Maplewood Senior Living Boosts Efficiency With Better Data From Aline

Based in picturesque Westport, Connecticut, Maplewood Senior Living operates two brands of vibrant communities across five states. Its signature Maplewood communities offer residents a refined and comfortable living experience with luxurious amenities and caring service while its ultra-luxury brand, Inspīr, sets a new standard for senior living in urban markets. With 16 communities featuring cozy residences, meticulously manicured landscapes, gourmet dining options, and enriching social activities, Maplewood Senior Living is dedicated to exceeding the traditional standards of senior living. Here, residents don’t just live out their golden years — they thrive in an environment that celebrates their life and legacy.

Given such high standards for resident experiences, Maplewood Senior Living recognizes the critical need to improve operational efficiencies at every business level, including sales and marketing, to maintain a flourishing community with high occupancy rates. An efficient sales process not only establishes a positive initial impression, setting the tone for what residents can expect, but it also empowers the sales team to focus on high-impact activities that significantly boost conversion rates.

Challenges: Limited Data and Inefficiencies

To support these efforts, Moriah Prasky, vice president of sales for Maplewood Senior Living and Inspir, needed a new solution for managing her team’s sales and marketing strategies. While the previous CRM was made for senior living, the tool wasn’t sales friendly and lacked the data needed to inform her team’s sales and marketing strategies. Instead of quickly pulling one report, Prasky had to run several reports and cross reference them to find the right data, leaving her frustrated with the system’s inefficient and limited reporting capabilities.

For instance, when Prasky needed to identify the market source for new leads, she sorted through each lead one by one to decipher whether the coded referral was a family member, staff member, physician, or another source.

“We had limited options on how to categorize market sources,” Prasky said. “All paid, professional, unpaid, family, and associate referrals fell under one referral bucket. That made it hard to measure those paid sources versus the free leads we earned through our external business development team and family and staff referrals. It was really time consuming and exhausting.”

The previous CRM also couldn’t handle Maplewood Senior Living’s marketing campaigns. Instead, Prasky’s team used another marketing automation platform to separately run the campaigns. Each sales rep was responsible for the administrative duties that came with the additional platform, including uploading and maintaining their email lists, which was an inefficient use of the sales reps’ time.

As a result, sales reps were often stretched too thin to ensure every qualified prospect received the marketing event promotions, and event attendance eventually suffered. Those events are important to Maplewood Senior Living for brand awareness and community knowledge. Prasky couldn’t let excessive manual administrative work and limited data get in the way of her team’s success — she needed a better solution.

The Solution: Aline CRM, Market Insights, and Marketing Automation

Attending a recent SMASH conference, Prasky was on the lookout for a new CRM. Prasky wanted a more modern system with updated features and capabilities, including better reporting and advanced automation. After talking to the Aline team and learning more about its innovative CRM, Prasky envisioned how the platform could help her team run more efficiently with access to deeper data for better decision-making and migrated to the new solution within a year.

Maplewood Senior Living’s complete solution includes:

• Aline CRM: Specifically designed for the senior living industry, Aline CRM is a strategic sales and marketing platform, equipped with advanced data management and analytics. Aline CRM enables precise targeting and personalized engagement to drive successful sales outcomes, marking a significant improvement from the previous CRM system.
• Aline Market Insights: Leveraging rich data and industry benchmarking from Aline CRM, Aline Market Insights is a custom reporting platform that provides automated performance reports. With these reports, sales and marketing teams have the necessary insights to identify trends and untapped opportunities, make real-time strategy adjustments, and measure performance against industry competitors.
• Aline Marketing Automation by ActiveDEMAND: Built to maximize sales and marketing outreach, Aline Marketing Automation optimizes the sales cycle to make it easy to track marketing effectiveness and spend. From a single platform, sales and marketing teams can use Aline Marketing Automation to manage email and social media marketing, lead nurturing, automated workflows, landing pages, asset libraries, web forms, appointment scheduling, and call tracking.

The Outcomes: Simplified Reporting for More Strategic Decision-Making

Since using Aline’s sales and marketing solutions, Prasky’s job has shifted for the better. Prasky worked closely with the Aline team to build custom reports in Aline Market Insights, which surface in Aline CRM. While the standard Aline reports were a significant improvement over the previous platform, every sales team operates differently, and Prasky needed a reporting solution with customization capabilities to fit her team’s unique preferences and priorities. Some especially powerful customized reports for the Maplewood and Inspīr sales team have been:

• Transfer-adjusted occupancy rates: When a resident transferred to another room or care unit, such as independent living to assisted living, Prasky’s previous system counted it as an occupancy loss, which skewed the data and added extra work for the team to adjust. Aline Market Insights, however, correctly attributes these events as transfers for more accurate occupancy data.
• Digital engagement scores: To help the sales team focus on prospects most likely to convert, Prasky created a report on digital engagement scores for various metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, based on 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day timeframes.
• Deactivation rate monitoring: After seeing the team’s active leads looked low in the CRM data, Prasky found the reps were deactivating leads too quickly. She set up training sessions to help them more effectively nurture prospects down the sales funnel as well as a monthly report to track deactivation. As a result, Prasky’s team reduced their deactivation rate by 30%, providing that many more open opportunities.

Prasky can even customize naming conventions, such as drop-down lists, to reflect her team’s internal language, which has helped the reps more accurately log their sales activities to improve data quality.

Now that viewing critical data has become so simple with Aline Market Insights and Aline CRM, Prasky spends about 75% of her time analyzing her team’s sales activities, such as tour volume, lead volume, and campaign engagement scores, to ensure they’re focused on the right activities that drive occupancy growth. By keeping a close eye on activities and performance, Prasky has created a culture of accountability that allows the team to address any issues immediately.

“The team has certain metrics they must meet on a weekly and monthly basis,” Prasky said. “I send a report every Monday morning to the sales directors, executive directors, and regional and senior leadership for accountability. If we have a community with challenged occupancy, we can see if they’re not spending enough time on activities that are more likely to drive conversions.”

Along with activity tracking, Prasky uses the industry benchmark data available in Aline Market Insights through the Aline CRM to make real-time adjustments to the team’s sales and marketing strategies. For example, if a sales rep finished last quarter with a high inquiry-to-tour ratio, but that number is down this quarter with the same number of leads, Prasky can then analyze the speed-to-lead response time and quality of leads, both of which can affect this metric. If the speed-to-lead response time is still within industry standards, the drop may call for a change to Prasky’s lead generation marketing campaigns.

“As soon as the updated benchmark data becomes available, I print it and thoroughly review each page,” Prasky said. “This process has been instrumental in identifying opportunities as well as pinpointing areas where we may be underperforming in comparison to industry standards. With those insights, we can strategically realign our approach to better position us to meet our sales goals.”

For the sales team, they’ve improved their efficiency with automated workflows in the Aline CRM and Aline Marketing Automation. In particular, the Microsoft Outlook email integration has been a powerful tool, Prasky said. This integration allows sales reps to directly email from Aline CRM without toggling between the two platforms. Once the sales reps send an email, Aline CRM automatically logs the communication as an activity, and it becomes part of the resident’s profile. The sales reps can then reference those emails to personalize future communications, building the much-needed trust that helps convert a prospect to a resident.

“It was so tedious for our team to go back and forth between the two systems copying and pasting,” Prasky said. “They have metrics to meet for the number of mail-outs, and this integration saves them a ton of time.”

Since implementing these Aline solutions, Prasky has only received positive feedback. Maplewood and Inspir’s sales team is full of long-term staff members who were around with the previous CRM, so they were well-acquainted with the old challenges. Now that the team is fully up and running with Aline’s platform of sales and marketing solutions, they’re thriving with better data and automated workflows, and Prasky would recommend to anyone looking to improve their efficiency while maximizing results.  

Improve Efficiencies and Data for Better Sales Outcomes

Want to see how Aline’s sales and marketing solutions can enhance your efficiencies and data quality to improve your team’s performance? Book a personalized demo today with our team of knowledgeable solutions consultants.