What Has the Biggest Impact on Your Community’s Marketing & Advertising?
Your customer relationship management (CRM) system plays a huge role in the success of your community's marketing and advertising — for better or worse.
Successful senior living sales teams, particularly for larger senior living communities, tend to have a robust, up-to-date CRM they can rely on to organize their pipelines and manage touchpoints. Of course, day-to-day operators often view CRMs as a technical nuisance or hoop to jump through, making it essential that you invest in your CRM to ensure strong adoption and ground-up functionality.
One problem, however, is that it's not uncommon for sales directors in senior living to inherit CRMs that have been used — and abused — for years, if not decades. Years of data might sound like a gold mine of leads, but in the senior living community sector, old data is rarely something you can mine for conversions. Plus, data in a poorly managed CRM may be unreliable, leading sales and marketing teams to chase leads or audience segments that don't exist or won't respond as expected.
Previous leadership's CRM-related habits can also lead to questions like, "Has the sales team been trained on this fully?"
Approaching such questions and a potential dirty CRM can feel daunting. However, a bit of patience and fortitude can help you wrestle your CRM into a functional, well-oiled machine with clean data and flowing sales pipelines.
Below are some tips we've gathered from years of helping senior living communities clean up CRMs and get to cleaner conversion workflows.
Tackling the Past: Cleaning Up Your CRM
Before you can optimize your CRM, you must understand what metaphorical spider webs are hanging around inside. You'll need to take time to evaluate the health of your database. The first step is assessing where your data stands right now and how far off it might be from the desired state.
By working with data partners like SenioROI, you can get a clear picture of the health of your database and clean up your prospect records. Their tool, VALIDIFY, allows you to separate the good data from the bad. They can then enrich, validate, and standardize the prospect records, so you have the most accurate and insightful information possible. This gives your sales team more confidence in every call and campaign, knowing they are being targeted in their approach.
Tools like VALIDIFY help you turn an outdated CRM into a high-performing system that supports your sales team, your community goals, and ultimately, a stronger ROI.
Understanding and Bridging the Gap
Start by identifying aged leads. For example, if your average conversion timeline is 3 years, prospects who've been inactive for 10 years or more aren't likely to be viable leads. Decide on a cutoff and make any records past that time period as closed or inactive. It helps if your CRM supports bulk updates. If it doesn't, a data partner may be able to help expedite this type of cleanup.
As you explore old data in your system, you'll likely uncover inconsistencies in how past team members used the system. One sales counselor might have habitually labeled a lead as "lost" in notes without updating the right sales field, for example. Another might have used pipeline terms like lost, closed, active, and inactive for slightly different categories than everyone else. This type of inconsistency creates misleading reports and inflated pipeline numbers.
Fortunately, these inconsistencies usually follow patterns. Once you find one error or issue, you can more easily search for similar issues as you work on cleaning your data.
Moving Into the Future: Building Healthy CRM Habits
Once your CRM is cleaned up with accurate, consistent data, you can focus on developing daily habits that keep it that way. A well-maintained CRM can become your sales and marketing teams' secret weapon, helping you identify patterns, improve targeting, and drive more meaningful engagement.
VALIDIFY helps achieve this by standardizing fields and reducing human error, so your reports reflect reality and your leadership can make smarter marketing and sales decisions.
Details, Details, Details! Fill Out Prospects' Profiles Consistently
The more your internal teams and agency partners know about your prospects, the better they can tailor marketing strategies to them. Even seemingly minor details can improve campaigns and targeting, so consider whether you can answer questions like:
- How many of your prospects are married?
- Who owns pets?
- Who has adult children helping with the decision-making?
You may not get every data point on a first call, and that's okay. Encourage your sales team to treat any initial consultation as a foundation for deeper discovery in the future. Tools like Roobrik or TalkFurther can help them gather insights before they even make contact.
Remind your team to update the CRM regularly and to record every detail. You might not know what specifically helps you close the deal, and all accurate data can improve your future marketing.
Additionally, there are tools that help you manage this on an ongoing basis, like VALIDIFY. Their ongoing enrichment process updates your CRM nightly, so you no longer need to weed through unqualified digital leads. Automated hygiene ensures data starts and remains clean, reliable, and actionable, so sales teams spend more time on qualified leads and building relationships with potential residents.
The Clock's Ticking! Update Prospects' Statuses Promptly
Timely status updates are critical to ongoing success. Leaving leads in outdated stages clogs your pipeline and can skew performance metrics. When your pipeline categories are treated like the Wild West, it's impossible to evaluate marketing ROI and make data-backed business decisions.
Make it a standard practice to update statuses immediately after any meaningful interaction.
Ensure You Understand Lead Source Attribution
Knowing where your leads come from helps you allocate a marketing budget more effectively. However, accurate attribution only happens when the team captures details early and consistently. Make it easy for teams to log info in the CRM and conduct regular audits to ensure each person is making an effort to support accuracy.
It's Time to Roll Up Your Sleeves and Dig In
Maintaining a clean, well-used CRM isn't a one-time fix. It requires a long-term commitment. If you're ready to say "I do" to a better CRM, we can help you develop the right habits and align your team so you can make your CRM the backbone of your marketing and sales strategy. Connect with us today.
