Want to hit 100% occupancy?
"I know how to care but I don't know how to sell!"
Selling in care homes isn’t easy and it’s rarely done by a sales team. When you receive an enquiry you want to know that your home is shown in its best light.
Yet the selling job is often done by an enthusiastic care professional or perhaps one of your admin team with little formal sales training. And it's often with very little notice.
Have you ever thought about how your occupancy or conversion rates might improve if you could fuse the enthusiasm and empathy of your team with simple sales techniques?
We help you create a team of non-sales, salespeople. Passionate staff who know what it is you do within your home, with the confidence and methods to make selling feel less complicated.
Improve your care home sales in three steps
Occupancy Plan
Set ambitious targets that deliver and sustain the occupancy levels you need. Ensure your best “sales” people handle more requests and show arounds and that all your team understand their role in keeping the home filled.
Sales Skills
Be certain that your team have the skills to engage with families making the enquiries, exploring their needs and concerns in a way that supports them in making a good decision.
Marketing Tools
Stand out in a noisy sector where lots of homes look the same. Know that enquiries are nurtured in a way that will result in higher conversion ratios and enable business growth.
Customer success story
The challenge
Our client ran a group of care homes in the Midlands and Southeast. The business was well-established, but Covid had impacted occupancy rates and staff patterns had been disrupted.
Their team had completed some mystery sales calls and had concerns about how their homes were represented to potential clients:
Enquiries were handled in an inconsistent way, often dependent on time of the week and staff availability.
Show-arounds came across as listings of features rather than engaging sales pitches.
There could have been more questioning of visitors to understand their real needs and concerns.
Care standards were good but the commitment of the team didn’t always shine through.
The solution
We worked with each home individually to understand the challenges they faced in their local market. We then designed tailored workshop sessions to help the Manager and Administration Teams have the confidence and skills to hold a sales conversation.
What became apparent was that many of the teams didn’t really understand how their sales funnel worked and how the deliberate actions they took so dramatically affected the conversion rates within each stage – and therefore their occupancy levels.
We also helped the teams work on the following areas:
- Understanding that only focusing upon replacing monthly lost income from respite care or deaths was not sufficient to regain and then sustain increased occupancy levels back to pre-covid levels.
- Setting realistic goals for them that were linked directly back to their CRM so that the team understood the importance of accurate record-keeping.
- Enhancing their questioning skills, rapport-building, and story-telling skills to enable them to choreograph the show-around to best suit the individual needs and expectations of the person they are with.
- Selling benefits rather than features and facts; having the confidence to ask questions about how decisions might be made and to handle queries or objections. This included Home Managers, Admin, Clinical and the Activities Teams.
- Reconnecting with what makes their care homes special and telling their stories to the families they show around.
The impact
Many teams immediately changed how they organised their show-arounds to enhance the experience for the relatives they were speaking with.
The CRM record-keeping improved substantially, and this avoided anyone being asked to repeat themselves when they arrived to meet the team.
The teams that had been trained reported having significantly more confidence in their questioning and listening skills. This was borne out in follow-up mystery shops where all of the homes that we supported were the highest ranked across the whole group.
More importantly, the numbers of conversions from enquiry to move in increased in both number and speed, with these homes hitting 100% capacity in the months after our involvement.
This is the only training our staff have ever been excited about participating in. They enthusiastically looked forward to every session with Lynne. They were immediately able to use what they'd learned to improve how they worked with our residents and families.
Gail, Home Manager