Matt Reiners’ Post

Transcript

Welcome back. My name is Matt Reiners and I'm the cofounder of Ever Sound, a company dedicated to improving quality of life for older adults by giving them the gift of hearing. Today I'm joined by Eric Veron, the SVP of Sales at the Aspen Wood Company. I've got a chance to know Eric on the conference circuit and have known him on both the vendor and the provider side. Eric is kind smart, one of the good ones, and I'm grateful to have people like him in our industry. So thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here and and and just I'm really excited about our conversation. I love it. So Eric, can you share a little bit about your background and how you got into the senior living? Sure. Happy to, yeah. For like many of us in the in the industry, it was a personal experience. My grandparents were living together in Worcester, MA and my grandmother had dementia, but she was incredibly strong and her body was very, very healthy. My grandfather was cognitively healthy, but unfortunately was his body was is was you know, pretty compromised. So my grandmother unfortunately had a fall and passed away from the fall and we thought my grandfather. Is going to pass away quickly after and he moved into a a community in Worcester and my grandfather was French Canadian, had a full head of white hair and a white mustache and had an accent and the ladies loved him. So he was loving his life in his community. He actually lived three years longer than we expected. But when you're exposed to the good work that is being done in communities and the impact that it has. Wells on residents and their families. It was kind of like a a bug had been kind of, you know, like I bit the bug and I had I jumped right in and and so a few years after that, I joined Atria Senior Living. It's my first position in New York City and then I worked my way up in different various organizations to Aspen would company and we're an owner, operator and developer of luxury I LMAO memory care high-rise communities at urban. Settings and we also offer some mid market luxury communities as well in four different states. So I'm loving it being back on the operator side, it's it's something that's really in my soul and I'm I'm glad to be back in the operator side. Yeah, No. And I love that story and you know you're able to see it first hand and really you know, take that, I think that's how a lot of the people who got in the space to your point have have come to to see it. And I and I was looking Eric, you know, because you spent almost the last 15 years in senior living in in different capacities and different roles. Seems like a lot of them have been like the sales and marketing focus and I'm I'm curious how you've seen that shift during your time. It's a great question. I was thinking a lot about when I first started and kind of how we sold and and I think for I, I see 4 main differences or evolutions. As I say, the first is a more consultative sales approach. I think originally, a lot of times people would try to scare seniors into building in. And what I mean by that is we use the trick like. Well, what happens if your daughter moves away or what happens if you fall again? Don't you think it's time to move right now before you can, before it happens to you? And I feel like that was just not an effective way to build relationships and sell somebody into a community and get their buying and want them to be a part of of being joining that that that community. So I think for me that was a big one. We as an organization use prospect centered selling and Sherpa and you know all we do is focus on the prospect. And and planning and building strong relationships through empathy and building trust and helping them navigate change. So it's been nice to see that evolution of I think the next is really companies are. I'm hearing that companies are starting to be less concerned about chasing metrics for the sake of just chasing metrics. And one of my regional rules, I had a production sales calculator that I had to use with all of my communities and I would have to take their conversion rates. Base dot in it. And so take them with the number of movements we needed to tell them what their activities were on a monthly basis. And you know, there were times when people, you know, a community of one had to make 300 phone calls and do 45 tours based on their conversions, right. And it just was silly. You know, I think salespeople and senior housing want to make a difference. They want to have impact. And if we're just having them chase activities to chase activities. They're gonna leagues and it's not a fun environment and and those kind of metrics just to chase metrics doesn't cultivate a culture of passion around what what people are trying to do. So I'm I'm loving the fact that a lot of companies are stepping away from that third is transparency. I think before a lot of companies held a lot close to the vest and with the introduction of social media you know you're able to see more. Inside of communities and I know that a lot of us in our roles, you know struggle with the communities going to post anything. Can I first try to approve it before, But I think it's important that we celebrate the heartbeat of our communities through what we're able to post. So I had transparency is huge, but we're seeing it now with pricing and occupancy percentages or occupancy availability directly on websites now that are not aided and we're right now looking at a. Provider to do that so that we will have our communities especially our new builds the you know the apartments on a on a interactive map where they can click in to see what available units there are, the direct cost of that unit. And I think that's we're seeing more and more people become more comfortable with being more transparent with with their their pricing. And then lastly I think it's the push for content as as you know I mean Matt just to share a story. Matt was so kind to me when I was working at another vendor and was trying to build up my LinkedIn presence and he said me these great kind of suggestions on what I should be doing. I don't always follow them but I because I just don't have time sometimes. But I think that the push for content is so important because. It's not only content but it's understanding your communities specific voice and your communities differentiators so that you can feed content that's really specific to what you're doing and not and being OK with the fact that you're not going to be the place for everybody. I think for so long we've tried so hard to market as the solution for everybody in every community and. It's not that's isn't work anymore. We have to be very specific with what with what we offer to customers and prospects and and really understand who we are and and and the voice that we speak to our customers in. Yeah, I love the way you can sum that up with a different evolutions and I think you know from the the customer perspective it seems like it's everything to help them just be better and like just make more informed decisions. And you know it's a it's a happier buying process which is just a you know, interesting to see and you know we we talked about the past and how that's evolved. And I'm curious as you look into the future, it sounds like you're doing some cool things with like you know the occupancy and you know being able to look at that and and kind of look into that, but you know how do you see. Sales and marketing continue to evolve. Yeah, I I I think it is first and foremost the reliance on technology and involving different types of technology in your sales process from your CRM to your website to video to automation to. There's so many different things right out there because I think that customers are going to want to be able to understand differentiators and your communities heartbeat through a virtual experience 1st. And so much of what we do is the experience of what it's like to be in a community and exposing people to the residents and to the caregivers and to the team, right. And really allow allowing them to sell the community for you and how do you do that virtually, I think that is going to be important. And then. Integrations. To me, integrations are what get me really excited about having all of our systems talking to each other. You know, we have an incredible opportunity to learn so much, not only on how to run the community better and have better health outcomes, but also on the marketing side. Like I would love to be able to understand with granular specificity what the marketing behaviors of a resident or resident families that have the longest length of stays in our. Communities and create personas that way and create marketing specifically around those behaviors to what I'm attracting that type of that type of of resident. So it's you know the importance of having your billing software, your health software as well as your CRN and you're like engagement software, everything talking to each other. I think it's going to change the way we sell in this industry as we become more sophisticated in how we use our data.