It's About Time! (eBook)

How to Grow Revenue with Prospect-Centered Selling

David A. Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-2049-0 (ISBN)

Infos

'Imagine trying to inspire people who need help but who are actively resisting change. That is the essence of Heroic Selling.' In It's About Time!, David Smith chronicles his thirty-plus-year journey in senior living. He reveals how to turn deep-seated resistance into successful conversions. His field-tested technique, Prospect-Centered Selling®, is based on a theoretical model adapted from the psychology of change. It's a strategy supported by data-driven metrics and a purpose-built CRM platform. David's methodology is disrupting the universally accepted speed-to-lead paradigm. This book provides case studies and is a step-by-step guide that will show you how to double your close rates, drive higher occupancies, and achieve faster fills. It will not only boost your performance, but it will also help hundreds of thousands more people get ready for a new and vibrant chapter in their lives. Be heroic. It's time. Come join us.

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"e;Imagine trying to inspire people who need help but who are actively resisting change. That is the essence of Heroic Selling."e;In It's About Time!, David Smith chronicles his thirty-plus-year journey in senior living. He reveals how to turn deep-seated resistance into successful conversions. His field-tested technique, Prospect-Centered Selling is based on a theoretical model adapted from the psychology of change. It's a strategy supported by data-driven metrics and a purpose-built CRM platform. David's methodology is disrupting the universally accepted speed-to-lead paradigm. This book provides case studies and is a step-by-step guide that will show you how to double your close rates, drive higher occupancies, and achieve faster fills. It will not only boost your performance, but it will also help hundreds of thousands more people get ready for a new and vibrant chapter in their lives. Be heroic. It's time. Come join us.

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION

Ever notice that some things just take time? When you bake a cake, you set out all the ingredients: flour, eggs, baking powder, milk, vanilla, salt, and butter. You can tweak the recipe, but the preparation time stays the same. You can’t make twice as many cakes by baking each one half as long.

Time is also necessary and often inflexible when it comes to making significant, life-changing decisions. These are situations where someone needs to let go of the world as they’ve come to know it, like grieving, divorce, addiction, smoking cessation, etc. The decision-maker often has all the facts they need for a logical decision. No matter. Each needs time to identify, confront, and overcome their own emotional resistance to change.

For older adults considering a move to senior living, especially the higher-functioning individuals1 who aren’t forced to move due to a medical emergency, the decisions of whether, when, and where to move are absolutely life-changing and need to be made at their own pace. That’s the lifestyle transition that I have studied: how to help senior adults accept the idea of change. We adapted practices from innovative approaches to complex sales and from extensive clinical research into readiness done by change psychologists. Embedded in the prospect-centered approach we have developed are strategies and approaches that can be applied to any complex, emotion-laden decision.

This book focuses on the decision to move into a senior living community. I love senior living and what it does to extend and enhance the lives of its residents. Achieving and maintaining 100 percent occupancy is critical to the wellness, socialization, and overall satisfaction of our residents, our prospects, and their respective family members.

Getting full is also critical for the financial viability of every senior living community. Today, there are roughly 25,000 senior housing vacancies in the US (10 percent of available units), representing about $100 million of lost revenue opportunity per month. Eliminating the lost opportunity cost of this vacancy is the single highest revenue-generating opportunity that most providers have. Getting full increases bottom-line cash flows and overall project value at sale or refinancing. Getting and staying full opens up opportunities to increase rates and enhance or expand programs and amenities. For a typical 100-unit community that has been open for more than a year, getting full only requires about 10 to 15 additional residents. Given the thousands of age- and income-qualified prospects in a typical primary market area, you don’t need to close very many to get full. Yet anyone who has ever tried knows that senior living is very difficult to sell. It is a complex sale with an overlay of emotional resistance. You can make this complex sales process easier (less difficult), but you can’t really make it simpler.

My first attempt to fill a senior living community was in 1988. I was going broke and at my wit’s end trying to get to 100 percent occupancy at The Gatesworth. It was one of the very first purpose-built, upscale rental independent living (IL) communities. The concept was based on the idea that older adults who could afford it would welcome a resident-centered experience with wonderful food, beautiful venues, and ongoing opportunities for socialization. My partners and I launched our first phase with 220 apartments, large enough to support the robust staff and programming that we envisioned. We thought that if we built an incredible service-enriched environment, reasonably priced and in a great location, the prospects would come, fall in love, and close themselves.

My role was to find, qualify, pitch, and convert 220 prospects into residents as quickly as possible. We started pre-marketing a full year before opening. We spent a lot of money on direct mail, print ads, outreach to community leaders, and a variety of educational and social events. We made cold calls off of purchased lists. Aside from working with investors and updating projections, I spent most of my time focused on new lead generation. My only purposeful “selling” or “conversion” strategy for my team of two full-time leasing counselors was to qualify new inquiries in terms of health, financial capacity, and urgency. Then, giving priority to the most urgent, we would try to entice them to tour as quickly as possible. The general message was: “Come see what we built for you. You are going to love it!” We didn’t really consider much about the buyer’s emotional state or their decision-making process. Rather, we envisioned the actual sales process to be about the numbers. Specifically, we gauged our sales performance by counting how many new leads, how many call-outs, and how many initial tours.

Nineteen months after opening, we found ourselves with over 3,000 qualified prospects, 170 residents, and, most importantly, 50 units still vacant. How could that be? We had at least 60 prospects for every vacancy! The 50 residents we still needed were clearly already in our lead base. “Selling” to those prospects should have been easy, especially with our amazing and innovative community. So why were those 50 units still vacant? That’s when I discovered the answer to this puzzle. Hardly any of the higher-functioning prospects were “ready.”

I decided that, rather than waiting for these higher-functioning prospects to be forced to move due to a serious health crisis, I would need to figure out some proactive way to help another 50 of them get ready. I wasn’t sure how that could be done. Neither was anyone else in our industry. I came to the conclusion that while a transactional, speed-to-lead approach to senior living sales can be effective for those who are forced to move or for the unusual prospect who actually is ready at the time of the inquiry,2 it is ineffective for the people we most wanted to attract. For the higher-functioning prospects, transactional or value-matching approaches grounded in product- or service-based solutions just doesn’t work.

In this book, I will share the lessons learned over the past three decades, pretty much through trial and error, first while in the leasing trenches at The Gatesworth and then at several dozen other hands-on sales turnaround campaigns for third-party operators across the US and Canada.

In this book, I will share the lessons learned over the past three decades, pretty much through trial and error, first while in the leasing trenches at The Gatesworth and then at several dozen other hands-on sales turnaround campaigns for third-party operators across the US and Canada.

These turnaround and consulting successes, along with engagements to teach, present, and publish materials that could be used by all industry sales professionals, led to the creation of a theoretical “change” model. My fellow Sherpa co-founder Alexandra (Alex) Fisher and I called our new approach Prospect-Centered Selling (PCS). It is an evidence-based model that we would use to scale our processes through teaching and training others. In the past few years, our core principles have been clarified and confirmed, with extensive sales performance data from Sherpa, a CRM and sales enablement platform created to help sales professionals be more effective.

PCS is a proven, effective approach to senior living sales. It focuses on advancing the prospect’s emotional readiness journey instead of trying to sell the benefits of the product. It works by openly and respectfully helping prospects make a buying decision, rather than waiting to process and admit higher-acuity prospects in a crisis. With PCS, sales counselors spend more time with fewer prospects. Higher-functioning prospects need help overcoming emotional resistance. That requires a sales counselor to invest the time needed to make an empathic connection, engage in purposeful questioning, and achieve multiple advances. Selling time represents a level of engagement, unlike most other sales performance metrics, which look to the quantity of activity. With PCS, selling time and sales outcomes become qualitative indicators of sales performance.

PCS is a proven, effective approach to senior living sales. It focuses on advancing the prospect’s emotional readiness journey, instead of trying to sell the benefits of the product.

We developed PCS to significantly grow occupancy and, perhaps more importantly, to give industry sales professionals better tools to help more older adults live better. In the following chapters, we will share what we learned, including:

• Why prospects who are not already in a crisis resist senior living and its typical speed-to-lead sales approach and how to assess, confront, and proactively overcome inherent emotional resistance to moving, one prospect at a time.
• Why the evidence-based theory and processes that comprise PCS help higher-functioning prospects “get ready,” improve sales effectiveness, and increase visit-to-move-in conversion rates by as much as 100 percent.
• Why monitoring, tracking, and managing Time in the Selling Zone (TSZ) is a much more relevant and impactful leading indicator and predictor of sales success than reliance on a “more is better” approach focused on generating even more inquiries, call-outs, and/or tours.
• Why investing more of the total selling time available in strategic planning, personalized creative follow-up (CFU), and home visits is key to maximizing your performance.

What follows is a guide to better conversion rates, higher occupancies, upward pressure on rents, and faster fills. Note that PCS sellers close...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.7.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-2049-2 / 1544520492
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-2049-0 / 9781544520490