Alison is the Sales Director of Marketability, a 20-year veteran marketing and sales consultancy in the village sector.
Alison explains she has 25 touch points in each of her customer’s journeys, including five before they first meet. Alison has 450 known prospects that she knows personally where they are on their journey. She shares how she maintains engagement from deposit to settlement and beyond.
It’s great stuff and reminds us all that the basics and hard work deliver results.
A number of Village Professionals have reached out to us to ask ‘how is the market going’ for retirement village sales.
We asked our colleague Carmella Rowsthorne at villages.com.au what is happening and she delivered the above graph for the 13 months from September last year to September 2020.
It shows that last year in September just under 3,800 people searched for a retirement village each day on villages.com.au.
This September, the same number of people are searching.
But here is the thing. Victoria accounts for 35% of the Australian population and they have been in severe lockdown since July. They have not been able to even think of looking at villages let alone sell their homes. It was basically illegal.
So when you add this into the mix, you have to say the average number of people looking seriously at a village option has gone up in 2020.
The only changes have been multiple crises. Fires, drought and now COVID.
The family home is no longer as safe as it was last year.
Have you been receiving a higher level of enquiry? If not, perhaps you are not listing your village on villages.com.au. With 1.2M visits a year it is the No.1 village search destination.
You can find out more from Carmella by emailing her at Carmella.Rowsthorne@thedcmgroup.com.au.
Filling village vacancies is one of the most important jobs for village, marketing and sales professionals.
Without direction this process can be inefficient and expensive.
Our sister company villages.com.au offers a comprehensive hub to link vacant villages with potential residents.
We’ve discovered plenty of things along the way that help inform this process.
Here are four things to consider:
1. You need to be able to find the right people
There’s no use having an ad on the Gold Coast if your village is in the Hunter Valley.
Destination is a key driver for potential residents, so having a platform that lets you market to specific regions is crucial. This is why villages.com.au offers 87 regions across Australia.
2. You need to put your best foot forward
Potential residents like to have a good idea of what your village looks like, before they commit.
So villages.com.au offers strong image and description options for every paid listing.
villages.com.au provides listings with the chance to feature a 3D Virtual Tour, which delivers approximately 30% more leads. There’s a great example here.
3. Tracking and stats
Transparency is also important, and you want to be sure you’re advertising with a platform that gives you bang for your buck.
This is why villages.com.au regularly supplies everyone who’s been listed with updated statistics to see how their village ads are performing.
4. A trusted home
Moving into a retirement village is a big, sometimes expensive, exercise for potential residents.
So it makes sense that your village is listed on a platform people recognise and trust.
villages.com.au has established itself as a trusted knowledge resource for people looking for retirement villages with videos, articles and an Info Centre to support people in the journey.
Listing your village on a trusted platform builds authenticity and increases the chance of a sale.
For more information on listing villages, contact villages.com.au Head of Sales Solutions Carmella Rowsthorne here.
If there’s one thing we’ve been picking up in our weekly conversations with village professionals, it’s that sales across the industry are patchy, at best.
Yes, there are exceptions. Anecdotally some people say sales are holding (and in some cases even improving slightly).
But for many others sales have stalled significantly. For instance, if you were achieving one sale a month, you may be achieving only one every two months at the moment (we are talking outside of Victoria).
You would know that sales momentum is very important; it keeps everyone on their toes plus operators happy. With December 13 weeks away, do you have momentum? If not, now is the time to act rather than waiting.
What is momentum? It is a full sales pipeline and as many prospective residents nodding their heads positively. They can see they should be continuing the conversations with you.
Is the interest out there in these COVID times? What will make heads nod?
Here is a graph of 12 months traffic across Australia on our sister DCM web site, villages.com.au.
What you can see is that the number of people searching for a village is higher, in fact 7% higher, in August 2020 than in August 2019.
And remember, this includes Victoria where all the customers are in lockdown.
The customers are there. In fact, I am being told that the people who actually visit villages are far more committed than usual. They know that they need a ‘safe harbour in a storm’.
Again, our sister group DCM Research has just completed a survey of 2,200 non residents and found that COVID-19 has increased a feeling of vulnerability (43%) and isolation (31%). And this is for all people aged 60+ surveyed, not just people who have personal triggers.
So the customers are definitely out there, they are looking for options and they are committed. But how much can we do as village professionals on the front line?
It’s the addition of all the little things that add up to a big impression on customers. The one percenters.
In this promotional video we have just done for this month’s deep dive topic in the DCM Institute’s Village Management Professional Development Program, I discuss the importance of having several people in the village that a prospective customer meets – not just you. These extra touch points give reassurance and also take all the reliance off you.
Check the video out as a thought starter. The challenge is to start now – the customers are there, they are willing, and December is just 13 weeks away.
What will happen to sales over the next 12 months? Who really knows? But lead management will be vital.
This means maintaining a link with buyers in their journey to finally commit to buying their village home, and then selling their family home and settling on their new village purchase!
At DCM we call this “momentum to settlement”!
Over the last few months I have been asked several times “what’s going to happen to sales” and “what should we be focusing on”. Oh, if only I had that crystal ball…
However, from my past experience opening a brand new village at the beginning of the GFC when sales just stopped, and my past professional experience of turning around stalled villages and villages in receivership, it is all about MAINTAINING MOMENTUM & HAVING A PLAN…
It is vital that sales teams do not lose momentum and that means supporting them by maintaining strong campaigns to attract new enquiry.
In difficult times we need to overfill the sales funnel, knowing even the most committed customer may find it hard to sell their own home, for a range of real reasons.
We also know that retirees can take up to 18 months to make their decision. Therefore it is vital that we maintain their interest in the retirement living solution, and particularly your village.
Do we send an enquiry pack, invite them for a tour, and follow them up, only to be told they aren’t ready? The most common excuse for not buying!
I strongly believe there is no one size fits all solution here. There needs to be multiple lead management/engagement strategies working in unison. All with the objective of moving the prospects decision forward to purchasing, and sooner.
So what helps to do this, particularly in this COVID environment where physical contacts and events are trickier?
Understanding and language
COVID has been with us now since late March – that’s four months. Even with the lockdowns and ‘no inspections’, we all have seen a change in the emotional drivers of the potential customers, and especially their children, who are now enquiring.
We need to understand these drivers and equip salespeople with the new language, the words that connect with these new customers.
Our DCM colleagues have research in the field now, asking 2,200 potential customers what are their emotions. They also have thousands of people sending emails from villages.com.au every month asking for information – and post COVID 70% of those people are the children, who are worried about isolation form mum and dad (see the research story following).
With this understanding and language, we can work on working with the potential customers.
Momentum to Settlement
It is vital to stay TOP OF MIND with your prospects, to build a relationship with them where they feel like they have an emotional connection with your organisation, and to continue to reinforce that this accommodation solution is the right choice for them.
Consider how technology can assist with your lead engagement activities:
Be creative! But whatever you do, maintain the momentum to settlement!