By Steve Moran

It is funny how you read something and it turns into a whole article. But I was reading a book on marketing and the author poses the idea that the goal of marketers, not salespeople, is to help consumers achieve their goals in the moment.

This is really a profound idea because it is easy to think that when someone goes online and searches for something like . . .

Senior Living near me

Assisted Living near me

Memory Care near me 

That they are searching for senior living, but more likely than not, they are simply searching for information about senior living rather than being ready to reserve a room. It likely means they have an older someone they are worried about and they are trying to figure what their next action should be.

When we get this wrong we make the sales process worse, not better.

And So . . .

If you make the assumption that they are ready to be a buyer without really knowing they are ready to be a buyer, two things will happen, both bad:

  1. You will come across as pushy and turn off your prospect.
  2. You will not give them the information they need/want.

In either case, it is likely they will either move on, looking for what they want. Or even worse, they will simply decide senior living is too complicated and not for them.

The Big Question

The big question is how do you actually make this work for you? If you go look at your own website you will discover that if someone is wondering whether or not they even need senior living the answer is always, 100% of the time, yes you do.

The problem, of course, is that this is not actually true. Kudos to Brookdale for actually putting the question out there on their site, except that even there, the answer is always “yes you need senior living”. 

I would propose there is a real opportunity for someone . . . for you even, to create a mini-course on how to figure out if you need senior living, and how to pick the best community. If we did this we would become the trusted resource and it would increase the chances that a prospect would say yes to senior living and say yes to your community.