What’s Your Return on Time Invested?

We normally calculate ROI in terms of money. But what about time?

As a resource, time is different because it’s finite. If you know a particular online advertising campaign is generating good results, you may simply increase your advertising budget for better results. That’s not true of time. Time is a resource you can never get back. In senior living sales, every hour you spend with a lead that never becomes a prospect represents an hour you then can’t spend with more promising leads.

But if you aren’t tracking the time you invest with each lead and prospect, how will you know if you’re spending your time well?

Return on Time Invested (ROTI) and the Senior Living Sales Cycle

The length of the senior living sales cycle is highly variable, determined in part by the level of care required (more care = shorter cycle). A study by A Place for Mom found that the average move-in time for residential care is just under 50 days, while for independent living it’s more than 120 days.

Especially for these longer sales cycles, it’s essential you know exactly how much time your staff invests in each prospect. Once you have this data, you can gain insights such as:

• What activities help move leads most quickly to prospects, and prospects most quickly to move-ins
• What types of leads/prospects require the most time to move down the sales cycle
• Where bottlenecks occur that prevent leads and prospects from advancing
• Which members of your sales team are the most efficient

This information will allow you to make better decisions. For example, you may find that certain types of prospects take up a huge amount of time, but very rarely become residents. In that case, you can look for ways to cut to the chase so you can spend more time with people who are more likely to move in.

How to Track ROTI

You could use timesheets, but the easiest way to track ROTI is through your CRM, where all of your customer data is already housed. Different CRMs track time differently (some don’t do it at all), so here are a few things to look for:

• The ability to customize your CRM to reflect your sales cycle, rather than being forced to adopt someone else’s methodology
• The ability to track touchpoints as well as overall time invested, which will provide both details and a broader, holistic picture of your sales efficiency
• The ability to create custom reports based on these times and touchpoints, so you can gain deeper insight into what’s really happening along your sales cycle

How are you spending your time? Schedule a demo with Aline to see how to promote better outcomes in senior living.