living before COVID hit and are now sitting back to wait it out until they feel it is safe to walk through your doors.
What are you doing to engage with these prospects? Or are you leaving them on the “back burner” to get back to when things settle down?
If you are taking this approach you may find that your back burner has gotten cold because active community marketers are using all the tools available to them to engage and nurture these not-yet-ready prospects.
Adapting your CRM to reflect new, COVID-waiting categories helps you engage with them now.
Jacqi Glenn, Corporate Sales Manager of Benedictine Health Services in Minneapolis, shares below how they have adjusted their CRM to better engage with them.
“After getting comments from sales counselors like, ‘They want to move in but they’re waiting for COVID,’ we added a field to help our sales counselors get to know our customers’ concerns. We also did a little training around discovering the customers’ real hesitation as it relates to COVID. With the new fields available, sales counselors could then choose from drop-down options including things like ‘Waiting for family to be able to help move’ and ‘Waiting for activities to restart’. With that data, we were able to maintain relationships and, as things started to reopen, initiate those moves. We even recaptured some that had moved out.”
Here is a screen shot of one of BHS’s drop-down windows:
Pretty cool, isn’t it? And here are a few more things you can do within your CRM to nurture your not-yet-ready prospects.
- Modify the Prospecting/Selling workflow to include more virtual activities (calls, tours, etc.)
- Leverage integrations to online meeting tools such as Zoom
- Generate reports that provide details on your COVID related prospects
- Use built-in or integrated email marketing functionality to send targeted communications that address specific concerns and other contextual communications
Have you made any of these adjustments to your CRM? If you haven’t yet, now is the time to start. Because your COVID-waiting prospects should be communicated with regularly, in a way that correlates to where they are in the decision process and what challenges concern them most.
By using the tools available to you, and a CRM infrastructure that supports a deeper set of data, you can prepare those currently not-yet-ready, COVID-waiting prospects to make a positive decision on your community when they are ready.
Give us a call at 800-570-6030 and see how Continuum CRM can improve your sales and marketing effectiveness without breaking the bank. Or, feel free to visit our website www.continuumcrm.com to learn more.
