Every year a few conferences roll around that I consider “Must Attend” in the Senior Living industry. If you are a Marketing & Sales professional, SMASH should be at the top of your list. Held annually in early October in Chicago, SMASH is the only conference and networking opportunity designed specifically for Marketing & Sales professionals.
The speakers and presenters are experts in the field of marketing & sales, both within and without the senior living industry. They deliver content that is often fresh, trending, and exceptionally relevant to current challenges. You will have no difficulty finding a session you can relate to, or one you need to get ideas to take back to your team to elevate your game. This is an intense two days of networking and education for the leaders in our industry.
I’ve been attending SMASH since its first year, two years on the provider side, and now, two years on the vendor side. My experience is that it is a fantastic way to meet new people from all over the country, both providers and vendors. It’s a great way to get out of your bubble and see the bigger world of senior living marketing and sales. I’ve had the honor of meeting the people I consider the best minds in our industry today at the SMASH conference.
Unlike other conferences where there is an expo with hundreds of vendors and their booths, SMASH has a far more intimate atmosphere. The conference promoters do a fabulous job of balancing the ratio of providers to vendors. There is no expo and there are no booths, although there are small kiosks and places you can meet vendors on a personal level and have a real conversation. Continuum CRM will have a kiosk and you should stop by and say hi.
While the vendors, or sponsors, are technically there to earn your business, the atmosphere at SMASH lends itself to a more genuine “get to know you” vibe. It’s the only conference I know where the vendors and providers blend together for two days of networking and learning in a completely non-intrusive and non-threatening way.
When I attended on the provider side, I never felt like someone was there to shove a product down my throat. There were networking, introductions, and offerings to tell me about a product or service, but I always felt like the vendors were sincere in wanting to help make our industry better.
Believe it or not, most vendors in this space, Continuum CRM included, genuinely care and have an authentic interest in helping make your teams more successful. We aren’t there to lay on a thick, pushy sales pitch. Although, I will be more than happy to tell you about Continuum CRM and even give you a live demo if time allows.
Why? Because I firmly believe that it is an amazing tool for senior living marketing and sales teams. If I can help a team increase occupancy, elevate their selling game, and gain better transparency and strategic direction through reporting and workflow management, then call me a pushy sales person.
The truth is, I’m interested in making rock stars out of marketing & sales directors. My goal is for you to be able to dazzle your corporate team with strategic insights and reporting you’ve never had before. That kind of deep data driven knowledge and understanding will impress even the toughest of critics, corporate entities, and boards of directors. Thereby making you an invaluable asset to your organization.
In addition to providing directors with in depth reporting capabilities, I also want to help you energize and motivate your sales teams. One of the best ways to do that is to provide them with a tool they feel good about using, that they too can use to develop themselves professionally, and that will help them increase their conversion metrics.
Our Sales Counselors are often great at building relationships. What happens many times though is they spend a lot of time focusing on the low hanging fruit, and less time cultivating the other people in their pipeline. Continuum CRM has a fully configurable, Forward-Thinking workflow manager, that empowers sales people to be more intentional and purposeful with their planned next activity.
We also include trackable email marketing, not as an integration, but as an inherent part of the application. This functionality delivers the ultimate transparency to the sales counselors to allow them to deliver highly effective, branded marketing messages at their discretion, to the prospects they feel each templated message would resonate best.
After delivery, they can view all the results of each tracked email with all the associated statistics such as delivery and open rates, clickthroughs, bounces, spam complaints, and opt-outs. In the past, this level of information was only provided to the marketing team.
Think of the possibilities if your sales counselors had the knowledge of which specific emails their prospects were opening and engaging with most frequently.
Like I said earlier, our goal at Continuum CRM is to help you and your team become rock stars in your organization.
Come visit our kiosk at SMASH. We would love to learn about you and what you’re doing to energize your team, help them grow professionally, coach them to success, and engage with their prospects. In turn, we’d love to tell you the story of Continuum CRM, how we came to be, why we’re excited to be part of such an amazing industry, and how we’d like to help you achieve your goals.
Of course, you can always email us in advance and schedule a time to visit with us if you’re trying to strategically plan your time. Feel free to contact us at sales@continuumcrm.com or check out our website at www.continuumcrm.com if you want to learn a little about us before we meet in Chicago.
