Whether you’re hosting family in town or traveling across the country to visit relatives, the holidays are always a great time to enjoy the company of those dearest to you. It’s also a time when adult children and other family caregivers first notice changes in their parents or loved ones. And it’s a time when talk about the future is likely to occur. Senior living communities should make sure they’re ready to help families understand their options.

Position yourselves as a resource to answer questions or simply talk. Whether its evenings or weekends, phone calls or tours, make sure you have someone available to meet with inquiring adult children. These are valuable chances to put your community top of mind with everyone involved with making a decision.

Being accessible is important. It shows you’re service oriented to make time to see them, no matter how busy the holidays can get. You only get one chance to make that first impression. These days no one has time to waste.

And don’t forget about New Year’s. This is a time of change. Resolutions are on people’s minds. Make a resolution to be more proactive and customer service focused. Be proactive and talk to them about the small changes they may have seen in themselves or their parents. You may find your New Year starting off with a bang.

Times are tough, and even during periods of national proportion, senior living professionals tend to believe that they shouldn’t bother anyone when global news is bad. After the tragedies of 9/11, many communities thought they couldn’t call prospects, that it wouldn’t be right. We’re experiencing that same feeling, though not on the same level, with the economic crisis.

My thought is, what better time to call than now? This is the perfect opportunity to reach out and talk to your leads and prospects to ensure them you have everything under control, and to begin developing those personal relationships that will be so important down the road.

With that in mind, here are six tips from a sales perspective that can help retirement communities refocus their sales staff during these tough times:

1. Suggest a timeout – If there’s resistance in the marketplace, step back and take a fresh look at your activities. Use your imagination for a little creative value-adding. A creative approach might be the spark you need to get fired up.
2. Reevaluate – If there’s uncertainty, what are you missing? Is it your pricing strategies? Perhaps your promotional materials? Reevaluate what you’ve been doing. Weigh all solutions, and then choose and pursue one.
3. Reorganize – Put greater emphasis on asking what position you should be in when sales pick up, and lay groundwork for the future. 
4. Generate – Excitement is contagious. Make your conversations with prospects a welcome diversion to the otherwise hectic day and doom & gloom headlines. 
5. Simplify – Streamline your processes and consolidate tasks to make your job smoother. Make a list of unnecessary tasks and eliminate them. 
6. Reinvent – Bring in fresh eyes to help you. Have someone evaluate your sales staff to see what you’re doing right and wrong. This can help you regain focus during troubled times.

Senior living communities don’t have the option to sit back and wait out the storm. They always have to be moving forward. That means reaching out and talking to your leads and prospects in the database. Stepping up efforts to meet a minimum goal requirement each day will enhance your own success during difficult times.

Human beings are motivated to action for emotional reasons, not practical ones. So if you want people to pick up the phone and say “that’s interesting, tell me more” with greater frequency, then let your advertising communicate with them about the experience of living at your community, and save the floor plans, services and amenities for the sales office.

Think back for a moment to your own personal home buying experiences. Remember how you, and perhaps your spouse, searched for the right place. Looking for the right price, in the right neighborhood, so the kids could go to the right school, and you’d have a reasonable commute to work? Remember how you looked at quite a few homes that met virtually all of these criteria, but you didn’t make an offer on any of them?

Not until you found the one – the one that touched you somehow. The one that you could, for some reason, actually get excited about because there was something about it that you connected with emotionally. You just liked it better than the others. It made you feel better about making that major purchase decision because the idea of living there – what you began to imagine the experience would be like – was appealing.

Why did you go through this process? Because you’re human. And that’s how we human beings tend to make decisions.

Despite our protestations to the contrary, we humans make even the most important decisions of our lives – the house we buy; the spouse we choose – for essentially instinctive, emotional reasons. Of course we gather lots of information that we analyze closely. We make sure we’ve touched all the bases. But until we’ve formed some kind of positive emotional connection with the object of our consideration, we typically don’t make a decision to buy, marry, vote. Or in this case, move. 

But the stronger that connection, the easier it is to say yes. People don’t get emotional about an apartment. They get emotional about the safety and/or the lifestyle moving to that apartment can afford them. Senior living communities need to make sure their communications focus on that emotional payoff, because without an emotional connection, the prospect will never buy.

The New York Times published an article about how surfing the Internet boosts aging brains in its October 16, 2008, edition.

In that article, Dr. Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center said that “a simple everyday task like searching the web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older.”

When we visit a senior living community and introduce LINK, our online community product, many depositors and residents are familiar with the web, but quite a few are hungry for Internet training. Even if seniors consider themselves to be savvy users, they have questions on how to do certain things or want ideas on where they can find specific information and/or tools on the web.

If you aren’t already, consider offering weekly Internet sessions as part of the established activity calendar at your senior living community. Feature new topics on a weekly basis like how to upload photos, where to find the best travel web sites, expose them to social networking and more! Check with your local university to see if there is a student who might want to volunteer to lead these classes or reach out to an Internet savvy resident or employee to lead these courses. You don’t have to be a technical guru to provide learning and sharing via the Web.

How many of you are currently offering Internet courses for your residents? If not, are any of your residents engaging in Internet courses at local universities?