53. WelcomeHome- The Power of Data in Senior Living Sales and Marketing

Tune in as Amber hosts a conversation with Maggie Seybold, Vice President of Customer Insights at WelcomeHome. By leveraging data analytics, WelcomeHome empowers sales directors to make informed decisions, optimize lead management, and enhance prospect interactions.

Discover trends, such as the management of aggregator leads and proactive scoring strategies, and innovative approaches WelcomeHome employs to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape. Ultimately, the message is clear: embracing data-driven tools not only enhances operational efficiency but also fosters better customer experiences, driving success in the senior living industry.

Find WelcomeHome on their website & LinkedIn.

Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.

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Transcript

Amber Bardon: [00:00:00] Welcome to Raising Tech podcast. I'm your host, Amber Bardon and today my guest is Maggie Seybold. She is the Vice President of Customer Insights at WelcomeHome. Welcome to the show, Maggie. 

Maggie Seybold:

Thank you, Amber. I'm excited to be here. 

Amber Bardon

So I'm sure all of our audience has heard of WelcomeHome before.

WelcomeHome is a little bit of a newer company. When they came on the market, I think they made a really big splash. I heard a rumor, I don't know if it's true, but I heard a rumor that Align Consolidated Enquire and Sherpa just to take on WelcomeHome because you've been such a big disruptor in the industry.

So for those of you who have not heard WelcomeHome, can you tell us a little bit about who you are? 

Maggie Seybold: Sure. WelcomeHome is a senior living sales and marketing focused CRM solution. We've been around since 2019 when our co founders started bubbling around the idea of putting a new user friendly data backed CRM out into the space.

Since [00:01:00] then we have grown from a team of two to a team of almost 50 now, and starting out with our one or two early thought partner operator partners. We're now well over 2000 communities on the platform. It's been a really exciting journey. I think in terms of how WelcomeHome differentiates itself.

It's a customer focused company. John, our co founder and Ryan from the start were focused on providing a solution to customers that was built by customers for customers. And spent almost a year and a half on the initial MVP of the product to get it right with some of our initial partners. And, since that time, They've looked for more new and innovative opportunities to serve customers.

Customer Insights is one of them. So I came on the team in 2022 as the data and analytics function for WelcomeHome. Our team has grown, but we're here mostly to take all that data that sits beneath the CRM and find ways to serve it back to customers in ways to help them improve [00:02:00] their results, serve it to the industry to, put information and performance data out there.

It's been a great journey, love this company, love the senior living space. It's been a wild ride. 

Amber Bardon: That's fantastic. So give me a little more insight into what specific problems was WelcomeHome coming in to solve or what opportunities to WelcomeHome see in this space that they didn't think was available already.

 Anyone who spends time in senior living sales and marketing will be familiar with the experience that sales director and the sales leadership goes through every day. The reality is senior living is a really tough job when you're regardless of whether you're thinking of the sales director doing that tactical work showing prospects around helping move them in or you're thinking about the sales leadership.

Maggie Seybold: This is not residential buildings that have a relatively straightforward process. This sales process is unique and that it's vulnerable. The time period varies enormously. There's a ton of work that goes into each individual [00:03:00] relationship between a sales director and a prospect.

And frankly, it's hard to keep track on all of that data. So hard that, the job was just made more difficult for a sales director on top of the additional emotional difficulty of selling senior living. So John and Ryan really went into this with the goal of taking all of that technical burden, taking all that redundant work and making it as easy as it can be for the sales director.

And then layering on top of that tools that make it easy for the leadership team to know what's going on, identify opportunities and act on those opportunities in a way that is data backed and informed. They multi pronged issue to attack. But the journey to get there has been great.

And we're very focused on. Even as we grow today, keeping our customers in the loop, even engaging with prospects on where do we need to improve what gaps exist in the product that we should be filling. And as like AI is an incredibly interesting space right now. We're having active conversations about innovation in that space [00:04:00] too.

So it's been an ongoing process and very customer informed. 

Amber Bardon: Maggie, let's pivot a little bit and talk about what's going on in the industry, what's going on in the space, what's happening with sales today and senior living.

Can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the major trends that you're seeing in the industry today, and maybe some of your biggest takeaways from the first quarter of this year? 

Maggie Seybold: Sure. What I love about customer insights at WelcomeHome is we have an enormous amount of data to sift through and then work through trends and insights with our customers, as we all know, in the industry, COVID was an extremely challenging time.

And while COVID was meeting our shores in 2020 and 2021, there were some trends going on underneath the surface that we are still working on solving today. So things that come to mind. 1st, digital adoption as a sales outreach method for prospects exploded. We saw the outreach through digital leads expand massively and digital leads account for more than 80 percent of inbound today.

[00:05:00] That's a very different sales process than working with referral partners like doctors or family and friends program. So there are many operators today that are still wrapping their heads around the appropriate strategy for dealing with different types of digital leads. An online website lead looks different than an aggregator lead and how do you, Manage those 2 different prospects.

That's 1 huge impact that we're still working through today. Another from coven. Is that we were stuck inside, so referral outreach took a backseat for 2 years and now we are as an industry relearning that muscle a bit and trying to. Be a little bit more efficient about it. Understand. Where should I be spending my time if I'm trying to decide between getting in touch with the 15 new online leads that have hit my inbox in the last half an hour or putting aside a four hour block to go get lunch with a couple different referral partners who may or may not have been productive in the past.

So really finding that balance on lead management is another huge [00:06:00] focus that we see in industry as well. 

Amber Bardon: I'm curious with all these changes with COVID and some of the takeaways you just mentioned, how do you see the sales process changing and what are some opportunities for improvement? Sure. So 

Maggie Seybold: in terms of how the sales process is changing, And I might be biased because I'm on the data side, but we are now seeing a much higher burden of proof on how sales directors make decisions on how they spend their time because that lead volume kicked back so aggressively after COVID

we were having such an influx of leads that it became more of a challenge to decide how to allocate your time to maximize the number of move ins that you're getting in your specific community so that burden to make well informed choices, data backed choices has been a significant change in the sales process.

Not only is it focused on the lead management side of things, so really understanding how does an aggregator lead behave? How quickly do I need to get in touch with that [00:07:00] person? How many touches do I need to complete so they're comfortable coming in for a tour, and I have the appropriate discovery to give them a successful experience.

Lead management is one thing. Activities and how we approach that nurturing process is another untapped area. We all know, I think, anecdotally, calls are better than emails, but how does text fit into all of this? Especially as baby boomers age in, not only are baby boomers more digitally capable, but their sons and daughters are. IPhone users, they have inboxes that probably have 17, 000 emails in them.

 It's a new way and a new person that we're trying to interact with. So those two changes have also had a meaningful impact on the sales process. 

Amber Bardon: I think this emphasis on data and using data for driving decisions is a big upcoming trend in the industry. And I think it's really long overdue.

And we've done a couple of podcast episodes on data analytics tools. Can we just talk a little bit more about how can you incorporate that in your day to day? How can that data that you're gathering through WelcomeHome integrate with other [00:08:00] aspects of the business?

And how do you see this just changing the way sales is done in the future? 

Maggie Seybold: lots of different audiences and lots of different use cases for data and senior living. Starting at the sales director use case, WelcomeHome has tools to almost automatically log many of the activities that are happening as you go through the sales process.

Having those data points that are stored and able to be used as a reference is critical for continuing to refine your sales process. If you're seeing, for Mary, who inquired two weeks ago, I did two calls. She toured. We did an ED follow up, had another call, and then she moved in three months later.

Collecting that journey data helps us figure out how to respond to each additional journey. That's only one example. Even looking at things like lead source historical performance, we see in our data that aggregator leads typically take More work to earn a move in make sense is they're super competitive.

They're evaluating a ton of [00:09:00] options. It takes more days, more time, more deliberate effort. And then on the back end, their length of stay is half of the stay of a friends and family referral, which again, makes sense that person has an emotional, a personal tie to the community, whereas an aggregator has evaluated seven options.

And if they're not immediately satisfied, they can just go check out the neighboring community, right? So having that information at your fingertips plays a huge role in how you do your day to day, especially at the sales director side. Similarly, as we like think up the chain. Regionals, for example, looking over five to 10 communities, really hard to identify what sales director actions are productive and coach across the team without that data visibility.

We try and make that easy for regionals by servicing that data for them so they don't have to dig 10 hours in the CRM just to find, this process works. This is what increases conversions. Similarly, for admins, senior living is in a state today where [00:10:00] admins have a complicated job.

They have to report up, they have to report across, they have to communicate down. And how do we communicate the decisions that we're making? We do it with data. So once again. Being able to support our admins with having the data presentation ready to go. So they don't have to pull raw CSVs down from the CRM. Come up with

a chart in Google slides, that was incredibly annoying to make and spend a valuable 5 hours of their day doing that when they could be thinking strategically about the direction of their company, all different examples of how we try and support our customers across levels, but data is pivotal in every single one of them.

Amber Bardon: We're talking a lot about data from the perspective of the providers. How do you think these changes in data will impact the customers? The residents and family members that are looking for options out there, potential living situations.

How do you see that evolving and changing? And especially when it comes to things like more virtual interactions versus that in person that [00:11:00] we're typically seeing right now? 

Maggie Seybold: It's an awesome question. And ultimately, At the end of the day, everyone in this industry is trying to create a positive experience for the prospect and for the resident.

And again, to your point, data here is an enormous asset, particularly as we think about the initial journey that prospect goes through, I've tried to replicate it. It's not fun doing the Googling, trying to sift through all the options available, signing up for a place for mom, getting 16 texts and five calls a day.

That's an incredibly challenging thing to navigate. Even if you put aside the vulnerable component of my loved one needs care and the emotional complexity that exists in just that interaction where data helps the most is it allows the sales directors and this prospect to know each other better. If a prospect is trying to get education on what kind of care they need, or what kind of care mom and dad needs.

It's important for the sales director to know that the prospect or the [00:12:00] influencer is in that stage of their journey. So ultimately we can support them with what they need. If someone doesn't understand their budget, for example, and whether or not, their option set matches what they're able to afford.

Again, another way that we can support prospects through their journey and reduce, or at least mitigate a little bit, some of that pain around trying to understand. What do I need? How quickly do I need it? Ultimately, a sales director is creating a relationship with a prospect or an influencer.

So the more data we have about each other, the better we can communicate and form a relationship that will lead to productive outcomes for both. Ultimately, we want the sales director to be able to drive an efficient move in. Do it, in a very caring and thoughtful way. And for the prospect, we want them to get the care they need quickly.

And so being able to know more about each other helps quite a bit with that. 

Amber Bardon: It's going to be a whole new world in the next couple of years. 

Maggie Seybold: Yeah, especially with the pace. Technology today is evolving so rapidly. There's so [00:13:00] much opportunity, especially with AI coming in and changing as quickly as it is things like even, on the CRM side, we're always saying it doesn't exist in the CRM.

It doesn't exist at all. But at the end of the day, if we're all honest with ourselves. Sales directors don't want to fill out 15 to 25 fields about every prospect. So the more that we can take those calls, we can take those texts, we can auto populate the information that we need, and then provide suggestions on what to do and when making that job easier for a sales director is going to become a much more significant reality in the next few years.

A couple of months to a few years from now. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah. And I think this really applies to all the enterprise applications that communities are using. So I think there's a lot of opportunity just to optimize and be more efficient across the board. And a lot of software companies are not yet thinking that way.

So I think it's really, refreshing to hear that WelcomeHome has built that into your tools. 

Maggie Seybold: Particularly talking about AI and just [00:14:00] technology innovation in general, it can be really scary for senior living. And I think as you mentioned earlier, Amber, it has felt as if we're behind for a long time.

And with this new wave of technology, there really shouldn't be a fear that technology is going to replace a sales director or replace the role of a regional. In fact, it'll be the regional that uses technology tools and data. The regional that uses AI is going to outperform peers that don't.

As we, we develop these tools, it's critical to the WelcomeHome team that we're rolling out things that are going to be easily adopted. That we're doing the upscale. So our users understand these tools and feel confident in their usage. And we build things that make sense that aren't just shiny from a marketing standpoint.

We want to build things that actually work and create value. And so much of what we hear about in the technology space today is marketing. So being really thoughtful about partnering with our customers as we develop. The innovation at [00:15:00] WelcomeHome has been an enormous focus as well. 

Amber Bardon: Maggie, are there any really specific tips, tricks, trends that you can share for people in the sales roles or for providers that you have come across using your system or using your data? 

Maggie Seybold: There are plenty of very tactical tips and tricks and we should honestly get time and then another time and invite our customer, our VP of customer success, Emily, to come chat about this as well.

But there are so many tactical tools in WelcomeHome that make. An enormous difference in results, but when we think about things that apply to everybody, we've seen two major focus areas for our operators in terms of how they're shifting their strategy on the sales director side for the past six or so months.

The 1st is on management of aggregator leads. So being more proactive about that partnership with aggregator partners. They send a lot of leads, not all of them convert. It makes all the sense in the world, but if we can better partner with our aggregator [00:16:00] touch points, we can work with them to say, these are the criteria that each prospect needs to meet.

They need to financially qualify. They need to be in this radius. Also only send me five a month. And then we're going to do a retro on all five and how they performed to boost the conversions with those types of leads and have a better working relationship. It's also worth noting as well, that not all communities Need all lead sources.

So taking a look at what lead sources make sense for my community context. I in a urban, highly competitive area where every aggregator lead that's coming to me is evaluating 15 other options. That's important context to keep in mind when you think about your inbound pipeline. Whereas if you're the only memory care facility in 50 miles.

It's good to get your name out there. So having more coming from an aggregator lead source starts to make a little bit more sense in that case. Lead management is 1 side. The other side is proactive strategy around activities and scoring prospects. When we [00:17:00] see those prospects come in, we know that every prospect has a different journey.

Every prospect has a different level of readiness to participate in the sales cycle. WelcomeHome has worked really hard over the past six months to update our scoring mechanisms and the product to base scoring, not only on what we know about a prospect, but how that prospect is working and engaging dynamically throughout the sales prospect process.

If you think about a typical independent living lead. That person could move in 30 days. That person could move in two years and their degree of involvement with us as a sales team will vary enormously. If you put yourself in the sales seat in that scenario, it's really hard to know, should I call Mary or is she's at home learning?

Is she communicating with her core influencers, we've updated scoring to make that process easier and make that allocation of time decision easier. So adoption of scoring is another huge tip and trick that we've been rolling out with our customers. And then, in terms of activities [00:18:00] planning again, anecdotally, we all know calls are.

Better than texts or emails, but it's not just about the channel. It's about the channel. It's about the speed and it's about the quality. So when we think about how particularly that 1st touch with the prospects, we want to have the most. Relationship centric conversation and outreach that we can. So getting the call done, getting the calls done within 20 minutes, making sure you're prepped to talk about the right topics, given what you know about that prospect and what you can port in from your mark marketing automation, having that productive conversation, and then using that discovery to plan the tour in a way that is tailored to that specific prospect.

We have a planning activity and WelcomeHome. And in the data, we see that those that log planning time before a tour for more than half of their prospects. Average occupancy is at those communities is 93 percent versus the average, which is in the [00:19:00] eighties. Putting structures around how you approach the sales process is the future. It's not random anymore. 

Amber Bardon: I have definitely learned a lot on this podcast. Is there anything we haven't talked about yet

you want to make sure our listeners know? 

Maggie Seybold: I think now having been in this industry and working with customers for almost two years now, I think every time I work with a sales team or a sales leader on adopting data as part of their process, they're surprised at how seamless it really is.

And so I would just say, as we go on this journey together, Lean on your vendors. We're here to support you. We will get on the phone. We will walk through these tools. We will show you how to use them. And ultimately it is our product that you're using and it's our responsibility to make sure it's well adopted and working for you.

So that would be my call to action. I know the data feels intimidating, but in today's environment, adopting data is what separates the top performers from the bottom. 

Amber Bardon: Data is definitely the future as we mentioned earlier. It's just something we're going to keep seeing more and more of.

 Our clients really [00:20:00] ask for this. So I think you're in the right place for it. 

Maggie Seybold: Thanks so much, Amber. This has been a great conversation. 

Amber Bardon: Yeah. Maggie, can you tell us where 

Maggie Seybold: can listeners find out more about WelcomeHome? Sure. So you can find us online, welcomehomesoftware.

com. We also do have a pretty active marketing team on LinkedIn as well. We're consistently putting out data centric blog posts, interviews with our team members and customers, all actually really informative stuff and a fair amount of data backed benchmarks as well. 

Amber Bardon: Thank you so much for joining me today. 

Maggie Seybold: Thanks. 

Amber Bardon: You can find us online at RaisingTechPodcast. com where you can see all of our episodes and contact us to provide feedback or submit an episode idea. We are on social media everywhere at Raising Tech Podcast. If you enjoy Raising Tech, please leave us a review and share with a friend. Music is an original production by Tim Resig, one of our very own Parasol Alliance employees.

As always, thank you for listening.