Selling Senior Living

Home for the Holidays

2009-12-14T21:07:00.006-06:00

Is your community Home for the Holidays?

It's this time of the year that families gather, and when adult children realize that their older loved ones may not be doing so well. Do you have a plan for your community to be appropriately staffed for Holiday visitors? Have you communicated through various marketing media that your community welcomes visitors during the Holidays? Do your key referral sources know that you are well prepared to help families during the Holidays?

While it's true that few will actually move during the Holidays, many will make plans to move shortly after the Holidays. Start your year off with more new residents in January through your efforts to promote your community to family members during the Holiday Season.

And, we hope you have a great Holiday!

Rick Hunsicker

www.sellingseniorliving.com

www.hunsickerconsulting.com

Free Seminar Preview Webinar

2009-07-29T21:21:00.004-05:00

Free Preview Webinar

Join Rick Hunsicker on August 4th or August 18th at 11AM PST and get a sneak peek into what topics will be discussed at the Advanced Senior Living Sales Seminar and Sales Essentials Class coming to California in August and September.

Please sign up below to attend one of the webinars. You will receive an email confirmation and a reminder email when the webinar is about to start.

If you are unable to view the registration boxes below, email shelley@hunsickerconsulting.com with your name and date you would like to attend. You will receive an email confirmation with the link to sign in for the webinar on the day of the event.

Webinar Dates: August 4th or 11th
Start Time: 11AM PST

You Can Improve!

2009-06-26T14:51:00.003-05:00

We can all improve! I want to convey this strong message as a result of the feedback from many of the attendees at my highly rated Advanced Senior Living Sales Seminars and Selling Essentials Classes. We are having highly successful and very experienced sales and marketing professionals attend these seminars, and without fail, they tell me "we are here because we know we can do better!" What I am also somewhat surprised to learn is that a greater percentage of the attendees are from communities that are doing relatively well in today's market. This tells me one thing very clearly.

Those who learn more earn more! The successful people in this business are successful because they make it a point to continue to learn new and better ways to market and sell their communities. Our seminar attendees don't seem to have an attitude that says, "we already know it all" and they consistently say "we really needed to brush up on our knowledge and selling skills".

And the other thing that's coming out of these learning experiences is the learning that the attendees gain from the highly interactive nature of the seminars and classes. They comment that making new friends who share similar issues is very rewarding to them.

So, if you want to earn more revenue for yourself and your community, attend one of my seminars or classes coming to your area, or invest in my DVD's that will become available in the next several weeks.

Sales Essential Class

2009-06-16T14:52:00.002-05:00

Based on significant demand, it has been requested that we present a Senior Living Sales Essentials Class.

To accommodate this request for "essential selling skills" training, we will be conducting a 3 hour Senior Living Sales Essential Class the evening prior to the Advanced Senior Living Sales Seminar.

This class is specifically designed for the long time senior living sales professional who wishes to brush up on the key essential selling skills as well as for the new senior living sales professional needing to get up to speed quickly by learning the essential selling skills.

This class will be held from 6 to 9PM on the following dates and locations:

June 18, 2009, Irving (DFW), Texas, Marriott North DFW Airport

Pricing this class at $99 and presenting the class in the evening was done to:

1.) Accommodate those communities with limited talent improvement budgets
2.) Accommodate an individual’s personal investment in self-improvement
3.) Provide a time of the day that would not detract from community selling time

Please visit http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=1012400455&msgid=1563752&act=2TEQ&c=392966&admin=0&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sellingseniorliving.com%2Fsalesessential for more information and to download the registration form.

We hope to see you there!

Selling Senior Living Seminar coming to New England May 29

2009-05-12T15:52:00.005-05:00

Selling Senior Living Seminar coming to New England May 29

I'm bringing the popular new Advanced Senior Living Sales Seminar to Boston on May 29th. This one day intense seminar provides senior living communities the opportunity to cost-effectively invest one day of their time to get new ideas, tools and techniques to increase sales, occupancy and revenue for their communities.

Recent seminar attendees gave an overall rating of 4.9 on a scale of 1 to 5 for the seminar, and all attendees said they would attend a similar seminar again.

I am a 25 year veteran of Senior Living Sales and Marketing with companies like Marriott Senior Living and Greystone Communities. I bring my depth of knowledge and experience to attendees, providing the best of the best sales and marketing advice compressed into one day.

Please visit www.sellingseniorliving.com to get more information and to register.

Executing Word of Mouth Marketing

2009-05-06T16:55:00.003-05:00

I'm writing this today because coincidentally, just as my 27 page White Paper on Executing Word of Mouth Marketing for Your Community is about to come out, I noticed that the recently published Independent Living Report sponsored by the American Seniors Housing Association showed that 64% of the independent living residents learned about their community of choice by word of mouth!

What great timing that this independent research project confirms what my White Paper concludes; Word of Mouth Marketing is your best and most cost-effective marketing mechanism.

If you want to learn how to ramp up your Word of Mouth marketing from what I call "naturally occuring Word of Mouth" to what I call "proactive Word of Mouth", take a look at how you can get the White Paper on the SellingSeniorLiving.com website.

By reading this White Paper you'll learn about things like Decision Acceleration Systems, Delivery Mechanisms, proximal cause of decisions to move and much, much more that will definitely increase your sales if executed as described in the article.

I look forward to your comments before or after you read this new White Paper on Executing Word of Mouth Marketing.

Seniors Buying Process

2009-04-07T20:34:00.002-05:00

I'm returning from a visit with some industry friends in Birmingham and have been thinking about how we approach the development of our sales and marketing approach.

Do you approach your sales and marketing efforts based on the buyer's decision making process or based on your marketing selling process?

Do you know the stages of the typical buying process?

Step one is deciding to decide, otherwise referred to as problem or need awareness.

Do seniors today think they need to sell their homes and move to a senior living community?

Many seniors don't see the need if there are no "triggering events" forcing them to make the move, however, in many cases they may have a latent financial need to move that they are not even aware of. With home values still declining or stable at best, seniors with free and clearn homes may actually be better off selling now and moving to a senior living community.

Taking the time to help seniors understand the real costs of remaining in their homes compared to the real value you provide in your community will get many seniors starting to realize they may really need to move now, and therefore they may start "deciding to decide".

Review of the Houston Seminar on March 27, 2009

2009-04-06T16:32:00.002-05:00

Rick Hunsicker presented to a group of marketing executives new techniques and sales tips during the Advanced Senior Living Sales seminar in Houston, TX on March 27, 2009.

In this video, Rick talks about how the seminar went and how you should attend the Advanced Senior Living Sales seminar being held in a city near you!

Beautiful Living

2009-04-01T23:15:00.002-05:00

After seeing my friend Sharon Moon, Corporate VP for Greystone Communities, at the DFW airport, on the plane and for lunch at the O'Hare Airport, I wanted to share what she told me about her vision/mission for caring for seniors. What she said really struck me...she wants to be...

"offering beautiful living for the vocal and the voiceless"

If you've experienced being in a nursing home, you understand what she is saying!

I asked her if I could post this really neat mission on the blog, and she said it was OK!

I hope you think about this when you think of people in nursing homes, and hope that Sharon is directing their care!

2009-03-11T21:26:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting hear at the desk in the Guest Room of one of my client's communities working on my upcoming seminar, and I'm working on the issue of Overcoming the Price Objection. As I think about all of the discounting I'm seeing today in the senior living business, including Independent Living and Assisted Living, I'm hoping that the senior living industry does not follow the auto industry into the "cash rebate debacle" that has so damaged the auto industry. If our sales people don't learn how to sell value and have the skills and determination to learn the skills of selling at your fair price, the "easy sell" of giving away the store will ruin this industry, as it looks like might happen to the US auto industry. Our leaders should work as hard on training their sales people and their ED's and General Managers on how to sell at fair prices as they do on figuring out what discount to offer! What do you think?

Seniors Should Move Today

2009-03-10T11:04:00.006-05:00

Is now really the best time for seniors to move to a senior living community?

I recently heard several people confirm what I've been saying about why now is the best time to move for several reasons, including:

Homes are not appreciating, and in many areas they are still depreciating, so the "my home is going up in value” is no longer a valid excuse, and with depreciation, the cost of owning the home is now more than just the upkeep costs, but is also the depreciation costs.

There will be fewer new communities opening in the next few years, therefore, there will be less new supply for a continuing increasing demand, which means availability will decline while prices will start going up. Seniors should get in now while prices are reasonable. In fact, with so much discounting going on and so many incentives available now, they should really consider the move now.

In these uncertain times, just how safe is it for seniors to be alone in their homes? We don't want to use scare tactics, but now more than ever it may be safer to live in a more secure environment.

What do you think about this perspective?

Getting Free New Leads

2009-02-19T11:45:00.000-06:00

Anyone involved in sales or community relations should ask everyone they talk to in person or on the phone a very simple question before they conclude their conversation. "By the way, who do you know today that should have information on our community?"

If only 5% of the respondents provide a prospect name, a sales person who talks to at least 40 people each week will gain 2 new leads each week, at a total cost of about 3 minutes of conversation time!

If that translates to 8 new leads in a month, and 1 of those 8 leads becomes a resident, that's one new resident each month gained just by asking "By the way, who do you know today that should have information on our community?"