Check out the most important steps to shortening the sales cycle for nursing homes.
The basic idea of every business, including homes for the elderly, is sales and profit. In this blog, find out how to shorten the sales cycle and reach your desired business goal faster.
Statistics from relevant research show that there are about 54 million Americans over the age of 65. Such statistics can be very useful for nursing home businesses and can be the basis for creating a strategy to shorten the sales cycle for nursing homes.
Although this information may seem like an inexhaustible resource for your nursing home at first glance, it is not as easy as it seems.
It takes a lot of planning, contemplation, and strategic analysis to find the most appropriate way to connect with these seniors and win them over as your future residents.
But your work doesn’t stop there either!
What you really need in winning markets and new clients is patience and consistency in everything you market to your audience and potential clients.
From the moment when the family of an elderly person or the person himself starts thinking about the idea of living in a home for the elderly, and until the first inquiry related to it, about two months pass. Until the moment when they decide to visit your institution, three to six months pass on average, and until the moment of making the final decision and booking a place in the home, it takes from 120 days to even two years.
As a business that has to think about a continuous and constant flow of funds, how do you deal with such a long sales cycle?
The answer to that question is a clear focus on the elderly for whom your institution will drastically change the quality of life and bring about a change for the better. These are people who will be significantly more comfortable, safe, and comfortable in your facility than in the conditions in which they currently live.
Your job is to get them through the new journey of residents as quickly as possible. The best way to make this happen is by qualifying and nurturing your leads.
In this blog, we are bringing you a few very useful pieces of advice on how to shorten the sales cycle for nursing homes.
Nurturing leads is imperative for nursing home facilities
How do you nurture leads?
Think of your clients as tending a garden or raising children over an extended period of time. The ultimate goal of all your efforts is that the seed you sow grows into a beautiful flower or that the child grows into a good and quality person. The same applies to leads.
So, the goal is to increase the interest of your potential residents in your community until it “blooms” into actual booking and starting life in a nursing home.
So what constitutes fertile ground for nurturing senior life leaders? How do you make the seed you desire blossom when the time is right?
The answer is – with a lot of care!
Lead nurturing is a systematic, long-term strategy that continuously, using various methods and tools, guides your potential residents through the decision-making process with the goal of eventually becoming your residents.
We’ll walk you through a few ways to develop a successful lead nurturing strategy that optimizes your conversion rates while at the same time shortening the time to actual sales/booking decisions.
– Analyze, analyze and analyze data some more
Before creating any strategy related to the strengthening of relations with clients, it is necessary to determine very precisely who are the people you are addressing, that is, to determine your target group.
This process begins with monitoring the needs, in-depth analysis, and understanding the current and potential residents of your community.
Ask important questions, such as: “How long does the average decision-making process for new residents take? What percentage of potential customers abandon their decision and at what stage does this happen? Which segment of your market is the most underserved or needs more attention and time? How different is your conversion process compared to your competition?
Also, find the source where most of your potential customers come from and put your efforts in that direction. whether it’s your website, your social platforms, your email campaigns, or something else, it’s important to find out where your customer base is, because that’s where you need to focus all your marketing efforts.
This kind of seemingly basic data is actually incredibly valuable to your digital marketing strategy – especially when you use the knowledge gained to create a prototype of your ideal customer.
Finally, the knowledge gained should provide significant and very useful information on ways to create and utilize your lead nurturing strategy. If you adhere to these principles and put them into practice, the result will be an increase in sales and a shortening of the nursing home sales cycle.
– Segment your audience
It is very important to know your audience, so you could offer them what they need and expect from you. Use the demographic and consumer behavior data you collect and use that data to properly define your target group and segment your audience based on common characteristics they share and other relevant parameters.
When you segment your audience based on common characteristics, you can target each segment in a unique way and tailor your marketing campaign in detail to the needs of that particular group.
Then your marketing team can create a strategy with precisely defined points, which correspond most effectively with the targeted target group. Such a marketing approach will bring you many benefits and help you with shortening the sales cycle for nursing homes.
– Create targeted content and be personal
The advantage of segmenting your audience is the creation of highly targeted content created exactly according to the needs of the segmented audience. Personalized marketing has become a necessity these days, primarily because people are inundated with information about products and sales, and any offers that are generic will be the first to be written off by customers. A generic approach to marketing will consume your resources, but will not bring you the desired results.
Also, generic marketing, without a personalized approach, will not help you nurture leads or with shortening the sales cycle for nursing homes.
For example, let’s say you have an audience segment made up of women in their 60s and 70s who have retired from some sort of corporate job. Due to the research that you have carried out in detail and thoroughly, you now know that the largest part of this target group is on Facebook and that it expects content different from that which is placed on Tiktok and Twitter. That knowledge gives you the ability to address them in a way that they will best understand and engage with your message.
Therefore, the time invested in collecting and analyzing data, creating content, and getting to know your audience is not wasted time, on the contrary! The insight provided by the collected data allows you to create your strategy and content accordingly and gives you an advantage in acquiring new residents.
