The National Investment Center for the Senior Housing and care (NIC) recently reported that senior housing occupancy in the United States has been lowest since 2020. Therefore, your senior care community needs to stand out to get more clients.
The method you use to store, collect and retrieve data on leads in your community’s sales cycle is important. It helps determine how easy it will be to convert prospects to residents in your senior care community.
Initially, senior living communities tracked leads and managed client relationships with spreadsheets or the usual pen and paper. However, with advancements in technology, spreadsheets may no longer be efficient. Most successful senior care communities use a software called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to track leads and manage client relationships.
This article discusses CRM in detail. We will look at what it is, how it will help your senior care community, and why you should consider it.
What is a CRM?
CRM software is a tool that senior care communities use to market, manage sales, and build relationships that provide referrals and build occupancy. The software achieves this by centralizing customer data from various sources, thus making it easier for you to make intelligent business decisions.
A CRM also allows you to maximize referrals and leads through automated communications and tracking interactions. You can actively engage with people listed in your software. Doing so goes a long way in converting them to residents.
How CRM helps you engage with prospects
Seniors, especially those living with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and cognitive impairment, require a high level of care. For instance, if the senior has dementia, they will need to select one out of many memory care facilities that prioritize dementia care.
Since relocating to a senior community involves uprooting their entire lifestyles, seniors or family members taking care of them know it’s a big decision. It is only natural that prospects will research senior care communities as much as possible and ask questions when they need clarification. Your job is to provide them with all the relevant information and answer any questions.
Actively engaging with prospects makes them perceive your community as knowledgeable. It also shows that you care about their welfare.
CRM makes engaging with prospects relatively easy through automation. Additionally, when your community’s representatives contact prospects in real life, you can track and monitor their performance. Generally, CRM platforms ensure you don’t lose any leads.
Why use a CRM in your senior care community?
Building relationships is critical in every senior living community. You may initiate relationships through interpersonal interactions, personalized tours, and marketing campaigns, but you still need to turn prospects into clients.
Since most communities have several team members and prospects, there is a need to maintain trusting, consistent, and strong relationships between prospective clients and the brand. This is where a CRM comes in.
A CRM system consolidates client information and manages client relationships on your behalf. Below are ways a CRM can help your senior care community.
Capturing leads and critical information
With CRM, you can easily capture and store data on prospective residents in a centralized location. By doing so, you can see what information they are interested in and track your interaction with them.
This information will also come in handy in care planning when the prospect becomes a resident.
Nurturing prospects to increase occupancy
A CRM enables you to stay in touch with your prospects and build relationships with them. You can collect data on their goals and interests and save the information to your CRM to deliver a personalized experience.
The CRM can easily create personalized communications to tailor-fit the prospects’ profiles so that the information they get is what they need.
Increased insight
A CRM software enables sales and marketing teams to view relevant data and prospect statistics. This way, you can tell which audiences you have been more successful with and which ones require more effort.
A CRM solution also helps you and your staff make appropriate follow-ups.
With increased insight, your sales process will be highly effective since you know exactly where you need to focus. The prospect report from a CRM helps you prioritize the strong prospects you can potentially convert to customers. You can use various marketing and sales tactics on these prospects, including direct mail and targeted online advertisements.
Automation
A CRM will reduce the response time of your senior care community through automation. The CRM tools change the reporting process from manual to automated. You can filter the automated dashboard to display as little or as much data as you want.
Additionally, the software can schedule follow-up e-mails or calls and issue post-tour surveys. Using this technology can also reduce human error, saving you a lot of time and resources.
Automation also allows you to reallocate valuable resources. Instead of focusing on data entry or management, you can build meaningful relationships with prospective clients. Additionally, you can follow up on your prospects faster. This way, they will deem your senior care community reliable and responsive.
Improved reporting and analytics
Your CRM allows you to manage all your data in one place. You can use it to generate reports which present and interpret essential data.
Additionally, you can monitor your sales and marketing team’s performance and analyze sales activity, trends, and referral sources.
Revenue tracking
A CRM automatically allows you to cross-reference the revenue you have earned with your marketing efforts.
With a CRM, you can quickly evaluate how effective your marketing methods are by tracking your margins and comparing your expenditure and revenue. Together with demographic insights, this information will help you focus on audiences with a higher purchasing power.
Get started with CRM for your senior care community
CRM is an essential tool for every senior care community. It promotes efficiency and helps turn prospects into customers.
Our CRM is tailor-made for senior care communities. Contact us to get more information on how our CRM tool will help you. It is designed to build occupancy in your senior care community and make more profit in the process. We would be delighted to show you how our CRM tool can seamlessly integrate into your community.
John is a highly respected and seasoned C-level sales, operations and general management executive, with decades of proven success in growing sales and profits while vastly improving operational disciplines.