Managing customer relationships is the heart of every single sales interaction. Creating customer relationships is the heart of each marketing interaction. But in the senior living sphere, the two can exist entirely separate from one another because of a cranky CRM. Just ask Natalie Groeger, our new chief transformational officer. Natalie believes senior living communities need a CRM designed to help both teams achieve their goals. And that starts by cleaning it up to reveal the hidden treasure of overlooked leads and metrics that have actual meaning. When that happens, goals can be achieved. A clean CRM can be a win-win for both sales and marketing teams.
Transformational Relationships
Customer relationships begin with someone reaches out to another. Maybe it’s a senior living community mailing an invitation to a luncheon event. Perhaps an adult child visits your website as they research nearby senior communities for their parent. Either way, a connection is made. The invitation results in RSVPs to the event. The adult child calls for a tour. It shouldn’t matter what form the interaction takes, actions should become usable data flowing into your CRM. Unfortunately, that’s usually where trouble begins. Trying to use whatever data makes its way into the CRM creates friction points, bad data, bottlenecks, and meaningless numbers for meaningless reports. <heavy sigh> But it doesn’t have to be that way!
CRM 101: Step by Step
Getting to a point where your CRM makes life easier for everyone won’t happen overnight. But it can happen. Natalie says it starts with a thorough audit that begins with the answer to a simple, direct question. What do your teams need to know to achieve their goals? That answer leads to identifying:
- Individual workflow needs
- How leads are managed
- Individual responsibilities
- What can be automated
- What should be automated
- What self-reported data can be replaced with facts
- How fields are categorized, selected, and named
- What fields are missing
- Which fields are a waste of time; which are worth your time
- Where are the gaps indicating missing data
Once she knows what’s there, what’s missing, and what needs to be reconfigured, the next step is to append data so your teams can work with complete and accurate information. Better yet, if the community has commissioned a MicroModeling Report, the Sabal team can prioritize and rank each entry. Instead of simply spending their time on 10 random leads from the CRM, sales counselors can reach out to the highest priorities among the CRM’s entries.
Leveraging Technology
In addition to managing customer relationships, sales and marketing teams need to manage their own relationship. Frequently the sales counselors have no visibility into the marketing team’s various campaigns. The marketing focus is on finding new people instead of cultivating those who are close to choosing to move. Each is working to determine and cultivate qualified candidates, but each needs to run different campaigns. The right AI tools can speak to both the CRM and the MAP. Devising and developing unified email campaigns to speak to marketing-qualified and sales-qualified individuals is easy to automate and personalize.
Now, if acronyms and the very idea of a tech stack make your heart race and nerves quiver, I promise Natalie is the person you need to hold your hand and walk you through everything. She firmly believes there is hidden treasure in every messy CRM. And by investing time and resources to clean and update your CRM, attending her subsequent training for everyone on your team, you’ll see measurable results. You’ll also see an unexpected bonus: reports that actually answer your specific questions and detail improved results.
Clean Your CRM
We get it. Most people would rather have a root canal than clean a CRM. (Sorry not sorry.) But Natalie considers diving into a CRM a grand adventure. Maybe that’s because she’s young at heart, and like every kid, loves the idea of finding buried treasure. If you’re ready to take the plunge with her, give her a call to discuss how a clean CRM can help your teams.
