One Team, One Goal: Aligning Sales and Marketing for Senior Living Success
Today’s senior living consumer journey begins long before an initial inquiry to a community. Prospective residents and their adult children are researching online, reading reviews, checking out websites and educating themselves on the options months-or in some cases even years- before reaching out.
This is why your online content and positioning your organization as the go-to expert in the field is so pivotal. Future residents will be reaching conclusions long before they contact (or don’t contact) a community. In cases where your marketing content doesn’t align with sales messaging, building credibility and trust becomes a challenge.
Why Alignment Matters
In senior living, occupancy growth rarely comes from sales or marketing alone. The highest-performing communities are the ones that align sales and marketing and operate as one team with shared goals, shared accountability and a shared commitment to serving older adults.
Yet all too often sales and marketing remain siloed. With marketing producing cookie cutter content that is not relevant to consumers in the market and sales keeping to themselves those pain points they are hearing as they meet with future residents. This can results in a disconnected journey for future residents and decreased conversions with qualified leads.
For today’s senior living prospects, the journey from discovering a community’s website to attending an event to sitting down with a sales counselor isn’t a series of separate touchpoints. It’s one continuous experience. When web content, social media, events, and sales conversations don’t tell the same story, it creates friction. Families notice the disconnect, trust erodes, and the decision to move forward stalls.
When sales and marketing are truly aligned, the results speak for themselves:
- Consistent messaging across every stage of the buyer’s journey builds trust and drives higher conversion rates
- Sales teams feel heard, and their front-line insights shape content that actually resonates with prospective residents and families
- Marketing campaigns target the right audiences, generating qualified leads that convert into move-ins — not just website traffic
To create a more cohesive team, Marketing should understand:
- Which lead sources produce move-ins, not just inquiries
- Common objections and pain points being voiced by the consumer
- How to nurture current leads to re-engage
- Who is our target demographic in terms of future residents
- Seasonal trends that impact decision-making
Conversely, Sales should understand:
- Marketing objectives and target audiences
- Why digital marketing strategy and metrics are important
- Using marketing content, such as blogs, to be a resource to leads
- Good content is a good investment in current and long-term occupancy
Shared Metrics Lead to Shared Success
Sales and marketing can be most siloed when it comes to sharing metrics. For both sales and marketing, data should paint a picture of what is working or not and how both disciplines can better work together so everyone succeeds.
Helpful metrics that both sales and marketing can find beneficial are:
- Qualified leads being generated and tours are being scheduled from various market sources
- Tour to move-in conversion rates
- Cost per move-in from market sources
- Occupancy growth
- Net move-ins or wait list deposits
Telling Better Stories Together leads to Better Marketing and Increased Move-Ins
The best salespeople in your communities and your best marketing are the residents living in your communities. Marketing can help tell these stories through various channels yet often they never get the stories to share.
With sales in the communities daily, they are integral in helping bring these stories to life. When sales and marketing work together, there is the opportunity to share powerful messages that resonate with future residents.
When teams collaborate, they can:
- Share resident success stories
- Capture family and resident testimonials and reviews
- Spotlight employees who make a difference
- Meaningful engagement happening in the communities
- Stories that differentiate you from the competition
Building a Culture of Collaboration
Creating alignment with sales and marketing is not something that happens by accident but takes effort and dedication. It is a fluid process that requires ongoing work and adjustments on both sides. When both sides see how collaboration benefits everyone, the time is worth the effort. The end goal should always be kept at the forefront, which is to serve more older adults. A shared vision and goal are necessary to truly build a team effort.
Best practices for organizations to foster Sales and Marketing collaboration include:
- Holding quarterly sales and marketing strategy meetings
- Sharing performance metrics
- Celebrating wins together
- Marketing team members spending time in communities
- Encouraging sales teams to actively listen and share objections and pain points
Everyone Wins with Strong Collaboration
Competition in senior living only continues to grow, including in-home technology and options. The future will require better alignment between sales and marketing. Those who are most aligned will see the best results. With the feedback from sales, marketing creates the content that positions your organization as an expert and builds trust.
Sales continue that conversation by showing your future resident how the content shared matches with actual community life. If one is disjointed from the other, you will lose trust and most likely not move to your community. Ultimately, everyone benefits when sales and marketing collaborate. Residents and family feel trust and safe to make a decision; your organization, in turn, sees greater lead generation and higher occupancy.
About the Author
Dan Swiatkiewicz is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Christian Living Communities, a non-profit senior living organization based in Englewood, CO. Dan is passionate about changing how we think of aging and many of the perceptions of senior living. He is the Secretary of the Eden Alternative Board of Directors and an alum fellow of the LeadingAge Leadership Academy.
