Empower families with transparency and shift marketing tactics to meet customer needs. Christy Cunningham, VP of Sales and Marketing at Vitality Senior Living shares her insight on lead generation and bringing sales and marketing together to produce the best results. 

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This episode was recorded at SMASH Sales and Marketing Summit 2023.

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Watch Christy on BTG Contributor Series.

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Welcome to season six of Bridge The Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. Powered by sponsors Accushield, Aline, NIC MAP Vision, ProCare HR, Hamilton CapTel, Service Master, Patriot Angels, The Bridge Group Construction and Solinity. And produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Lucas 00:56

Welcome to Bridge The Gap podcast, the senior living podcast with Josh and Lucas. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada at the SMASH Conference 2023, having an excellent time and we've got a great friend and past contributor to the episode today. Christy Cunningham, you're the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Vitality. Welcome to the show.

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Christy 1:15

Thank you. And thank you guys for having me. It's so good to see you and be here at SMASH.

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Lucas 1:19 

You actually, you walked in and you were like, do you know that we've never met physically in person? And we were like, what? Because we feel like we already know you and a lot of our listeners may remember back probably two seasons ago, Christy was a Bridge the Gap contributor and she really put a lot of time and attention into bringing great content to our network. We're so thankful for that and now we have the opportunity to sit down with you face-to-face at the SMASH conference where there's so much going on here. There's a great energy we've gotten to see a lot of our friends so far. We're really excited about it. So this is our first time being at SMASH and so we have a lot to learn. What have you learned at past SMASH conferences and what are you expecting to learn here in 2023?

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Christy 2:02

Oh gosh. Well I've gone to probably six different SMASH conferences and each year I feel like there's a different takeaway. So,  early on it was the emergence of digital marketing and how content marketing would play into what we do and then eventually started to kind of shift into more of what we see today, which is a very balanced approach to both marketing and sales and a lot of talk about how they come together. This year I'm really just looking to up my game. So I'm coming here to hear from people both within the industry but also they are really great at bringing experts from outside of senior living with really amazing perspectives and great insight into lots of different verticals and bringing that to senior living. So I'm here to get as much out of that as I can and my game for myself and Vitality.

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Josh 2:49

I can remember early conversations that you and I had, I don't know how many years ago, but I felt like you were one of the pioneers of that kind of thinking and terminology

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Josh 2:59

And we talked a lot about just strategy and hypothetical situations. So I would love to know now have that conversation years after we were first talking about, wow, our industry needs to do this more. And I feel like we are, we're doing it more. And you're doing some cool things I know over at Vitality, but what are some of the basic ingredients? Because I know there's still a ton of work that we all need to do when you're going into a community or a new team, what are you doing to kind of lay the groundwork to bring those two things together?

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Christy 3:30

I think the work of bringing these two worlds together is still underway and I think that if you're a smaller operator you've got some advantages because you've got fewer people and you've got closer connection and ultimately really fantastic sales and marketing is oriented into really understanding the customer, what they need, want, how they want it, and delivering it better than anybody else. So you call me a pioneer, I still feel like I'm trying to figure it out. And how do you achieve that at scale? How do you achieve that in organizations that have 20, 30 buildings where it's really easy to go the route of efficiencies and to say, okay, my marketing department essentially becomes a brand generator that's just pushing kind of standardized content and standardized materials out to buildings, but ultimately our customer doesn't really care about the company on a hill in Nashville somewhere Brentwood, you know, they want to know about the community that's at their corner.

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Christy 4:26

Figuring out how to bring those worlds together and make them cohesive and make them collaborative when you're a larger organization is really a challenge that I'm still trying to figure out. How do you do that really, really well today? I'd say it starts with just understanding the market and understanding the customer base that's there. When you're operating buildings in Memphis, Tennessee or you're operating buildings in New York City, there's such a different customer base in those different cities that you've got to really know so that what you're building in terms of a sales experience and then how that is kind of working backwards in the customer decision making journey into parts that of lead generation that marketing's contributing to making sure that those are all really aligned and that we're really talking to the customer and doing what they need us to do, how they want us to do it.

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Josh 5:11

Well, and that makes a ton of sense, but that is much easier said than done, right? So that gets into talking about strategy and talking about putting systems and processes in place, which I was encouraged already as I'm sure many of our listeners, when you said smaller operators have an advantage, we're so used to hearing the big operators, they have all the money and the budgets and the personnel and how do we keep up and how do we do all the cool things that they're doing. So what would you say, whether you're a small operator or large operator, if you know to do that, what are some of the systems and processes that you can put in if, at the local community, you want to get to know your resident but then you have to sometime and somehow take that into some intelligence that forms a strategy and a process? How are you doing this?

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Christy 5:59

Oh gosh, I don't think I found the way. I want to be very clear to you guys and to the listeners. I don't think I found the way, what I saw in smaller organizations and in my experience with them is that my marketing mechanism had vested interest in the residents too. So they were out meeting residents, they were talking to residents, they understood their pain points, they were getting feedback on the blogs that we were creating. We had residents that were subscribers to our blogs and were walking into my office or my marketing office and saying like, you know, slamming it down on the table saying this doesn't represent me. And we were getting that real-time feedback, that real-time accountability to the consumer. And so that's where I think that smaller operators have such an advantage in that if you've got even one person on your team that's tasked with lead generation, that having a small, you know, let's say portfolio of communities means that there's more intimacy for that person or those people to understand the residents as much base time as the marketing department can have in human relationships with our customers, the better.

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Christy 7:05

I think that collaborative and joint meetings between sales and sales leadership and marketing I think are really effective because there may be pain points or things that sales is experiencing that marketing can try to help engineer some communications around. The size of Vitality is, we're roughly about 30 buildings and one of the things that we do is we've got collaborative weekly meetings between my regional team, my sales specialists, and my marketing department. So we meet weekly, we're talking about issues that are coming up, we're collaborating. So when we're building something on the marketing side, there's been heavy influence and customer perspective that's being brought directly from the field. How do you maybe tool up sales counselor, sales director or a moving coordinator who have the most intimacy, how do you tool them up to know what may be inspirational for a white paper? What may be inspirational for a social media campaign or what may turn into a marketing message that really needs to go out overall different platforms. So that's still a, a challenge of how do you tool everybody up to understand marketing on the sales side and for marketing to understand sales.

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Josh 8:14

Well, where do you think we are as an industry because I feel like we've come a long way and probably the pandemic forced us to get more into the, the digital world and have a good balance. But where do you think we are as an industry in adopting new technology, new strategy into what has been a very traditional marketing and sales environment? If you could put a pulse, a finger on the pulse, where would you say we are and how, how much opportunity do we still have to improve?

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Christy 8:45

You know, I think that this is an interesting question. I probably have an unconventional answer for it. When you go to these conferences like you guys do, I mean you're at almost everyone, right? There's so much talk about innovation, there's so much talk about technology and the general narrative is that we lack sophistication and there's this heavy interest in a lot of like widgets and little things that could be accouterments of a sales process or you know, an add-on to a website and it even goes into operations with little items that you can add into your operations platform to help up the game. What I think is really interesting is that there are these like little widgets and little technology kind of pieces that are emerging that I think people have an appetite for really understanding. And if they have the budget, I think they're willing to utilize it.

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Christy 9:30

But what I see lacking from an innovation perspective is a willingness to like kind of walk the harder roads of innovation, which is, you know, really great design comes from like really investing in consumer insight and using consumer insight to then back into solutions. And I think as an industry where we've been very, very short is on having a lot of consumer insight. And so me, myself, I have almost 20 years of experience in senior living started very young and that is my biggest liability and in working in senior living sales and marketing because I think I know my consumer but as an industry, our penetration rates are like maybe 10% at max of people who are age and income qualified to live in our buildings. And so if we can humble ourselves to say that all I really know how to do in 20 years is attract the same 10% or so of age and income-qualified people to live in any building in any given market across the country, it opens up I think some huge opportunity to, to realize that I don't really know as much about my customer as I should because 90% of them are not choosing my solutions.

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Christy 10:42

So there's a breakdown somewhere here where I should have a higher success rate if I really know who they are and I really know what they want and need and I know how to deliver it better than anybody else. And I think that the big breakdown in terms of that true innovation is coming from the fact that we're looking for quick wins. We're looking for quick little technologies, quick little mini solutions to, you know, tiny little pain points and we really don't understand the full picture of what our customers want, how they want it, and really even how to deliver that.

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Josh 11:12

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Lucas 11:30

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Josh 11:37

I think that's a great perspective one that I've not heard much, so I appreciate you saying that and I think that's probably really easy because there are so many emerging technologies. The other thing that strikes me is when you say that the 10% ish, depending on what study you look at, what statistic? Huge opportunity for us.

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Christy 11:54

Yeah.

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Josh 11:55

Huge opportunity. So you know, we are always telling our listeners because we have a, a huge volume of a growing group of listeners that are not in the industry.

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Josh 12:04

That are like the senior living thing, what is this?

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Josh 12:07

And I think it's just the, a great green field of opportunity for folks whether they want to work at the community level or higher ranks in a corporate environment at a small or a large provider. So many opportunities and we really, really appreciate your voice. So six years I think you said or something like that, but SMASH, we are rookies here. This is our first one, mine and Lucas, we're enjoying hearing the conversations. I think we've almost got a day behind us here. What are the themes of the conversations? What does everybody seem to be talking about here in the circles that you're in?

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Christy 12:41

The sessions that I've attended so far, I think were in alignment with some of what I'm saying to you. So I had a really great session to hear about a case study with 2Life and some of the great work that they're doing around an Opus program. And I think one of the notable things that they're doing really well and what I would hold up as like a huge opportunity for all of us in the industry is that they've, they were really deliberate about how they built their buildings, how they've marketed. They did all the right pre-work before launching into just throwing out the run-of-the-mill sales collaterals. And they were really in tune with who their audience was, what they needed and wanted and the success that they've had is, is unbelievable. So I hold that up as kind of a token of like, yeah, see, that's really what we need to be doing, but we need to be doing that and willing to invest in that, willing to bring sales and marketing experts into the fold in developing our buildings way earlier so that we're really building successful models.

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Christy 13:40

And then had another really great session of just different ways to look at sales management metrics, what our customer is really trying to achieve and really building our approach to sales around getting the customer what they want. I think that there are a lot of, and I'll put myself in this bucket with my brothers and sisters in leadership and sales and marketing and say that there are a lot of us that are really kind of frustrated with the fact that we used to know what to do, we used to know that when we weren't getting it, you know, when our occupancy was low that we would just go out and hit the streets and do business development and that that was going to be the what saved our day. Or we used to know that hey, we can get people on the phone, we can just start calling people and hit the phones really hard and let's just call blitz the heck out of our lead basis and those don't work anymore.

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Christy 14:31

Because guess what? People don't answer their phone. And so there's a lot of these old tactics that worked 20 years ago that we've been training on for 20 years and we continue to tell people and train people on how do you make a really great phone call, but what we are really not doing is shifting. And I think that is that humility piece is shifting into recognizing that we're not getting the same results out of what we were getting 20 years ago. And that there comes a time where we need to start to really think and shift into changing our ways. And ultimately that comes with this place of humility to say that what I think I know the process should be maybe has served its purpose and that we need to open up and look at some other ways for us to really think about engaging our customer versus just trying to get them on the phone and convert them. Because that's really been the conventional knowledge I think in senior living. Sales management to date has been like, how do we convert people? How do we get more heads in our beds or you know, more tour in the doors? It's like we've had these conventional ideas but our customers are doing a lot of research and they're coming to us a lot earlier. We have to change our behavior if we want to meet their needs.

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Lucas 15:43

So I have a question about that, and this may be a silly question. Most of our listeners may be like, oh Lucas, why are you even asking that? We know that's answer you're referring to the customer, the customer, the customer. What is the ratio of the customer being the resident that's moving in and the extended family, the adult daughter or somebody else that's make helping that transition?

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Christy 16:02

I mean it depends on the product type, right? So independent living tends to be very dominated by the primary decision maker is the resident, residents themselves. But the supporting players are usually the adult children or other members of their family or their social circle that are sort of tasked maybe with helping make sure that they're not getting themselves into a pickle. In Assisted living, I see that as, as getting a lot more egalitarian. So you still have decision-making that is made between those same two groups, but the weight of who makes the decision or who makes the call starts to change. But generally speaking, it's really difficult to make someone move into an assisted living who doesn't want to.

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Lucas 16:42

Right.

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Christy 16:43

So the resident themselves is still a big decision maker where they may not be necessarily the lead person in the inquiry and the lead person doing that at-home research, they're definitely going to be the person who says yes to the dress at the end and signs the dotted line. So that's kind of the way I see it. But ultimately understanding humans and understanding developmentally that perspective of how do we age and what are the developmental factors to that, understanding the familial elements to what they're dealing with and the financial elements of it. This is an extremely complex experience for the consumer and we want to reduce that to a housing decision and that this is just a real estate choice that they're making, but it represents much bigger themes in life and death for these folks that are making choices that they know might impact the quality of their life sometimes for the better and maybe sometimes in, in their view for the worst.

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Christy 17:38

So I don't think we've totally tuned into all of that kind of element, the psychographic element of it all. And I think that that leaves some gaps into how we build buildings, certainly how we communicate market buildings. I even had a pondering the other day where I thought, have I lost more sales than I've gained in my career because of what I think the right way to sell senior living is, you know, have I sold it the way I think is really great and grand and the way I've been taught only to find out that yeah, I'm getting enough success to like hit the benchmark or hit the company mark and obviously like get to advance in my career, but how many people did I turn off by those sales experiences that I was giving? Because I

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Lucas 18:22

Apparently 90%,

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Christy 18:23

I mean isn't It kind of unbelievable, you know.

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Christy 18:26

Part of me like on this last year going down this journey of trying to be really open-minded about what I don't know and trying to be really humble and what I don't know is leading to, you know, me, to consider other possibilities around themes that we as an industry think that we know, you know, we think we know lead aggregators for example, and that's a real hot topic at these conferences is, ah, how do we get out of lead aggregators and there's all these downsides to them and how much they cost and the length of stays and there's all this stuff. But for me, I think that there's a real psychological story there that we're missing. And I also think that there's a marketing story there that we're missing that maybe there's other ways for us to really think about how the ecosystem of  lead generating possibilities, how that really works together and, and how we might combat it a little bit differently versus just kind of taking a staunch approach.

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Josh 19:12

Well I think it's very encouraging to me to hear a seasoned leader like yourself that is practicing the humility and digging in deep to continually be learning to be a better provider, not only to their teams, but also to help to change the perception and to penetrate deeper into that 90% that we don't get. And it's always a treat to have you on. I know Lucas said earlier you were a contributor. She once was a contributor, you're still a contributor you're contributing today. And I'll also say those episodes, hours upon hours that you gave us and gave the listeners, gave our industry are still getting downloaded and still relevant. And so always appreciate your time with us getting pulled away here at SMASH when we know you got a busy dance card. So thanks for the time with us today.

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Christy 20:00

Oh, thank you guys. It was truly a pleasure to be a contributor and it's great to still contribute to the conversation here today. I think you gave me such a great platform to kind of rant and challenge in some of those episodes and so it's really encouraging to me and for all of you that have listened to those to see that that's resonated or that that's provoking some thought.

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Lucas 20:19

And great to see you today. And for our listeners, we'll make sure that we connect with Christy in the show notes and we'll make sure our producer Sara will put a special link in there to her contributors series shows, because I know they're sitting there right now, they're like, oh, I missed those. We got some new listeners. And they're like, wait a minute, I didn't hear those. So we'll make sure we put that link in there as well so you can be able to partake in that.

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Lucas 20:41

Go to btgvoice.com, download this show, and so many more connect with us on LinkedIn, we'd love to hear from you and be a part of the conversation here. Thanks for spending time with us here at SMASH in Las Vegas, Nevada 2023. Thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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20:56

Thanks for listening to Bridge the Gap podcast with Josh and Lucas. Connect with the BTG network team and use your voice to influence the industry by connecting with us at btgvoice.com.