Have you ever had someone ask you, “What does success look like for your organization?”

By Susan Saldibar

Have you ever had someone ask you, “What does success look like for your organization?” Maybe you answered something like “100% occupancy with a waitlist.” That works. But that’s a single metric. What metrics got you there?

No one likes tracking sales, least of all the salespeople themselves. But, if you want to get better outcomes, you need to track, period.

Don’t you want to know why you had a good (or bad) quarter?

Melinda Schmitz, Executive Vice President & Senior Consultant for Sage Age (a Senior Housing Forum partner), recently remarked, “Certainly it’s important to have a solid sales strategy. But that’s only the beginning. The next very important step is to identify a solid method to track your team’s outreach.” And those efforts are what she says are behind ultimate success. “By doing so, you are aligning the efforts of your team with your goals. Then you can adjust, as needed, to channel them towards a successful outcome.”

One thing is for sure. If you don’t track sales properly, you may never know what you did that led to that really good year, or that really bad one.

What should you be tracking today?

Here are the key metrics, taken from a recent Sage Age article, that senior living communities need to be keeping track of:

  1. Reach: How many people you are connecting with – or reaching – with your content or marketing messages. It is an aggregate of data from your social media following, your blog, your email database and more. It is key because it tells you how wide your “top-of-funnel” pool is.

  2. Visit-to-Lead Percentage Conversion: How effective your sales and marketing team is at getting prospects to visit certain key landing spots in your sales process. It can also be a reflection of the quality of your content and messaging.

  3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)-to-Opportunity Percentage Conversion: The percentage of your MQLs that become quality opportunity leads. If you see this number falling, it may mean that you are too generous in your criteria for qualifying someone as an MQL.

  4. Lead-to-Customer Percentage Conversion: How many of your leads turn into actual customers. This number ultimately reveals the strength of your sales efforts.

Maybe this is the best reason of all to track goals. Morale.

At the end of the day, everyone wants something to shoot for. Nothing is more motivating than a goal. Sage Age urges senior living communities to set goals that are achievable. It is one of the best things you can do to keep team morale high and establish momentum for future success.

As it states in the article, “Feeling as though they are contributing to something larger than themselves is a huge part of creating satisfaction at work. And satisfied, happy employees are way more successful than unhappy ones.”

Who can argue with that?

There is much more in the article, which you can read here. For more information on Sage Age please visit their website.


For more information on Sage Age, please visit their website.

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