Your Easy Guide to Setting Sales Goals for Senior Living 

In the competitive senior living industry, you and your sales team need an actionable plan for setting sales goals. Determining precise, achievable goals is the cornerstone of any successful sales strategy. 

So let’s break down the process into manageable steps to help you define achievable, impactful sales goals that align with your community’s mission. From defining KPIs to choosing the right sales enablement tools and monitoring progress, we’ll review how to easily set sales targets to build a thriving, profitable senior living community.

Determine Your Goals

Effective goal setting starts with defining what you’d like to broadly achieve, such as increasing occupancy rates, enhancing resident satisfaction, or expanding into new market segments. Once you have that framework, you should then set SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—and ensure that each goal directly contributes to those larger business outcomes.

Once you decide your goals, you can set the KPIs that it will take to achieve those goals in your CRM. Some senior living KPIs include averages for inquiries, sales cycles, lengths of stay, conversion rates, market source conversions, and sales activity performance. 

So how do you set your KPIs? Start by looking at your sales metrics from the past year. If you well-surpassed your goals, perhaps you set your KPIs too low. Or was there a market condition that created an outlier effect on performance?  

• Specific: Set specific goals for your senior living community, such as spending more time on high-value sales activities that are more likely to advance the prospect down the sales funnel. 
• Measurable: Make measurable goals. For the example above, you could aim to hold 10 in-person tours per month. 
• Achievable: Depending on the size and location of your community, your goals can vary greatly. Smaller communities don’t have access to the same pool that larger communities do, so they must scale their goals to fit realistic benchmarks. 
• Relevant: Keep goals relevant to your community’s overall mission. If your community wants to increase occupancy, you could aim to improve your tour-to-move-in conversion rate by training staff on enhanced sales techniques and customer engagement strategies. 
• Time-Bound: Determine the appropriate timeline to stay on track. For a holistic approach, divide your timeline into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, and schedule regular reporting sessions in your CRM to assess your progress. 

Once you decide your goals, you can set the KPIs that it will take to achieve those goals in your CRM. Some senior living KPIs include averages for inquiries, sales cycles, lengths of stay, conversion rates, market source conversions, and sales activity performance. 

So how do you set your KPIs? Start by looking at your sales metrics from the past year. If you well-surpassed your goals, perhaps you set your KPIs too low. Or was there a market condition that created an outlier effect on performance?

In addition to your own performance, you should also consider senior living industry benchmarks. This can help you identify potential gaps and target areas for improvement. Perhaps you haven’t invested in a certain market source channel, but it converts well across the industry — you don’t want to give that channel to your competitors.

Expert tip: Remember to look at what percentage of your previous prospects stayed in their home or moved to a competitor. Set goals to reduce losses, so you and your team don’t prematurely disqualify or give up on tough prospects.

Implement the Right Sales Enablement Tools and Training

Implementing advanced sales enablement technology makes it straightforward and simple to track your goal progress. If you’re serious about reaching your goals and improving your sales outcomes, you need these top tools.

CRM
Invest in a CRM that allows you to assign specific goals to different sales team members. This gives visibility across the team and keeps everyone accountable as the CRM tracks successes and opportunities for improvement. 

To stay focused on reaching your goals, your CRM should also integrate with your financial, operations, and resident care units. Not only does this eliminate time-consuming administrative tasks that take you away from selling but it also ensures your entire organization has access to every prospect’s profile from the first touchpoint to move-in and beyond. 

Your accounting and billing team can seamlessly provide leasing documents when it’s time to close, and your resident care staff can create personalized plans during the sales process to show your community can deliver the care they need. These all make for a smoother sales experience to help you reach your goals.  

Expert tip: Designed by seasoned industry experts, Aline’s leading CRM software meets these exact needs and directly integrates with your leasing and billing, care, and operations offices.

Dedicated Contact Center
You’re not always available to take every call, so without call support, you could lose enough qualified leads to make it difficult to hit your targets. But partnering with a dedicated senior living contact center that offers weekend and after-hour support ensures you capture every inbound lead. 

All call activity with a detailed prospect profile integrates directly into the CRM, and you can even work with a contact center to provide cold outbound reach. Your time is best spent on advancing warm to hot leads who are more likely to convert. At the same time, your pipeline will quickly dry up if you don’t somehow engage these leads. Adding an extension to your sales team with a contact center keeps your leads active through every stage of the sales funnel.

You can also leverage live chat capabilities for immediate support. This is a great option for prospects who may still a sense of hesitancy, which is common in senior living. They can get the answers they need and even schedule a tour in a low-pressure setting.  

Expert tip: Aline’s powerful Contact Center leverages next-generation AI and account-specific teams to help you capture every lead for higher conversion rates and lower spend.

Sales Automation Tools
Automated lead scoring is an especially helpful tool, which uses a predictive algorithm to rate prospects by those most likely to convert, so you and your team can better prioritize your efforts. This algorithm scores a lead based on the number of activities and where those activities occur in the sales funnel. Leads with the highest scores have participated in more activities further down the sales funnel. As the lead continues to engage or even disengages, the lead score changes.

Related: To learn more about how lead scoring can enhance your conversions, check out our guide “Improve Sales Performance With Better Lead Generation.”

AI integrations are effective for making it quick and simple to enhance your personalization. With a simple click, AI tools can summarize your sales notes using a large language model, and then offer specific, thoughtful ideas for how you can better connect with prospects as they progress through the sales process.  

These automation tools help you focus on the right prospects, simplify the nurturing process, reduce your reliance on time-consuming manual tasks, and give you better visibility into your progress. When these efficiencies come together, it becomes much easier to reach your sales goals.   

Expert tip: Aline’s lead scoring helps you prioritize prospects most likely to convert, allowing you to work more effectively and efficiently as you work toward reaching your sales and occupancy goals.

Prospect-Centered Sales Training
Some sales teams rely too heavily on emails, texts, and call-outs to prospects when face-to-face interactions, tours, and home visits achieve better results. This is where professional, senior living-focused sales training can help. These training sessions show you how to:

• Build a strong connection with prospects to improve engagement and address resistance to change. 
• Listen to what prospective residents really need and adapt your sales pitch to emphasize how your community can meet those needs. 
• Leverage benchmark reporting on the most effective KPIs to improve performance.

Expert tip: With Aline’s Prospect-Centered Selling program, we teach senior living sales professionals how to do just that. Our best performers have realized up to a 25% occupancy growth within one year. If increasing your occupancy rates is part of your sales goals, it may be time to invest in the right training.

Monitor Your Goals

Once you enter your team’s sales goals into your CRM, you can use reporting dashboards to monitor your KPIs and adjust as necessary. Goals and KPIs are flexible, and you should regularly review and tweak your goals based on changing market conditions, the competitive landscape, and internal business changes. This agile approach helps you better align with business objectives and adapt the right strategies. A monthly or quarterly KPI review can help you identify trends and gain insights into what strategies are working. 

Keep in mind that goals aren’t necessarily the same across the team, and you can easily adjust goals for individual team members in your CRM. Say you have an entry-level sales rep on your team. This person should start with smaller goals than your seasoned rep who’s been selling for decades. As this entry-level sales rep achieves small wins, you can gradually ramp up their goals. 

To help keep your team on track, offer incentives for short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, and base incentives on what motivates your sales team. For example, offer a cash reward for a certain number of new meetings held with qualified prospects.

Expert tip: To easily digest your progress, Aline’s CRM allows you to visualize your data with a range of easily configured tables, graphs, and KPI charts. 

Get the Right Senior Living Sales Benchmarks

Now you’re ready to put this plan into action, but don’t forget that one critical piece — industry sales benchmarks. Aline’s 2023 Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report is loaded with the information you need to set the right sales goals, determine the most effective sales channels, and better allocate your resources. Download the Aline Benchmark Report now and put your sales plan on a path that gets results.