Hey everybody, it’s Jen Gasper, coach with Hurricane Marketing Enterprises and this is the last part of my three part series of The Coach’s Corner regarding asking for the business. In part two of my series, I talked a lot about how to ask for the business in an assisted living community. So if you haven’t seen part two, you definitely need to go watch that, and while you’re there, find part one if you haven’t watched it and listen to that as well.
In this session, I wanna talk about specifically how you can think outside of the box working with your marketing representatives with an assisted living community. These would be asking for referrals of people that aren’t even living in their community yet. If you think about the job of a marketing representative in an assisted living community, it is to give tours to people who are interested in finding out what they’re all about.
Maybe they take a look, they take a tour, they know Mom and Dad need some extra help, they scope things out first, and then they’re coming back in for a second tour maybe with Mom and Dad this time. And Mom and Dad are like I don’t need help yet, I don’t wanna move into an assisted living community, but yet somehow through the course of that tour the marketing representative knows that Mom and Dad actually do need help, they’re just not ready yet.
So when you’re working with a marketing representative, you can have conversations with them about this. Oftentimes I chose to ask for the business a little bit differently this time. Instead of using it as a reason for a drop in visit, I maybe requested a coffee date or a lunch date where I could talk about some of these things one on one with my marketing reps. At that coffee or lunch date I would have them explain to me a little bit about what happens on the tour process. I would ask them how often do you get that we’re just not ready yet, or we don’t need the extra help, or we want to stay in our home for one more summer before we think about moving.
I also ask them questions like how many tours do you typically do in a month, what are the realistic expectations for those people to move into the community. How many are you typically touring, and of those, how many are typically committed to moving in. When we start talking about things like that in a more personal setting, I can then explain to them that if you are seeing people who are coming in and touring not ready to commit right yet, but you know they’re going to need some support in their homes to stay safe, let us educate them on what we are able to do so that way when it comes time for Mom and Dad to move in, that they’re not falling, getting hurt, having something happen that they’re ending up in the hospital and essentially skipping over your level of care completely and needing to end up moving into long term care.
If we have the opportunity to talk to these people we can work together because when they are ready to move we can encourage them to go back and tour with you again because that’s what referring partners do for each other. The same way works with a waiting list. If you talk to people and you ask them do you have a waiting list of people that want to move into your community but can’t because you’re full? That’s another way that we can help them.
If they send every single tour who doesn’t sign up to move in with them to us, just educate them. That will better our chances of being able to get those referrals. And you know what? I also took time to very realistically talk about the types of conversion ratios that we would experience. Industry average is 40% from inquiry to start of care. And while you’re having the conversation about the tours and how many people move in based on how many people they show around the community, I say you know what, here’s what it is for us.
I may talk to 10 people and be able to educate them about our services, but realistically only four of those people are going to start onto services. But the more people that we can educate together, the more people we are going to help, and that’s what we’re both in the business for, helping people stay safe. I hope some of these tips have helped. I know when I was going through the coaching program, having somebody tell me these things, bounce verbiage off of, that’s how I learned best.
And so if you are a person like that or want anymore information we are always here to help you with that. We love what we do, I love coaching, and I’m just ready to share everything that I’ve learned through working as a marketing representative myself. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed it. Until next time.
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