Aaron Catoe, Senior Vice President of Operations, and David Ensor, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, join Greg Puklicz, President of 12 Oaks Senior Living, to discuss 12 Oaks’ successful sales and marketing strategies and demonstrate how these strategies have led to significant occupancy growth across their communities.
Learn more about how 12 Oaks Senior Living Outperformed Industry Benchmarks in 2023 in the case study HERE.
You’re listening to The Roots Podcast by 12 Oaks, where we’ll be joined by industry leaders to discuss and highlight the character, competency and care that is required to successfully manage senior living portfolios.
Greg 00:20
Well hello again everybody and welcome to yet another exciting episode of The Roots Podcast. Brought to you by 12 Oaks Senior Living.
Today I am joined by two of my most favorite people here at 12 Oaks. I have, of course, David Ensor, our Vice President of Sales and Marketing. And, no stranger to the podcast, one of our most favorite guests, Aaron Catoe, Senior Vice President of Operations. Welcome, gentlemen.
Aaron 00:51
Thank you. And a pleasure to be here as usual.
David 00:54
Absolutely.
Greg 00:54
Good, good. Well, seeing as we’ve got the two of you here, as we’re sitting in the 12 Oaks Romper Room, all comfy and spread out. Today’s topic is sales and marketing. And we’ve got our two resident experts here to talk about that. So one of the things we pride ourselves on at 12 Oaks Senior Living is our ability to outpace the market, outpace our competitors, and our sales and marketing efforts. And David, I understand you’ve actually done a little research on this. You’ve actually got data. And, you know, we love opinions very much here at 12 Oaks. But we really, really love data, right. And then we really, really, really love opinions backed by data. So, David, you’ve got some findings from our efforts on the sales marketing front in 2023. Why don’t you share that with our vast podcast audience?
David 02:12
Absolutely. And this is data that as much as I love to take credit for doing the research on this, this is actually provided to us by a third party that took all of the sales metrics, KPIs, lead to tour conversions, tour to move-in conversions, and broke it down by our percentage versus the rest of the industry.
And there are really five metrics that we came out looking pretty good in comparison with our peers. The first being, inquiry to move-in. So once a person comes in as a lead to moving that person in. For 2023 as a year, we converted 11% of our inquiries to move-ins, versus the industry standard or the industry average of nine. So outpaced on that one. The second was obviously, if you’re going to get someone from inquiry to move-in, you’ve got to get them in to tour first. With that one, we came in at 27%, which was not quite as high as our previous one, but 26% was the industry average. So we outpaced that one. And the one that I’m really keen on, it’s the biggest delta, I guess, is our move-in. We came in at 40% versus 33% for the industry. Not only were we converting at a higher percentage on all those three metrics, we also did it faster than the industry. So we came in at an average sales cycle of about 67 days versus an industry average of 182 days.
Greg 04:17
That’s quite a difference.
David 04:19
Again, pretty big difference there. Some people out there might be wondering, well, you’re moving them in fast, but are they staying? We hit the double-double on this where our average length of stay is 512 days versus the industry average of 498.
So 5 pretty key metrics to measuring sales success and effectiveness, and we came out looking pretty good on all five.
Greg 04:50
That’s awesome. That’s great news. That’s well, you mentioned a double-double, I think that’s a quintuple double in NBA parlance. So that’s pretty impressive. So that’s great success.
Our relational selling techniques appear to be working. Aaron, how do you interpret this data? You are a big fan of data. And so what do these numbers kind of tell you?
Aaron 05:19
It tells me that 12 Oaks intentionality by no accident, intentionality with the way that we have staff training and support and coaching have resulted in objective data that people move in longer, stay longer, move in quicker at a higher conversion rate. And once they come in the door, it’s certainly never a done deal. But my gosh, there’s something really special about 12 Oaks that people are choosing to move to our communities. And I think that’s done through several different ways by five different ways that we focus on. However, I’ll let you lead and see where we go from here.
Greg 06:04
Well, yeah. So that’s a perfect segue into something I’ve heard about; It’s called the Five Vitals. So, the five vitals are foundational to our relational selling techniques. David, you want to take a crack at telling us what the five vitals are?
David 06:28
I would absolutely love to. So these are five functions, I guess you would say, that we’ve identified that if we do well on all five of these, generally, we’re going to win more than we lose. They are attunement, which is connecting with the person in front of you, and not just listening to what they say, but understanding the feeling and the emotion behind that and all those different things that go into that. Urgency, which is, it can be attributed to how quickly we’re getting to our leads, which is definitely something that we pay attention to, but also, helping the prospective resident through that process with some urgency, too. The next obviously, is we have our CRM, Aline/Sherpa. But, you have to have a good CRM and a good process for managing your leads through the process so that is number three. We have what we call top ten and wrap up, which is an opportunity for each community team to spend some dedicated time daily focusing on the perspective of residents that are looking at doing something right now, who need the most help right now. It’s kind of the concept of many hands make light work, right? Collaboration, those kinds of things. So making sure that we’re getting multiple perspectives with every lead, to just make sure we don’t miss something. And then wrap up is kind of more about accountability, right? We said we were going to do this today. How did we do on that? That’s number four. And then number five is what we call create a follow up, which is another kind of arm, I think, to attunement. It’s a way for us to our communities to differentiate themselves. And more importantly, I think to help the prospective resident or family member of that resident, feel heard and seen by our team. It’s a way of us kind of putting our money where our mouth is and showing, rather than telling. We found that if we can do all five of these really well, that’s generally what leads to those numbers we just talked about.
Aaron 09:03
Can I expand on attunement some? Would that be alright?
Greg 09:05
Of course.
Aaron 09:06
David was right on with the definition, but I want to add an additional way to understand. Metaphors seem to help people understand concepts. So with attunement for those in the audience who have ever ridden in an automobile with a manual dial radio where you turn the knob and you’re on a station and on one side it’s fuzzy, then you come back and it’s perfectly clear. Then you make it a little far and it’s fuzzy again. You can come back and you’re tuned in. You’re dialed into that station. That’s how attunement works, except substitute the radio station with an emotion. And here’s what’s really important about understanding the prospect’s emotions: we teach that emotions are signals of what to do. I want you to hear me say this. It doesn’t mean the signal is always right, but it’s a signal of what to do. For example, anger is a signal that something’s out of alignment. Joy is a signal that something is fulfilled. Now, with prospects, there’s all sorts of emotions to be untangled. And in these emotions, if someone is feeling fear or anxiety or apprehensions, that signal is telling the prospect to move away. It’s a safety emotion. I need to be safe and I need to move away from this. I need to move away from this viable option of senior housing. I need to move away from this leasing counselor. And it’s a movement away. Now, feelings of peace and comfort, those are signals to move toward. And so they move towards the viable option of senior housing, move towards the messaging of the sales counselor. And so it’s very, very important as we teach all our leasing staff and skilled professionals that they are attuning to understand what signal is being given to this prospect through the emotion, so that they can navigate and connect and untangle and advance to the next logical step. And that’s why attunement is so important and it often seems people misunderstand it at times.
Greg 11:14
Oh that’s great. No, thank you. I appreciate the clarification. So there’s a lot to this and there’s a lot that goes behind the scenes. Aaron, how do you impart all this information to our 40 communities spread across the United States, from Milford, Massachusetts to Pampa, Texas? How do you get all the marketing directors on the same page?
Aaron 11:48
It is with intentionality. Again, metaphors are a great way to understand. And I was speaking to a gentleman about this yesterday. When a professional selling member is in the selling zone and they’re doing all this creative follow up, and this planning, it can be chaotic. It can be really, really fast-paced. Hence the urgency or the vital that David spoke to. And in that it’s like a race car going around a track in this race car is going 170mph around this track, and it’s fast. If you try to work on that car around the track, things get damaged, things can get hurt, machines get broken, people get hurt. And so you want to intentionally, and this is important, get off the race track into the garage. That’s where something can be worked on and made stronger or reinforced or repaired. And so the very first step, Greg, to that answer of “how do we do it?” is we get the sales staff out of the racetrack, so to speak, in a protected setting at a conference center or the 12 Oaks home office located in Dallas. And we have a workshop with intentionality on the skills that need to be developed. So that’s the very, very first step. It goes on. Does that provide some clarity of how it started.?
Greg 13:11
It does. It certainly does. Thank you.
So to be able to enjoy the success we’ve had in terms of move-ins, it all starts with the leads and the lead base. So, David, how’s it been in terms of lead generation? What efforts have you undertaken, and what success have you enjoyed in terms of lead based management?
David 13:39
Yeah. Getting your sales team the right people to work with to help, I think is obviously key in converting movements, because that’s where it starts. We’ve been very focused on, efficiency is not the right word, but kind of fine tuning our process. And really focused in on some of the digital space and everyone’s trying to optimize their search engine optimization, drive costs down. One thing I think that also is very key is kind of brand and name recognition. So we spent a lot of a lot of intentionality on, how can we get that out into the local markets? And by doing that, it would allow us to drive down cost per lead. We reached like literally last week, had some meetings and were looking at some data, and through a lot of what we’ve been doing, we actually grew our organic lead traffic in our database by 61% in Q2 versus Q1, and drove down our cost per lead, I think it was like 14% in doing that. So again, being very intentional with how we’re managing that effort based on the location, the socioeconomic area. Finding leads in the Kingwood, Houston area is a lot different than Tucson, Arizona or Pampa. So getting very, bespoke I guess, and fine tuning that process, we’re seeing some pretty good success, and I think that also plays into some of these numbers as we look at how we did last year.
Greg 15:50
It does. And I guess to wrap it up, the real success, of course, is manifested in occupancy. And year over year we were able to grow occupancy by over 14 points. So, 12 Oaks’ portfolio-wide had significant and tremendous portfolio success; many communities at or near the 100% occupancy mark. And a lot of struggling communities have kind of turned it around. And through the efforts of our sales and marketing team led by Aaron and David here, we’ve enjoyed tremendous occupancy growth across our 12 Oaks portfolio.
So, thank you, Aaron. Thank you, David, for another wonderful podcast. And with that, we’ll bid you adieu until next time.
Aaron 16:49
Take care.
David 16:49
Thank you.
Speaker 1 16:52
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