Quick Follow-up Tips

Maintaining a CRM can be the bane of many salespeople. It can seem tedious, counter-intuitive, and even unnecessary. However, often, following up is key in showing your interest in helping a family with a move, and thus increasing the chance they move to your community. In today’s edition of Actionable Senior Living tips, we’ll discuss how you can make your CRM work for you, and even automate certain follow up tasks. Let’s go.

When CRMs grow into a monster, a beast that isn’t manageable, it’s down to a lack of continual effort to stay organized. The type of CRM your organization uses can contribute to this monster, or help your teams work more intuitively. For example, I’ve seen how Welcome Home can connect you with your prospect and then record the call under the Prospect's Profile for you to listen to, and even integrate with your Email Provider so that you can send emails and attachments directly from your Day Planner. You can even see when they've been opened, which can incentive sales teams to follow up with more precision. Clearly, Welcome Home helps their reps stay organized and doesn’t contribute to more work. However, let’s assume you’re not using something innovative like Welcome Home.

The following tips seem to help the most:

1)?????When leaving a voicemail for a prospect, mention that you’ll also follow up via text if you do not hear back within a specified time. Express this in a way that shows empathy that they are living a busy life, and you want to be courteous to their time and how you can best help.

2)?????With android you can easily schedule a text message to follow up on your behalf. To do this, hit the call button, so the number you’ve just dialed is on your screen. Next, hit the three dots in the top right and click ‘send message’. Mention in the message how you left a voicemail yesterday and wanted to follow up to ensure you can help. Hold down the send msg icon and an option to schedule this text will appear, I generally schedule it for 24 hours later.

3)?????Finally, after scheduling the text message, in your CRM make a reminder to check on this lead in a few days. Did they return your call? Did they respond to your text? These steps may seem obnoxious, but often it’s an emergency when the adult son or daughter reaches out to us, and we owe it to them to follow up. They are likely receiving a lot of calls from discharge planners, other ALF’s etc.

You can also set an automatic follow up via email. Simply use the scheduled send option in Gmail, by clicking the drop-down option next to ‘send’. You can also do the same in outlook under ‘delay the delivery of a message’.

Doing follow up is tedious work- but if you can utilize these hacks to make it less painful, you may find that when you call people to ‘check in’ they’re grateful to hear from you. The goal is to show concern and empathy for a situation that is likely new to them, and you want to be a resource in helping them find the best continuum of care. Remember ‘the work we do is important in the lives of the residents and families we serve’. Follow up is important. Making it effective is key.