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Voices: Pedro Soares, Chief Executive Officer, Sherpa

This article is sponsored by
Sherpa. In this Voices interview, Senior Housing News sits down with Sherpa CEO
Pedro Soares to learn why the senior living CRM and sales enablement company
wants its customers to focus on prospects who “aren’t ready yet” to buy. Soares
explains how Sherpa’s technology and training helps operators gain an average
10% occupancy bump and describes techniques that can help improve the way they
sell senior housing — a product that potential customers are hesitant to
embrace despite the enormous benefits.

Senior Housing News: You spent almost a decade working
for Anheuser-Busch, followed by about a decade in real estate development with
Turnberry. What brought you into senior living and Sherpa?

Pedro Soares: I had two careers
before moving into senior living. Both of those careers were very challenging,
and there was a strong sense of accomplishment. But I did feel a lack of being
able to help people. I decided to seek an opportunity where I could make a
difference. That’s when I was introduced to Sherpa. I met a group of people
highly dedicated to changing the way senior living sales occurred. They sought
to help seniors make that really tough decision, which is, “Should I move
into a retirement community or not?”

What also attracted
me was the fact that we could scale that process using our technology, our
coaching and training in terms of helping those seniors. That was exciting. As
I help the company grow, we can touch more lives and help more seniors, which
is really nice. We have these big TV screens in our office and we put up what
we call a move-in counter, which shows move-ins as they happen throughout the
communities that use Sherpa. It’s a way for our team to see how they’re making
a difference on a real-time basis, which is really neat.

Sales obviously is so important. That’s not news to the
senior housing industry, but in what specific ways could the industry invest
more in sales?

One of the unique
aspects I found in joining Sherpa was that, other than our development team,
most of our members have been in the trenches. They’re leasing counselors, VPs,
owner-operators. What we have found is that the companies that invest in
widening the funnel, rather than adding more leads to the top of the funnel,
have better results and higher conversion rates. How do you really open that
funnel? It’s by increasing your sales effectiveness by investing more time with
leads you already have.

You work them
deeper by focusing on planning, home visits, creative follow-ups, everything we
call “spending Time in The Selling Zone.” Some of the companies that have
worked this way and have included their executive directors in the sales
process have outshone some of the other companies. They all seem to be
investing more in sales, hiring more salespeople as well as taking some of
those non-sales-related tasks away from sales and into operations to give their
sales reps, the leasing counselors, more time to focus on sales.

Our latest research
at Sherpa shows that we have an average of 23 SQLs (sales qualified leads) per
open unit, which means if you focus on those leads you have in the system, all
you need is a very low conversion rate of about 4% and you’ll fill in all the
empty units in Sherpa. It makes sense to mine your own gold, really, than to go
off and prospect new leads and new opportunities.

How specifically does Sherpa increase sales results? In
some ways, sales is sales, and that’s the connection to me between what you did
with Anheuser-Busch and what you do now.

I was selling a product
that everybody wanted, which was beer. Senior living sales is the actual
opposite of that because most prospects don’t really want the product.
Unfortunately, the senior living industry continues to try to differentiate
themselves by talking about their features. They’re selling senior living like
we used to sell beer, talking about features such as “tastes great, less
filling.”

The reality is,
your competition isn’t the community down the street. It’s really the
prospect’s home or just status quo. What we need to focus on is helping
prospects overcome their natural resistance to buying.

That requires a
focus on learning their story, their motivations, and their objections, so that
we can help them in the decision process. We have, in Sherpa, embedded Prospect
Centered Selling® which is a methodology that our founders developed over 30 years.
It helps guide our leasing counselors to gain the prospect’s trust, to help
them move along the stages of readiness rather than having to wait for some
crisis. Then what happens is you end up bringing in people into your
communities with less acuity.

What makes this Sherpa strategy different compared to
other selling styles?

That’s a good
question. We focus on a relational sales strategy versus a transactional sales
strategy. We focus on the prospect instead of the product. Transactional
strategies focus on features and on the prospect having a crisis. What we do at
Sherpa is focus on incremental advances to move-in where it’s really the
prospect’s choice at the end of the day. When the prospect is ready, that’s
when you can talk about your features and you can mold and direct those
features toward what you’ve learned about your prospects and what your
prospects want.

If we look at
overall prospects coming into our communities, 10% of those leads have some
crisis. Yes, you should work those leads, but there’s another 90% of prospects
who don’t have a crisis. What we look at doing is expanding the pool of
prospects and increasing conversions by working those leads that don’t have the
crisis. If you work the leads deeper and really understand their resistance to
buying, that’s where you make the breakthroughs. Companies that do that well
really outperform the rest of the market.

When you say “outperform,” how do you measure results at
Sherpa?

It’s an important
distinction because the industry tends to measure increased tours and move-ins.
What we measure are sales activities that convert more sales. The main drivers
there are proactive planning: You’re planning your next phone call, you’re
planning how you make your next advance, interactions with prospects or the
buying circle through face-to-face visits or voice-to-voice, and then following
up with the prospects. We do that through creative follow-up, which is about
showing the prospect that you’re listening to them and you understand them.
This is a cycle that continues, and you have to do it sometimes several times
in order for it to work, but you keep advancing down the buying journey.

It works. On
average, companies experience a 10% gain in occupancy in the first 12 months
coming into Sherpa. They also experience a 50% increase in visit-to-move-in
ratios, and a 35% decrease in their lead base. Those are pretty impressive
numbers, and it really shows that the methodology works.

That being said, of course, this is a year that had a
great deal of change. How has COVID-19 changed Sherpa’s approach?

It really hasn’t.
We’ve noticed that Prospect Centered Selling® resonates with sales teams. In
the beginning of the crisis, the leasing counselor was not able to have tours,
and their new leads declined substantially. We find that the leasing counselor
has now started to work those existing leads and have deeper conversations
which have led to great trust breakthroughs.

Nurturing prospects
now is more relevant than ever. The communities that are doing that have become
our best performers during the crisis. They’ve built this pool of prospects
ready to move in as protocols allow. That’s on one front. On the other front is
that the crisis has given us an opportunity to come closer to our customers,
understand their new reality. We’ve been quick to incorporate new workflows
such as tracking virtual tours and really understanding how this pandemic has
changed the life of the leasing counselor.

We also have a
coaching and training arm, and obviously we had to pivot due to not being able
to go to communities or be in front of people. The team has done an excellent
job in taking all of those training opportunities and creating a whole
curriculum of virtual programs.

What future trends do you expect to see in senior living
sales?

As costs go up and
occupancies go down, I think the smart operators will focus on increasing
revenue by increasing their sales performance. They’ve started to scrutinize
and understand the difference between marketing and sales. Just because you
bring more leads in doesn’t mean your conversion ratios will go up and you’ll
move more people in.

The focus will
really be on improving the effectiveness of your sales team and how you perform
and increase the top line. That’s why we have seen the demand for Sherpa at the
highest it’s ever been. Converting more people is really key to getting out of
this crisis. We’re excited to see how communities are adopting some of these
best practices to move forward.

What’s next for Sherpa?

We spend a lot of
time analyzing our data to help our customers perform. We’re very excited about
the upcoming launch of our machine learning model for senior living sales.
Basically, what our data scientists have done is analyzed all of the prospects
in Sherpa who became residents, and we determined what factors influenced that
move-in. That model helps the leasing counselors focus on prospects with
similar factors to past move-ins. As the sales counselor’s time has been
affected, this is a great way for them to focus and save some of their
time.

Everything we do at
Sherpa is focused on improving our customers’ sales performance. We monitor
what our best performers have been doing and identify those key factors to
success so we can replicate that in our system. Selling senior living is hard.
Teams need the coaching, training and the tools more than ever.

Editor’s note: This interview
has been edited for length and clarity.

Sherpa is a sales enablement platform that elevates the senior living
industry by transforming the sales process with a Prospect Centered Selling® methodology. Marrying leading
CRM technology, hands-on training, robust analytical tools and deep customer engagement
lets Sherpa revolutionize the way senior housing is sold. To learn how, visit
sherpacrm.com.

The Voices Series is a
sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends,
topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For
more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.

The post Voices: Pedro Soares, Chief Executive Officer, Sherpa appeared first on Senior Housing News.

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