Listen Now

Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast: Hello, and welcome to the Senior Living Sales and Marketing podcast. I'm Roy. I just wanted to drop by for a minute and tell, let the listeners know, I'm going to be taking a hiatus from the show. I am going to leave it up. That way, if there's any episodes that you'd like or would like to share, they will be there. The last year or so, I haven't really been working in the senior living space that much. I've got a sister podcast, the Business Of Business podcast, which is thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com, or tbobp.com. It just allows me a lot more latitude to do other topics besides sales and marketing. I'm interested in employee retention systems and procedures, content, leadership, and leadership development. This just gives me a... It gives me a lot more room to talk about a lot of different subjects and reach a more wider audience of general businesses and professionals.                I'd like to invite you to, check us out at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We are on all the major platforms, Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora. Please, go over, download it, check it out, and share with your friends. We're trying to build an audience over there. I really haven't done much of a promotion with it. We're going to start promoting it a little bit more and driving some traffic over there. Would love to have you come over. Like I said, I'm going to leave these episodes up for a while. I don't see any reason to take them down right this minute, but we'll see.                Also, be on the lookout. We are starting another more age-related project. It's called Ageucational it's A-G-E-U-C-A-T-I-O-N-A-L, and it's ageucational.com. The website was recently went through an update and messed it up, but we are in the process of getting it rebuilt. We'll be launching a podcast hopefully shortly after the first of the year, maybe second, third, week of January. So be listening for that. That there's going to be wide range. That is myself and my partner, Terry, will be hosting that. We both are fortunate enough to have living parents that are getting up in age. And so, there's just a lot that goes on. Terry's actually part of the sandwich generation. She still as a younger adult daughter, but still there's things going on, on both ends.                What we want to do is really talk about this aging. I know I've worked in the senior living space for probably the last 20 years, worked with a lot of operators, a lot of different communities, so seen a lot. And then, of course, just the trials that we go through every day with our parents, that it's not necessarily that they that they cause any trouble. They're all good and in good health, but just things like medication, driving, of course, COVID, all of these things. We know that there are a lot of other individuals out there that are touched by this.                Terry's actually been through the process of finding senior living for her parents. We'll be able to talk about that. Her dad unfortunately has passed away a few years ago and went through... He had Alzheimer's. She, and her sisters, and mom went through that. I feel like we actually have a lot to talk about. We'll be doing some interviews, of course, with other professionals in the industry. And then, we'll just be having some shows of just us talking back and forth about some things that we may have gone through in the last week or so recently.                So anyway, just be on the lookout for that. If you have show ideas for that, of course, you can reach out to me at Roy@ageucational, A-G-E-U-C-A-T-I-O-N-A-L, ageucational.com. Send me an email for show ideas, or if you're a professional in the industry would like to be on as a guest, we'd certainly love to entertain a show topic ideas. Again, thank you for the last few years of being faithful listeners. It's been a lot of fun doing this. I'm certainly excited about these other two projects and just feeling able to do a little bit more different topics to bring to more of a general audience. Again, thanks a lot. Until next time, this is Roy, please take care of each other. www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com www.tbobp.com www.ageucational.com  

Lead Generation with Roy Harmon Roy Harmon is an experienced marketer with a demonstrated history of generating leads in the legal, political, automotive, higher education, software, and healthcare industries. His efforts have mobilized voters, enticed customers, and persuaded donors. Advertoscope isn’t your typical lead generation company. Most of the time, business owners searching for lead generation services end up fighting for leads generated by third parties. Those leads are sold to multiple competing businesses, and anyone buying them has to hope that: the lead is qualified their sales rep gets to the lead first their sales rep closes the lead before the competition bombards them with other offers You won’t have that problem with Advertoscope. We help businesses generate their own leads. We’ll work with you to generate a detailed customer profile so you know the leads you receive are highly qualified and ready to close. For more information, shoot Roy Harmon an email at roy@advertoscope.com. www.advertoscope.com www.seniorivingsalesandmarketing.com Full Transcript Below  Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Yeah. This is the show where, you know, we try to focus our efforts on the senior living industry and specifically the sales and marketing. Uh, some things that we are seeing are things that may be able to help your community actually increase your occupancy or do it, uh, at a more reasonable rate, try to, you know, find cost-effective ma uh, lead generation devices. And so, uh, which brings us to our guests today, Roy Harmon, we're going to talk about lead generation and he's been in multiple industries. He's been in healthcare. Uh, he's been in the, uh, SAS law, politics, automotive and higher education as well. So, um, Roy, without further ado, we'll just bring you on and we'll get talking. How's your morning going Roy Harmon (01:01): One. Great. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (01:04): Good, good. Yeah. Thanks for taking time out of your day. So yeah, lead generation, uh, you know, that's important an important part of, uh, the S uh, in senior living for sure, because, you know, when somebody moves out, hopefully we've got a waiting list, but as things go, sometimes the people at the top of the list aren't always ready to go. So we, you know, have to have an, uh, some way, not only to keep that wait list full, but also have, um, some method in place where we can constantly have leads coming in just to make it easier, you know, any, um, you know, a day with the, uh, with an empty room. We never recapture that revenue. So very important to, you know, cut that down as well. So first off, kind of, how did you get here? And I, I know that you've been in politics and I'm actually a lawyer as well. So kind of tell us a little bit about how you got here. Roy Harmon (02:04): Yeah, well, so I did, I graduated from law school, but I realized my mistake before I actually took the bar. So not actually not actually a lawyer, but, um, but I had the pay off the same student debt as the rest of them. So, um, yeah, I, uh, I started out in politics doing political marketing Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (02:27): And Roy Harmon (02:29): Ma you know, a lot of grassroots stuff, mobilizing voters and things like that. And I really enjoyed that and I realized that that was easily applicable to anything else. So, you know, whether you're trying to get a donor to make a donation or a vote, or to show up for a, um, for a signed wave or to make a phone call any time that you're trying to get somebody to take action that's to the principals are going to be very similar. Right. And so I went from there to automotive and worked for an agency that did, um, did, did advertising for a tier three automotive dealerships. And from there just went to a number of different industries and, and found that I, my initial suspicion was correct. And these, these principles really do apply, uh, broadly across multiple industries. And, um, over that time, one of the areas where I found that it could really benefit from this kind of thinking is senior living, where a hundred percent occupancy is such a big, uh, important factor and the idea of having a full pipeline or having a, you know, having a waiting list, having these people who are familiar and ready to, to actually, uh, come on and become a, a resonant is something that's important because it's not a, it's not a short sales cycle on necessarily mean people are, there's a pretty big decision, right. Roy Harmon (04:11): And the longer the sales cycle, the longer the decision-making process, the more important it is to have these marketing efforts in place. Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (04:22): Yeah. Well, I'm just gonna needle you just a little bit about being, being out of politics before this cycle. That was probably a blessing in itself. Roy Harmon (04:35): I've, I've always, I've always done a pretty good job of, uh, of knowing when to move to the next area. And so I got out of that, I'd say just in time Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (04:46): And that was it. Yeah. I was going, it doesn't matter what side you're on today. Uh, everybody pretty much took a beating. So yeah, no, I think the importance of what you're saying is, um, can't be stressed enough is that we've got to keep that pipeline full and, and I don't ever want to, um, I guess inbound and outbound are complimentary when we'd never say, Hey, we're not going to do, we're going to do inbound. We're not doing any outbound or we're not, we're going to do outbound, no inbounds whatsoever. I think there has to be a good combination because, you know, Indiana, we got to pick up the phone, we got to build relationships, talk to people, do things like that. But the, um, what I like about inbound is number one is I think the, um, it works for you 24 seven. So if an adult child, you know, we, uh, adult children are, you know, I'm blessed because my kids are older. Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (05:46): So I'm not that sandwich generation, but, you know, adult children, they got jobs. They're working all day. You know, they come home at night and maybe, you know, there's nobody at the community they're interested in at 10 o'clock at night when they're doing the research. So they're able to, you know, go on the internet, wherever websites, social media, to look around at the different places. But also, um, I think it's easily eat easily, uh, scalable too. So we can start out find something that works. We can ramp it up versus, uh, you know, having to add employees. So, um, let's just talk to those two points. First off, we can talk about it, you know, work in 24 hours for us working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Roy Harmon (06:35): Yeah. Well, and the great thing about it is you can automate it so much of it can be automated as long as you're creating the content and creating the, putting the processes in place. Most of this can be automated and then it can serve your outbound efforts as well. So they, they, they tie together in a way that each one together is going to be better than it would be on its own. Um, but so, yeah, that's, that's a really great thing about it. And it doesn't even require necessarily the investment in some really expensive marketing automation platform. There's some fairly automated things you can do just with, within the Facebook ads platform or within Google displays ad platform. If you're, if you're creating content and you say, let's just say, you've got you, let's keep it simple and say, you've got two personas. Let's say, you've got, you want to find your people who are, um, who are actual the parents who would actually be moving in. Roy Harmon (07:44): And then you also have your people who are, uh, the, the caretakers, the, the children who are providing care for the apprentice. Uh, you know, you want to have different content for each person, right? And as they go through the, the buyers journey as HubSpot calls, that they're going to have different questions, different problems that they're dealing with. And, and you want to answer those questions with your content. Then on Facebook ads, you can set up your audiences and based on what content they've gone to, you can, you can know about where they're at in the process and tailor your messaging based on that. Roy - Senior Living Sales and Marketing (08:26): Yeah, that, that's a good point if, uh, somebody's spending a lot of time on the care component or aspect, then, you know, that would be a good touch point to talk about, you know, the safety, the meals, whatever they're interested in, whatever their needs, but also, you know, if they're looking at the amenities activities, you know, if it's more of a independent, active community, then, uh, you know, we can target them with that because it's important, everybody. Um, I think it's a good distinction to make that everybody has their kind of their own unique need for wanting to make changes, not just in senior living, but in any company. I mean, excuse me, with any product it's like different motivations. So it's so important that, um, we be able to, I guess it makes us sound intelligent, but also it, uh, you know, we can, without having to grill people to ask a lot of questions, we can get right to the point to address whatever their needs are. Roy Harmon (09:28): You're providing more value to them. You're, uh, and you're also not hitting them with irrelevant information. Right. Um, and just one thing that, that you, you kind of touched on, uh, there briefly is that it really it's important when it comes to these buyer personas. You have to understand who you're marketing to. Uh, you know, I mean, if it's a memory care facility it's going to be, you know, the people who you're, you're looking at, it's going to be entirely different. You know, the, the amount of direct marketing you're going to do to, to a resident in that case may be very low, but maybe you're, uh, you know, there, but there's still going to be

Storytelling In Sales a Winning Strategy with Mitch Waks CEO, Author, and Consultant Mitch Waks exhibited the gift of entrepreneurship at a young age; elementary school to be exact. He realized the profit to be had in making is own cinnamon toothpicks and selling them to his classmates. During his college years, Mitch quickly realized his side-gig in a band would not pay the bills, therefore he established a “party planning” business, using his sociable personality to his advantage. Mitch may be the only college student who did not eat ramen noodles during that time. During his experience as a student-teacher, Mitch understood he made a grave mistake in career choices. Sticking with it until after graduation, Mitch went into sales instead of teaching. Mitch eventually et and married his first wife whose mother owned a home tutoring business with around 12 students. Mitch, during his time as an investment salesman discovered investing in senior care to be a lucrative move. Mitch spoke with his mother-in-law who agreed, and thus, Cooperative Home Care was born. Under Mitch’s leadership, Cooperative grew from a small tutoring business to a leader in the home healthcare and hospice industry with offices in two states. After 35 years, Mitch expressed a desire to share his knowledge. He took a sabbatical, hid out in the woods, and wrote his soon-to-be best seller On Entrepreneurship. Mitch continues to share his business acumen through consulting start-ups and established businesses alike. www.mitchwaks.com 314.368.9445 Home - Cooperative Home Care www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com   Full Transcript Below Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Uh, today we have a fascinating guest with us, uh, Mitch wax. He is the owner of cooperative home care out of St. Louis, Missouri, and, uh, Mitch. First off, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking time out of your day to be here. Mitch (00:23): Well, thank you Roy so much for having me on your show and hoping I have some interesting knowledge to pass on to your listeners. Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (00:31): So you do, you've got such an interesting background and unfortunately we're not going to be able to cover it all because I'm sure that we could talk three or four hours, uh, you know, based on our previous conversations, but, uh, you know, a couple of things I think, uh, as we talked earlier, that really stand out is number one, you've been in business for 35 years. So, I mean, that says a lot for the way that you treat your customers, the way that you treat your employees, the way that you, your sales process. So communication communication with seniors, their families. And I think maybe more specifically, uh, we kind of agree on that storytelling aspect that telling our stories, our company stories, our personal stories, our values stories, those are all very important. So I think that'd be a great jumping off place. Mitch (01:22): Sure. Well, I think any sales person or marketing person in our industry has to be able to utilize storytelling in a different types of setting, because what we do is not selling a hard product like paint or ladders or cars. What we are doing is connecting with individuals and we need to connect with them at the heart level, right? And sales people can have a great advantage over many of their peers. If they just learn the art of telling a story often, that's a true story of why they're working for the company they're working for or how the company helps somebody through a great tragedy and was able to bring that family peace of mind, right. Or it can really be any story that connects. And the story obviously needs to fit the opportunity that you're talking to a presenting to, but the best salespeople I've ever seen in any industry are ones that can make a good heart connection with their prospects and get them to agree that the service is exactly what they need and they're willing to sign up. Um, yeah. Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (02:47): Yeah. And I think that's a great point that, um, you know, in this business, we it's, we're not, um, we need to connect at that level because we're not taking home can of paint. We're actually entrusting you to care for our loved ones. And I think you have to have such a deep, personal connection and build that trust with those, with, uh, you know, there, the trust needs to be between the sales person and the prospects that you can deliver on this care that you've told me you can for my loved one. Mitch (03:21): Yeah. Um, yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Roy. You understand it? And the story can be the company's story. And I would say, if you don't know your company's story, you need to go to the leadership or the owner, uh, or the CEO of the company and say, Hey, can you tell me your story of why you started this company? Why did you start this assisted living? Why did you open up this nursing home? Why did you decide to get into metal liquid medical equipment, uh, and learn their, their why story? And I believe for those listeners, uh, in your, uh, in your listening area and in your, who are listening to you, I think if they haven't, um, heard Simon cynics presentation is very famous. Now, Ted talk on why on starting with why they need to go, uh, to, uh, Ted talks or YouTube look up Simon Sinek. And, uh, it's about 15 minutes and it's one of the best sales tools that, uh, uh, and any sales or marketing person can learn and start to understand. Now, once they understand that, then even if they don't have their own story, but I'm going to tell you, everyone has a story. Right. But even if they don't know that they have a story, they can begin with the why story of their company and use that. Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (04:46): Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, uh, uh, you know, we need to connect on that emotional level in this really goes for all products you need to get, because unless you're, uh, in a unique position that you have no competition, you've got, you're the only person that makes this product, or the only person that provides this service, which I think very few people are lucky enough to be in that position. We all have competition and we have to differentiate ourself from that competition. And sometimes that is reaching down to an emotional level. I can give you all the facts and figures about my industry, about my product, about how awesome of a salesperson I am. But, you know, at some point people begin to glaze over with all these facts and figures. Whereas if we, if we try to reach them on the emotional level, it has such, such a more impact. Sometimes it's because we're being vulnerable and putting our story out there. But I just feel like that is a must for most, any salesperson. Mitch (05:52): I love how you phrase that Roy, the idea of being vulnerable, most salespeople, I meet early in your career who want to consider themselves rock stars. They want to dress fancy. They want to sound fancy. They want to have all kinds of literature that talks about, as you said, the facts and figures that eventually people will begin to glaze over. Right? If I come to you and as a physician and say, we have the best assisted living in all of Texas, how much, how many times has that position heard that? Right. And do you really believe the position cares that you've just said those words or believes you, right. Right. But if you can, uh, communicate with that physician, a why story that connects with him or her and her patients, um, now you have a chance to grab their attention and you're absolutely right. It being vulnerable and open, uh, can often mean the difference between people trusting you and not try and thinking of you as just a slick salesperson. Right. Exactly. And we know slick salespeople that that method just doesn't work anymore. I mean, I don't know if it ever did, but it clearly doesn't work in healthcare. Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (07:11): Yeah. I think our consumers, uh, have become, become much more smarter than that. And then the, with the internet being so popular now, a lot of times our consumers have done more research on us and our competition. You, you try to slide something by them and they're going to call you out on it. It's not, it's not as easy as it was back in the, you know, in the stone age prior to the internet. Mitch (07:35): You're absolutely right. Our consumers are much more knowledgeable today. And I think part of the, uh, which story you're choosing to tell depends on who your audience is. I may tell a very different story, um, to an adult daughter of, uh, uh, one of our patients, um, then I will to a referral source, um, like a social worker. Um, and it also depends on the situation. So there's going to be situational stories. And over the years I have accumulated so many real life stories that pretty much any, any different type of person I'm presenting to or talking to, I can find the right kind of story to match their situation. Roy with Senior Living Sales and Marketing (08:21): Well, you just led into my next, I just, uh, you know, I'm not being rude here. I'm actually writing notes down. And so you just led into something I just wrote down is listening. So prior to being a great storyteller, I think we have to be good listeners. And this is something that, you know, we have a canned presentation and sometimes salespeople just feel like I don't care what you, as the prospect have to say or what you look like, you know, I've got this, I've got this thing I've got to get through. And I've heard it on phone calls before where they, uh, the prospect throws up all the stop signs, but we just keep running through it because it's like, I've got, uh, all this to say. So sometimes, uh, listening is what listening is always good, because we want to hear what they have to say, but we have to know where to start. I mean, when somebody comes to you, why, why did you come here? Is, you know, that's the why, but then are we trying to meet a security issue, a health issue medication, you know, why, what is, what is the ne

Corporate Branding with Valerie Forgeard A strong brand is the centerpiece of successful and influential business and professional activity. Your brand is what you make of it. Our goal is to help you clarify the best route to build your brand and help you every step of the way. Whether you're a corporation, small business, or trying to build/grow your network or change your career, your brand is the bridge between where you are now and where you want to be. It is all too easy to make mistakes while marketing online; even a slight misstep can undermine the personal brand you worked so hard to create. We are here to support you in crossing the bridge to success with ease while avoiding common branding pitfalls.   "Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room"— Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) Services | StunningBrand Stunning Brand provides workshops, Media Training & Support, and Consultancy.  www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:02): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Uh, we've got, uh, a great guest with us today. We're going to talk about branding and, um, be the first to say I have very limited knowledge of it. So I am, uh, I'm happy that we have Valerie here with stunning brand to help us out. I'm not forgetting her last name. It's just very difficult to pronounce. So what I will do is I will get her after the introduction to, uh, she can say that for us. It sounds awesome when she says it. Not so much when I tried to say it, uh, but, um, Valerie and her team, uh, they bring 32 years of experience in broadcasting, social media, stakeholder engagement, community, building, public speaking, and negotiation to both the private not-for-profit and public sector. So serve a wide range of clients. And, um, I was why I was excited to have Valerie and she's taken time out of her, uh, late evening. She is in the UK. So we appreciate you taking time, Valerie. First off, before we go too much further, can you give us a pronunciation of your last name please? Valerie (01:14): Um, it's for French. Not expected. Roy (01:19): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. My French is terrible. I can barely speak English. Good English. So anyway, um, you know, what I want to do is, um, I just want to start at the beginning and this, uh, that what we're talking about today is going to be more geared toward corporations, big corporations, not necessarily, um, individuals are solo preneurs. There is a little bit of difference there. So just so everybody is kind of on board with that. We're going to talk to corporations. So let's just start at the beginning where you can tell the audience kind of what is branding. We, uh, typically some of us that are not knowledgeable, we think it's a logo, or we think it's a web page, but I know it's so much more encompassing, so let's just take it from the start. I, I have a corporation. I want to either develop my brand or, um, maybe rebrand in some manner. So I come to you and your team, uh, where do we start first? And secondly, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, but where do we start? Valerie (02:26): Uh, thanks for having me here. Um, so first I'd like to say that, uh, branding sounds like a complicated word, but we run every day right now. You're branding you to me and I'm granting yourself to you. And we're not even aware of it because branding is the representation of the brands. So it's the image that the brand represents and how people will talk about it. Um, the only difference with, uh, which is a big difference with the corporations is that in a corporations then could be 50,000 or a hundred thousand of different worries. Um, which means that, uh, it's a lot of people to represent the brand. So, so yes, a brand that has a logo has a website, uh, does its marketing companies do the marketing to, to impress the clients to gain more clients. Um, but it is also around, uh, the personality of the brand, but also around the people who represent the brands, uh, which is why, sorry, she wants to say something. Um, we, which is why, uh, the classic branding doesn't really work anymore because, uh, everyone nowadays has the perfect design has the same classic marketing. So if everyone does the same thing, uh, branding is not edge. Branding is not really unique. Uh, it's, it's just another flashy, perfect design Speaker 3 (04:09): And then another Valerie (04:10): Shouting on social media. And so, so how can you make a difference with your branding where first it comes? So if you come to me, I will ask you what is the story? So if you're a corporation, I presume that it's very likely that your design is already sorted out. You hire professionals to do it. Uh, your marketing is already up and running. So, so that that's not really the RA. Um, but I would ask you, what's the story, the history of your branding, how did it start? Why was the story behind your brand? Uh, usually there's always fantastic stories that come out. Sometimes I spoke with people who were not even aware that for example, Vagrant parents were already attached Speaker 3 (05:04): The company, um, in term of Valerie (05:08): How they influence. Um, but also it's, it's also about the leaders of the organization or the corporations. Uh, many times we don't think of the leaders, but the leaders, uh, some of the leaders may have some really good stories attached to the brand, um, to, to the story of the corporation. Um, there could be also, well, what is the interest for the next step? Uh, so some, some corporations now adopt, uh, corporate social responsibility, uh, to make a, an impression to make more impact and to get their brand, uh, and the great thing with social responsibilities because, um, it's like a marriage with a big NGO, for example. So, so both gain, uh, the NGO can raise awareness to the clients of the brand or the, of the corporation. The corporation can also raise the awareness about their brand, um, to the NGO supporters. Um, so, so that's a big, uh, thing that is being done now. Um, so, so, so these will be the questions first, uh, I would ask is, is after the story is about, uh, which impact, uh, do you want to make, um, apart from just, uh, showing how successful you are, and we would look at these different areas. Yeah. Roy (06:42): I'm not being rude, I'm actually taking, actually taking notes. This is very interesting. So, uh, yeah, I want to talk about the story for just a minute, because a, a lot of time in business, we, we try not to be personal or we try not to tell those stories. We try to be very sterile, but you know, one thing I talk a lot about is not only telling the company story, but the individual story, that's how we, uh, I think that's how we connect with other individuals is when we could connect on a personal level and not be a sterile, non, um, you know, non feeling company. Valerie (07:23): Yes. Um, well, I think to, to tell a story, a physical story has to be a really aligned with the brand, but it also has to be aligned with you. Um, I agree with the fact that if you don't feel comfortable of telling a personal story and not everyone is ready for that, um, it doesn't have to be, I mean, some companies use, uh, other people's stories that connect to them, um, to create an emotion, uh, because beyond the physical branding, uh, what really matters is the emotion. So it doesn't have to be your story, but it can be someone else's story. Uh, so for example, corporations who are associating themselves with, um, um, um, and then you, uh, could have, for example, a guest, uh, so for example, let's say it's an NGO that helps refugees could have a refugee coming and talk at the event and show that, uh, the corporation is supporting these schools. So, so that can be an example, for example, so that, that would touch, uh, the clients, uh, providing that it's, but usually a corporation will choose, uh, an area where it's safe. Um, and also, um, the corporation the same time does something good. So it's good karma. Roy (08:54): Yeah, I think, uh, you know, the story goes a long way in conveying our brand, um, unless you're very lucky and have a very unique product or service, there's somebody else that sells the same product or service out in the market. So the other thing that I've, uh, talk about a lot and feel that we have to do is we have to create the value. Why do you want to deal with me either for my service or my product? Again, I think that's where stories can go a long way in helping us show where that value is to the people that we're trying to reach. Valerie (09:31): Yeah. I mean, these days for corporations, uh, it's very data driven, so they will know what their customers, uh, what kind of topics that customers are interested in there will be surveys, but would be so, so it's not like, um, there, there would suddenly dive in supporting another organization and it doesn't have to be an organization. I mean, some, some, some corporations use emotion in very complex companies, for example, cook at the company in about happiness, um, to, to uncle, to encourage people, to, to figure about happiness when they did this look and choose happiness, or you have also, uh, for example, children of the world, which is a non-profit organizations. I like to give the example of nonprofit organizations because they're fantastic when it comes to creating emotions, um, because uh, corporations tells a product usually, which people want, um, otherwise they con crew, but a non-profit organization says something that people don't especially want and lesbian raised awareness, right. So the emotion has to be created, uh, strongly. Um, Roy (10:53): Yeah, and I think that's important even for products I, you know, in sales, that's one thing they always try to tell you is that you have to tell a story that creates that emotion in order to, you know, interest people. So I, I did notice that, uh, you know, when some of your collateral, that's something that you talk a lot about is creating that emotion. It's some kind of an emotional response. Valerie (11:17): Yeah. Yeah. Now there is, there can be downsides about this, uh, which is why some peopl

dbaileygroup, llc is a full-service marketing and public relations firm offering clients a wide range of solutions to ensure their needs and objectives are met. Whether your needs are to identify and secure new clients, deepen your current client relationships, or your need to stand-out from your competition, we will listen to you and partner with you to define your needs and objectives, then strive to develop solutions that don’t just reach these goals, but exceed them. Our experience in marketing research, traditional and digital marketing, public relations and graphic design solutions will be the foundation for your success. Because the true measure of our success lies not in the recognition and awards we receive, but in the effectiveness of our solutions for your specific needs and, your continued satisfaction. “Professionals today need to define their target audience and present an enhanced presence and detailed strategy - and they need it done in a timely, cost-effective way. That’s where I come in. Whether my clients need support for their existing marketing departments or an entirely “off-site” marketing team; I’m here to bring a wide range of resources and years of expertise to the table. Ours is a customized - not an off-the-shelf - marketing strategy that never fails to exceed expectations.” Denice Bailey, Principal and Senior Account Executive, has over 30 years of extensive marketing and public relations experience. Prior to founding dbaileygroup, she worked as manager/director in marketing for a number of different companies including Zachry Associates, the Abilene Reporter-News, The Business Press of Fort Worth, and Morren+Barkin. Her previous client list has included such names as Aviall, Inc., The Associates Financial Services, Fort Worth Symphony, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Physicians Reliance Network. Denice is involved in many civic and community organizations and activities. www.dbaileygroup.com www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:03): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Uh, we're going to have with us today as a guest, Denise Bailey with the D Bailey group, we're going to be talking about a few different topics, uh, kind of on the sales side, more sales than marketing, but it's going to be all, uh, kind of all encompassing. So Denise, how are you doing today? Denice (00:27): And then I Roy (00:28): Am good. Good. Got the dogs stowed away. So I'm getting much better now. Anyway. Well, let's just jump right into it. Um, you know, the first thing that we talked about is that the sales process, especially at the community level is such a team effort. And, um, you know, as you visit communities, you realize that the receptionist is generally the very first impression that you get. If you didn't, you know, if you haven't called ahead, if you just are walk-in, so it's important to get them, um, especially, but also the, um, all the staff on board learning how to greet visitors and just, um, you know, kind of learning those different techniques of, I guess, how we need to act in front of somebody that's in our community for the first time. Denice (01:26): You know, I agree, Roy, I can't echo your sentiment enough. And part of that I believe, and I think you might agree with me as well, but I believe that is a culture and it comes down from the top and if the top assures that their entire team, and it doesn't matter who on the team within the organization or within the home does not feel empowered or part of the team. And they need to understand and respect and realize how their actions in their interactions could make a huge difference for the home. Roy (02:05): Exactly. Yeah. And, and, you know, I fault us as managers because we, we don't, um, in our orientation, in our own boarding, we don't really go into how key that certain positions are because of that. And, you know, I've, I've mystery shopped a lot of communities and come in and find somebody reading a book that, you know, it's like their heads in a book and they just pop their eyes over. They really can't even take the time to give you the attention to find out why you've even walked into their community that day. So, Denice (02:40): Oh, you know, you, you have shared with me a fabulous example and I've obviously I remembered it because I'm going to bring it up again about how our community, how our community there wasn't, you know, the marketing manager wasn't there, the administrator wasn't there and it ended up being someone in the kitchen that gave the tour and it was a fabulous tour. Didn't you share that with me? Yeah. Roy (03:07): Yes, I did. I was, uh, I was out of town traveling and went, you know, went to a community. And like you said, well, first off marketing manager was busy. They didn't have a receptionist. The, uh, executive director was out of pocket and they had a businessman. I don't know. There was like a business manager, the head nurse. I mean, we got like five or six deep, but the kitchen manager came out of the kitchen, all smiles and said, Hey, you know what? Everybody's tied up. I'd be glad to walk you around. And it was a fabulous tour. I mean, it was very personable. The young man knew the community left and right. Which, you know, somebody had to give him some direction to know that he didn't just walk in knowing that, which I thought was fabulous because I've been on the other side of the coin to walk in and then say, sorry, there's nobody here that can help you. Maybe it can come back and, you know, and, and in any business Roy (04:13): Exactly. Now that's, that's what it is. Like, you know, it's manna from heaven when somebody walks into your business, no matter what kind of business it is, you have to have a plan. I mean, you have to have an, a, B, C, and D plan to make sure that they are taken care of when they walk in. So yeah, it was a, it was something else. And then just the behavior. Cause the other thing that I've encountered is walk in and receptionist is, uh, you know, grap into their coworker about how somebody took too long for lunch or didn't do this. And the last thing I want to do, if I'm going to put my loved one into, uh, your community is, you know, that we're already, uh, you know, the infighting and griping and things like that. And not saying it doesn't happen, but it doesn't need to take place right out where everybody can see, Denice (04:59): No, it doesn't need to be, it doesn't need to be broadcast. It's like family business, you know, it needs to stay within the organization. Roy (05:08): Exactly. Yeah. That or you call in and the receptionist, you know, they think that they're doing the right thing by eating, uh, you know, being on their desk and eat. And, but they answer the phone with a big bite in her mouth. And you know, you can't understand them from chewing food, just little things like that, that, uh, something else, Oh, go ahead. Denice (05:28): One of my big gripes and it's not just within communities like this, I think it happens across all industries right now. Not just right now, but it seems kind of prevalent right now is me answer the phone and the person you're supposed to talk to, not the receptionist, but someone whose responsibility is to take care. Maybe it's billing, whatever. And it sounds like I woke him up and I have found myself saying, have I woken you from a Naprosyn today? No. And I said, well, maybe we could, like, you know, and I want to say, then why don't you put yourself in the best presentation that your company would appreciate. Right. You don't sound like I just woke you up from a nap, Roy (06:14): Little enthusiasm. If you're going to be on the phone, never hurts. Well, I was going to say kind of along that same lines is that if, uh, you know, if you have a spat with your spouse or if somebody upsets you sometimes it's okay just to say, you know what I need to be. I need to step away from this prospect facing for just a little bit while I gather myself up. And I think people, I think the leaders of the company would much rather see that than you, uh, you know, taking that out on them. And that's one thing I asked the lady that cuts my hair. And when I walk in and she's got some scissors up around my ears, I always ask her if she got a fight with their spouse or kids made her mad. Cause I sure don't want to lose an ear because of that. So yeah. You know, it's, it's a good thing too. Uh, but you know, here again, I think this is where we fail as managers, as we really don't set, take the time to sit down and explain all of these things to people. And uh, just how important that they Denice (07:13): Really are every single time. Roy (07:15): Right, exactly. Uh, yeah. You know, the other thing we had on our list is, um, I think it's a great ideal to use professionals to bring them in, to speak not only to your residents, but take that as an opportunity to invite prospects back in. I mean, if somebody, even if they've not come in, but if they've come in, they've toured, you kind of gave them a little bit of a sales nudge and they still haven't made a decision, um, inviting them calm in a non threatening manner to come back is an awesome idea. Denice (07:56): Oh, I agree. And it's it. The rewards are, are tenfold on how that can happen, you know? And oftentimes you find you're professionals, be it the attorney or the estate planner or whomever, it might be oftentimes I've seen that them, that they, the attorney or the estate planner or whomever say, listen, I have a few customers or a few clients that would like to hear this. Do you mind if I invited them? So I think it would be well-served for the community who is that who's hosting the professional, say, listen, Roy, if you have any customers that you feel would be beneficial to hear this, I'd welcome them to come and join us when you're here on Tuesday or whatever. Right. Roy (08:48): That yeah. Asking for that referral, especially in a group like a group kind of rate to get multiple people from the professional. We, you know, and I fall guilty. I fall, um, take blame or fall be guilty of this a lot. Is that j

Engage Prospects Through Content Marketing with Tim Sprinkle Tim Sprinkle is the founder of Layup Content, a thought leadership agency in Denver, CO that helps financial services companies tell better stories in order to connect with their customers on a deeper level. A journalist for 20+ years, his work has appeared in Wired, Entrepreneur, Outside and many other publications, and he is the author of Screw the Valley: A Coast to Coast Tour of America’s New Tech Startup Landscape. More information is available at www.LayupContent.com.   www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:02): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy. Uh, today we have a guest that's gonna talk to us about, um, content and content as, um, especially Darren tougher times. And, uh, you know, as this industry progresses and grows and gets to be more competition, I think that the, um, the opportunity or the gonna have to be able to tell the story of, um, the senior living community, not from a bricks and sticks, uh, type of aspect, but more from the, the lifestyle aspect. And if you've listened to me before, you know, um, that's one of my things that I try to talk about all the time is that, you know, we have to, to, uh, kind of build the dream, what is life gonna be like? And so, uh, Tim sprinkle is with us today. He is with layup content. Roy (00:58): Uh, they are a thought leadership agency out of Denver, Colorado. They help, uh, small to midsize, small to midsize businesses, tell their stories in order to connect with their customers on a deeper level. Uh, he was a journalist for 20 plus years and has appeared in wired entrepreneur outside and many other publications. He has also authored a screw the Valley, a coast to coast tour of America's new tech startup landscape. Tim, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Roy. Hey, it's great to talk to you again. And, uh, you know, we talked a little bit in the pre-show about this, but, uh, this audience that we're talking to today is the senior living based, which can run the gamut from, uh, assist, uh, from, um, independent living assisted living, uh, nursing or Alzheimer's care and, or some combination of everything in between there. So, uh, you know, we, I think we, um, we're getting better, but a lot of times we're in a habit of telling the story, like, you know, we have an apartment where you live and this is where we go eat. And, you know, I think our consumer not only have they become an they're smarter, the, um, you know, this, this generation is very much research based and research focused, but we've got the internet and with the internet, they do a lot of research before they even make that phone call or come onsite to visit. And so, you know, that's why I feel that content is not only content is King, but it is it's going to be the master of driving traffic to the, uh, communities Tim (02:47): That's right. I mean, really what it comes down to is that everyone right now is living online. I mean, would it without a digital president's presence, you don't, um, do you have exist? And I think, uh, what a lot of, you know, senior living being just one of them are kind of realizing kind of waking up to you right now is that, you know, it's not necessarily enough to, you know, put your best foot forward and engage with kind of your customers online and on social media. That might be their only impression of you. They may not necessarily even meet you or talk to you on the phone until they're ready to buy. And that really kind of put really high bar for kind of the quality that you're putting out. And it's not just about, you know, just attracting inbound traffic and SEO and putting out content and all that, all those kind of buzzwords, it really is like telling, telling a true story that engages with someone who may only know about you from an Instagram story or, you know, whatever platform they're on, um, really kind of building those connection, that it, it's the kind of thing that we do as human beings in person all the time. Tim (03:49): It's not difficult when you're talking face to face with someone, but when they're just on their phone or on their computer, it's a whole different ball game and you really need to kind of step up kind of what you're doing to, to really resonate with them. Roy (03:59): Yeah. And I'm not sure what the metric is anymore, but it used to be, you got like about six seconds to capture somebody's attention. And so while we've, you know, got a lot of pretty pictures, uh, you know, the story that goes behind that is important. I think people have learned to, um, realize that B businesses post the best pictures that they possibly have up there. So we know what is the story behind that, you know, what is life going to be like in one of these communities? And, you know, that's where we talk about, you know, building the dream. And the examples that I typically use are that, um, you know, somebody is not going to have to chase a lawnmower in a hundred degree heat, or they're not going to have to actually, you know, be behind a snowblower. So, you know, there's that physical aspect and the work aspect, but then also, you know, I think is this, uh, you know, we have to tell the story, is this a lively community, a lot of seniors, they're not looking for a place to go sit in a rocking chair and not do anything else. Roy (05:04): They still want to live an active and a very social life. So I think that the opportunities to tell that story are just endless. Tim (05:14): Yeah, exactly. I mean, really at the end of the day, differentiating between a couple of different places you need beyond location, let's say that it just, it might seem like they're all dime a dozen. And obviously there are many differences that people can point to, but if you're not talking about those differences, you're not highlighting kind of what you're really putting the person who is looking for a place to live into the, into that story. Uh, they don't really feel any connection to you. It's the same as, you know, another Philadelphia, Philadelphia on the block. Yeah. There's really no differentiator. Roy (05:45): Right. Right. Yeah. And the, you know, the other thing about, uh, that's a little difficult too about this business is sometimes we're not only reaching the person that's going to live there. You know, we may be reaching, uh, a spouse of somebody that needs to move in, or we could even be trying to reach out to a, um, an adult child or, uh, you know, somebody else that is going to help be involved in that decision. So it's, um, it's good in a way, because it gives us a broad range of messages to put out, but on the other hand, you know, it can get complex and trying to manage that. And then, uh, you know, we want to have an, and I would assume that what we want to try to do is build kind of a, a longer vertical with all the different topics that it may be activities, safety, you know, the meals that, but then, uh, make it where you can go very deep into it to get a lot more information than what we'd call the superficial information that you just see on a webpage Tim (06:54): That's right. I mean, you really are talking to such a wide audience, you know, the folks who are retired and it could be moving into their, their kids or their grandkids. I mean, the age range is really staggeringly large. And it's between the generations, that the ways that they communicate are all very different and, you know, to speak to all of them kind of in the same way, the same voice, but, you know, kind of the brand and the whole, you know, all of the stories that you're telling them, the content you're creating, it all feels universal and United, even though you're going after a different way is it's, it's, it's, it's a bigger problem than I think a lot of people actually appreciate it. And it takes a lot of kind of forethought and planning to make it work. Roy (07:33): Right. Right. Yeah. And, you know, and I guess what I was kind of, um, I wasn't very clear, but, uh, I kind of allude to the fact that, you know, we've got that short little time to get their attention. And so while we want to have, um, you know, like I like to have bigger blocks that try to have the keywords or catch words that may, uh, you know, on a single page, we may have, uh, you know, image four or five images that will capture their attention. Then they're able to click on that. If it's security that they're interested, then they click on it. You know, it takes them a little bit deeper. So just want to make sure that I clarify that, um, I, you know, when I look at things I'm all about, you know, finding the need that I have to try to build that value, you know, before I go deeper. Roy (08:23): And, uh, you know, it's, it's difficult on, uh, on a flat web page, piece of paper, you know, to try to capture a lot of information and everybody's needs, but, uh, that's where we get back to the, you know, a lot of nice visuals, a lot of nice titles in order to take us deeper into the subject. And then, like, you're saying, tell that story, you know, what is the story? What, you know, what story do you have to tell? And, um, I think that's where we can really add value and try to capture those eyes for the first time and try to get somebody to pick up the phone, make a phone call, or even come out and take a tour is just that, um, we're going to add value to their life or to their loved one's life in some way. Tim (09:13): Yeah, that's right. And then, like you and I are  earlier, Roy, I mean, incorporating visual than, you know, videos and, you know, different ways that everyone really wants to kind of interact with with companies and websites, even in their own way. I'm personally not a huge video person, but I know that millions, many, many millions of other people really will, are video first and they'll pick up their phone and watch a video a hundred times out of a hundred before they read up a sales sheet or anything on a website. And just kind of, you know, keeping that in mind and just having as many different options as you can for people to interact with you. Uh, it's kind of an imp

Tommy is the Co-Founder of The RoundTrip Group (RTG), a marketing, advertising, media and sales consultancy firm based in the New York City area. RTG's goal is to help marketers better sell to their customers, agencies better sell to clients, and vendors better sell to agencies. By quickly and clearly identifying simple solutions to today's complex business challenges, RTG helps businesses in the industry "sell-in" and "sell-through" more effectively, thus driving profitability. Additionally, Tommy is also a Strategic Advisor to Glewed.TV, a privately-owned ad-support video on demand platform that is revolutionizing the streaming space. Prior to founding The RoundTrip Group, Tommy spent 24 years in the media industry driving business growth via communication solutions for some of the world’s most well-known brands.  Throughout his career, Tommy has been known as strategic, innovative, transformation expert who has a knack for quickly identifying and simplifying business challenges and coming up with innovative communications solutions that are laser focused on driving positive business outcomes for his clients. Tommy began his career in 1995 in the media department at the Grey Global Group (prior to acquisition of the group by WPP) in New York.  During his first 3 years at Grey, Tommy helped develop and modernize communications plans that propelled Procter & Gamble’s Pantene to the #1 hair care brand in the United States.  During his time with Grey he also managed the ConAgra portfolio of food products helping to successfully launch the well know Marie Callender’s frozen food line. In 1999, Tommy helped start up a youth and entertainment company, GWHIZ Entertainment, funded by Grey Global Group.  During his tenure there, he helped grow the agency from 1 client to over 15 in a 5-year span working with clients such as Dairy Queen, W Hotels, Topp’s Confection, D-Lish Fragrances, Konami Video Games and US Cellular.  He was part of a team that created the first in-game advertising experience in the industry via a partnership with Reebok and Konami and he also developed and executed the industry-first “wireless scavenger hunt” using SMS for US Cellular.  In 2004, Tommy was recruited by Publicis’s Starcom Mediavest Group to transform their unprofitable operation in Puerto Rico. As the VP, Managing Director of our Puerto Rico office, he helped to not only establish SMG as the first stand-alone media agency in the marketplace, but also helped transform the profitability of the operation by securing new business, diversifying their service offering and restructuring marketplace deals.  During his tenure, Tommy helped to elevate the talent and product across some of our most well-known global brands in the world including P&G, Kraft, Kellogg’s and Visa.  Under Tommy’s leadership the media team won a Cuspide, Puerto Rico’s most celebrated industry award. In 2007, Tommy relocated to Mexico to take on the challenge of recapturing the Coke business in their largest market in the world.  For three years Tommy transformed and led a team that won back the business in unprecedented fashion – in less than 3 years and without a pitch.  The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta cited this as a “first-ever” in their organization.  During his time running the Coca-Cola business he helped grow market share across the beverage portfolio to over 80% and more importantly grew Coca-Cola’s water brand, Ciel, and won the monthly share game against Danone’s long established Bonafont brand.  His team also won silver at the Circulo Oro Festival for Media Innovation for work done on behalf of Coca-Cola’s energy drink, Gladiator. During his last two years in Mexico, Tommy led business development discipline in LATAM for SMG as part of the Global Growth Team.  In 2010, he helped lead the Mexico office to an incredible 9 wins during that year picking up clients such as Banamex, Burger King, Subway, Expedia and Cadbury to name a few.  In 2011, he continued helping the region grow landing a big regional win in Mead Johnson and expanding the Subway business to include 6 additional markets.  Tommy was also instrumental in helping establish both a Content and Data & Analytics discipline within Latin America for SMG. In 2012, Tommy returned to the United States to run Mediavest’s business development practice.  During his time in this role, Mediavest experience unprecedented growth winning over $2.5B dollars in billings by winning clients such as Honda, Converse, Travelers, Brown Forman, Bloomin’ Brands, and Keurig Green Mountain.  In 2013, Mediavest won Adweek’s Agency of the Year as a result of its massive growth. In 2014, Tommy returned to the world of day-to-day business management where he oversaw the global businesses for Mondelez and Brown Forman and the domestic business for Sprint.  As an SVP, Global Managing Director, Tommy was responsible for the operations, talent and product for Mondelez across 40+ countries in the regions of North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.  For Brown Forman he oversaw the communications, which included both above the line media and below the line events.  Tommy led the Sprint business during a transformational time when they were looking to prepare themselves for a sale and/or merger, thus there was a massive focus on communications that could be measured and attributed to sales.  Sprint eventually merged with T-Mobile. In 2017, OMD tapped Tommy to take over and transform the Nissan business in North America.  He quickly shifted the team’s hub from Los Angeles to New York in order to have better connectivity with the clients.  Tommy helped assemble a new team of cross-athletes who were fluent in offline and online channel planning.  With this newly built team they transformed how they approached business, building a unique communications framework that was grounded in building brand over time and driving sales over night.  The use of 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data was essential in driving both targeting and messaging decisions.  Lastly, and most importantly, Tommy’s team regained the confidence of the Nissan clients so much so that Nissan renewed its contract with OMD for another three years. Tommy is originally from Charleston, SC and attended the University of Florida in Gainesville where he graduated with High Honors with a Bachelor’s Degree in Advertising.  He’s been married to his wife, Meredith, for over 15 years and they have a thirteen-year-old son, Gaven.  Tommy’s passions include scuba diving, traveling, music and gardening.  www.theroundtripgroup.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:01): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm rolling. Uh, we are very fortunate enough today. We have an awesome guest, uh, Tommy Nolen. He is the seat, uh, the co founder and the chief marketing officer of the roundtrip group. They are a marketing advertising media and sales consultancy firm based out of New York city. So I'm not going to waste any more time. I want to get straight to Tommy. He's got a lot of great things to talk to us today about marketing, uh, to the, uh, senior, to the baby boomer population and some great advice on how we could put that to work, to help us in the senior living space. So, Tommy, I'm going to turn it over to you, if you would tell us just a little bit, you know, kind of about your background and how you got here and a little bit about what y'all do. Tommy (00:58): Great Roy, uh, well, uh, first off, thanks for having me on, I'm happy to be here this morning and, uh, hopefully, uh, in part, a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of what we've learned at the roundtrip group, uh, you know, in, in terms of, uh, marketing to seniors and really kind of the future generation of, of your customer base. Um, just to quick, quick bit on, on how I got here, you know, as you said, I'm the cofounder of a marketing consultancy and, you know, our focus is on helping people sell better. Uh, we say we like to help marketers better sell to their customers, agencies, better selves and their clients and, uh, vendors better sell to agencies. And, um, you know, we, we look at ourselves as a, as a collaborator, not a competitor, um, in the industry. Uh, and we started at about a year and a half ago. Tommy (01:53): Um, prior to that, uh, I spent about 25 years in the advertising business partner. Uh, Barbara Martinez spent about 30 years in the business. And, um, you know, uh, during that time I worked with some of the largest, uh, I would say most sophisticated marketers in the world. Um, people like Proctor and gamble, uh, Nissan Coca Cola, the up, you know, well known brands that you've, uh, you've heard of. Um, and, you know, I would say, uh, you know, each with a different approach to talking to consumers, but, um, uh, also allowing you to learn different things along the way. Um, you know, during my 25 years, uh, I worked in big agencies. I ran agencies, uh, ran business domestically, regionally, globally, uh, lived in Latin America for eight years. So, um, you know, my, my entire career, um, has been selling in, in some way shape or form, and the most effective way to do that is to really, uh, understand your customer. And, and, um, as you, we recently just finished a project where, uh, we had a lot of focus on kind of the baby boomers understanding them and, uh, and what that means for marketing. Roy (03:12): Yeah, no, I'm going to just give you some kudos. You're doing a good job. I drive a Nissan and I do drink a lot of Coke, so whatever, whatever you did to help them is work. And so, yeah, I'm not going to let you off the hook too. You know, we, uh, we had a talk last week a little bit, and so I'm still jealous. I talk every day about, um, you took, you had an opportunity to take a gap six months and, um, I guess this was when you were a little younger, but you were able to travel around, um, uh, what were you in Europe when you were t

Marty Ramseck Talent Optimization Advisor Marty has cultivated 30 years of experience in hands-on sales management and double-digit growth in every one of his ventures. He has worked for companies such as Vintage Senior Living, LivHOME, Sunrise Senior Living, CORT, and Cigna. An expert, who helps organizations intentionally design and implement a people strategy, building powerful teams and cultures to match their business strategies.  He helps employees become more engaged, productive and satisfied by facilitating self-awareness and an understanding of an individual’s motivations and natural behaviors through the talent optimization discipline and Predictive Index® methodology. Marty’s primary focus is on partnering with Senior Leaders to build a talent strategy that maps to their business goals. In 2016 Marty joined PI Midlantic as a Talent Optimization Advisor to help companies and professionals to reach exceptional results. Marty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton. He lives in Southern California with his wife Nancy of 36 years. https://www.pimidlantic.com Full Transcript Below Roy (00:01): Hello, and welcome to another episode of senior living sales and marketing. I'm Roy, you can find us@wwwdotseniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com. You can also download the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, and Spotify. We are on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as well. Hey, today we've got a great guest. Uh, this gentleman not only has a great product that I truly believe in, but he also, uh, has a wealth of experience in the sales and marketing, um, portion of senior living. So couldn't find a better guest we've talked before, but I did want to catch up with them again, just to kind of see what some changes are, uh, kind of what's new coming down the pike with the product. So let's give a warm welcome to Marty Ramsey. He is with PI Midlantic and, um, it, the PI is predictive index. And so what it is it's basically, um, and Marty, I'll let you jump in. Roy (01:04): It's basically an evaluation of a person's behaviors, I guess, you know, we want to clarify and I'll let you clarify. There's a difference between skillsets and behaviors. You explain it much more eloquently than I do, but, um, this is going to be something that we can use for a pre hires. And it's also something that can be used within the organization for making sure we got people in the right place, making sure if we are, uh, promoting that the temperament, the individual's temperament is a match for our position, but anyway, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Marty. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for coming back and, um, I'll let you talk a little bit about the product. Marty (01:52): Okay, great. Thanks for, thanks for having me. And, um, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. Um, let's see, does is if you think about your employees, there's kind of three buckets that you're, that you look at, right? The first bucket is kind of what gets them in the door for, uh, for the interview, it's their skillsets, uh, their education, their knowledge, their experience, and that's what's on the resume that that's what gets them in for the interview. The tougher part is the second thing that you're looking for, I'm sure is their value system. Do they have the right values for your organization? Uh, are they, uh, uh, hardworking, integrity, honesty. And I was a VP of sales for 15 years in the senior, in the senior space. The one of the things I always look for myself, people will have passion for seniors and people that have that I thought customers could see right through them. Marty (02:45): So those are two things you think about why we choose those in life. We choose our skills. We choose our education. We choose our knowledge and we choose the values. You choose to work hard. You choose to treat people respectfully, she's have honesty. Your and the third thing that you look for every job has the behaviors you have to do to be successful. And with PI does, is looks at your behaviors to see is you have the right behaviors in that role to be successful. And unfortunately we don't choose our behaviors. Our behaviors kind of choose up. I tend to compare to your height, right? So those who have not met me, I stand five to 10. I was five to 10 at 18 I'm five to 10 today, 20 years from now, I'll probably be five foot eight, five to nine shrank. But no matter what I do, I can read every self help book on Amazon, my wife's and me. Marty (03:36): I'll never be six foot five. So PII helps you determine what behaviors that person brings to the, to the, to your organization. And with that, if you think about people who have not been successful in your, in your communities, in your organization, it's usually not. It's usually not what was on the resume that got them in trouble. It's usually what's what is on their behaviors. So he was in trouble. They didn't have good followup or they didn't communicate well. One of the teammate behaviors is what really gets you in trouble from that standpoint. So how does PCI work behavioral and you all have drives rides, great a need, uh, our behavior, our actual behavior is a response to those drivers. And those needs, for example, couldn't later in the day when we're doing this podcast and I'm sure Laura and I are gonna have in a few hours and a drive for hunger that will create a need for us to eat. Marty (04:32): And our behavior is a response to that drive and that need of eating dinner, eating dinner is a response to that. Drive that knee. If I only see the behavior, for example, I see somebody drinking coffee at a coffee house. I don't know why they're there, what's driving them there. What they could be there. She was in coffee because they got to get caffeine and energy for the day, or they could be there for socialization needs or they're there to meet a friend, or they can be there because they have a two year old screaming at home. So we could see the behavior, but we don't know what to strive with PCI. We're able to predict what that drive is. And from that from a PI, I can determine what type of needs that employees when have hasn't work and what, uh, how they're going to behave at work, but understanding their predictive index. Roy (05:20): Yeah. And I think that behavior is so important, especially when we move to the sales side. And, you know, I think that, um, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, but this would, this will kind of separate those that are made for sales made for that, you know, human contact, those that are kind of, uh, you know, driven for the outreach versus, you know, more of an analyst type, somebody that wants to set out a desk, maybe look at spreadsheets and not that there's a right and a wrong, everybody wants to be comfortable in what they're doing. It's just the fact of it takes a very special type of an individual to be on the sales side of anything. But, you know, I think senior living sales is a, it's a much more tricky because we're not, it's not like I'm, you're taking an inanimate object and give it to somebody. I mean, the we're trying to convince maybe an adult child or a spouse that we are the rat people to take care of their loved one. And that's, that's a, to me it's an important distinction between an inanimate object taking your car in to get some service. Yeah. We want that to go fine, but it's really not a life or death situation versus, uh, you know, if it's our loved one, we really want to be convinced that the community is right and that the personnel is right to actually, uh, take good care of them. Marty (06:51): Yeah. And I think, you know, especially in sales with senior living, um, you know, we couldn't predict again what that behavior is. And I think, you know, senior living sales, which I have 20 clients alone that are either a assisted living, kind of like harmony Commonwealth and pestle and, uh, uh, senior care companies like home care assistance in, uh, a model to name a couple, um, they, um, you know, you can look at what they need and that sales all be successful. And one thing that I can tell by looking at a pie is how much a person is going to control the sales process. I think selling is a lot about control and controlling the next steps and getting people to, you know, recommend next steps. You know, saying things like what we need to do is get mom in for, uh, for launch. Marty (07:39): What we need to do is get you to sell the house. Here's how we're going to do it is controlling that next step. The second thing we can help determine a pie is I think is towards point is senior living is such an emotional sale, right? And you want somebody who naturally what their behaviors is going to connect to that emotion of that family, of connecting emotionally to this very, very emotional sales saying things like, you know, can you picture your mom sitting by this window on a fall afternoon as a lease change, watching reading her favorite James Patterson book versus having someone come in and say, you know, the room is 648 feet. It has a frigerator, a shower, and you're selling back and no, no emotion tied to that. Also by looking at a predictive index, I continue to tell that sales person's going to be resolved, focus, all active activity focus. Marty (08:29): But what I mean by that is at the end of the day, you asked that person, uh, how did your day go? The person results focused. They're going to say, I got three checks today, or I got to move today, or I got three lunch tours today. They're going to talk to you in terms of results or another type of behavior. You'll have a sales people is they'll talk to you. In terms of activity. I made a hundred calls. I sent out a hundred emails. So obviously you want that sales person to have that high drive, the need for results. And the last thing you could tell based upon a PIs, how a sales person would close. Some people see no as one step closer to getting a yes, some sales people will not go for the next step unless they totally feel in their mind. They got the next steps, uh, secured by, by looking at a pie. I can tell you how that person's going to close a sale. They can close more often or th

As a sales professional are you asking the right questions? Don't just spew information at your prospects, really have a thoughtful conversation with them that includes asking good questions. Questions are key to gathering information in order to build relationships, target conversations, and thoughtful follow-up. Jessica Koch is here to help us ask the right questions.  www.jessicakoch.com jessica@jessicakoch.com  

In Episode 5 Roy Barker talks with Heather Deveaux about the importance of developing a content calendar to aid in planning and posting content to your preferred channels.  Heather Deveaux is a freelance writer and loves helping clients who need specialized content for websites, blogs, or other writing needs. Heather’s unique ability to create content that conveys your message to customers will result in more value, more authority, and more sales. Heather can be reached at www.heatherdeveaux.com and see her new project The Freelance Writing School at www.thefreelancewritingschool.com You can find out more about Roy Barker at www.roybarker.com,www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com  and listen to his other podcast at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. The podcast is also available for download on iTunes, GooglePlay, and Stitcher. Search Roy Barker or The Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast. Below find the full transcript of the interview   Roy Barker:                        00:02                    Welcome to episode five of the Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast. As a reminder, you can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. Please take a few minutes to download the podcast and rate it. It'll make it easier for others to find. You can also go to our website at www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com and sign up for our newsletter, which will let you know when each and every new episode comes out. Roy Barker:                        00:34                    Well, today I want to welcome back Heather Deveaux. She is our content writer, and as we talked at the end of our last episode, once we've got all this great content and then also how to basically plan what content we want, where it's going to go, we need to think about a calendar, and I am terrible at this. I actually have some content lying around that I haven't posted yet. New things come up that I usually rush in. So hopefully today I'm going to be able to learn a lot from Heather as well about how to set down at the very beginning and make out a calendar that you can stick to, that can cover all the different channels that we want to release our content into, so we're not having duplicates, and if we can get scheduled a couple of weeks out, we'll know exactly what we need to do in the future. Roy Barker:                        01:28                    Heather, thanks a lot for taking time out of your day again to come help us with this content calendar issue. How are you? Heather Deveaux:            01:36                    Good, Roy. Thanks again for having me back. I'm excited to be talking about more content. Roy Barker:                        01:40                    You bet. You bet. If you don't mind, for somebody that may just be listening to this episode for the first time, why don't you just give a short introduction? Heather Deveaux:            01:50                    Sure, so my name is Heather Deveaux, and I am a full-time freelance writer, so I write mostly web content for our clients, and I work with clients all over the world and I am based on the East Coast of Canada. In addition to doing freelance writing, I also launched this year a freelance writing school, which is called The Freelance Writing School and I, just two weeks ago, had my first set of students start their online training program, and so I'm excited about that. I'm excited to be sharing what I do with people and help them start for themselves to be a freelance writer. Roy Barker:                        02:32                    Well, that's awesome and that'll be a great topic for a future podcast, is setting up training sessions. I'm sure that is not easy, but I'm glad to hear that you're having success with that. Heather Deveaux:            02:44                    Yes, it's going well. It's slow, but everything is in the beginning, so I consider it a success for sure. Roy Barker:                        02:51                    Well, that's great. Let's talk about this calendar issue. I guess we could talk to two audiences. One is the audience that's just starting, that they really don't have anything, and so it's like, "Well, what do I need? And where should I even start writing? And where should I start my efforts?" The other audience is, "Well, I'm already knee deep into this, but I'm kind of all over the board with what I'm putting out, where I'm putting it in." So I think we can help both of these groups kind of channel their efforts to put out consistent content where they know, " I did something last Tuesday. I need to do something this Tuesday," depending on how much they want to put out. Roy Barker:                        03:36                    Then also the channels. Like, "Well, I released a blog last week, but I didn't do any Facebook or any LinkedIn." One thing I have started doing is taking excerpts from the blogs or from these podcast transcripts and actually releasing them as snippets of social media, as quotes either through LinkedIn or through Facebook, Google Plus, things like that. I know it's a lot to cover. I'll kind of let you start where you think we need to. Heather Deveaux:            04:13                    Yeah. Okay, so maybe what I will start with is if you're just starting out, because I think that this will actually answer a lot of questions for people who are new to content planning, and if you're a seasoned content writer or if you release content on a regular basis, going back to basics is a great way to sort of reorganize yourself, so I guess we'll start with that. If you're new to content writing and you're new to sharing content, the first thing that a lot of people think of is they need to be publishing every single day. I would say to that yes, but not the same kind of content every single day, so I'll use your blog example where you're taking excerpts for social media. Heather Deveaux:            05:01                    If you write a blog on Monday and you release that on Monday to your website or to your podcast, wherever you have that living, and then you schedule something for a different excerpt from that podcast or from that blog for Tuesday, for Thursday, for Saturday, and then you share it on three different platforms — say, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn — and then you share on the Wednesday, the Friday, and the Sunday three different excerpts on say, Facebook, if you use Snapchat, or if you use another platform, so that you're touching each platform at least once a week, but you're publishing every single day. Heather Deveaux:            05:49                    The idea behind publishing every day becomes a lot less overwhelming when you realize that you actually only need to be publishing one great piece of content a week, maybe twice a week, but for starters once a week, and then you're just sharing that content in different realms, with different audiences in different ways. That's a really great way to get a really long-term use out of your content. Roy Barker:                        06:14                    Right. Heather Deveaux:            06:15                    So that would be the first thing that I would say. Roy Barker:                        06:17                    Yeah. Before w

In episode 4 I talk with Marty Ramseck about using the Predictive Index Assessment to make better hiring decisions and enhance communication among sales teams. Marty has cultivated 30 years of experience in hands-on sales management and double-digit growth in every one of his ventures. He has worked for companies such as Vintage Senior Living, LivHOME, Sunrise Senior Living, CORT, and Cigna. In order to deliver record-breaking sales in highly competitive fields, Marty had to have an advantage over others in the industry. He found that advantage through an exceptionally strong match in recruiting, training and individual coaching using the Predictive Index. Marty’s primary focus is on partnering with Senior Leaders to build effective teams and design innovative solutions to organizational issues. In 2016 Marty joined PI Midlantic as a Senior Consultant with a focus on California to help companies and sales professionals to reach exceptional results. Marty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton. He lives in Southern California with his wife Nancy of 34 years. Marty's contact information is: 949-545-8121 mramseck@pimidlantic.com www.pimidlantic.com When you reach out to Marty, be sure and mention the podcast for a complimentary Predictive Index Assessment, a $200 value. Please visit our website www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcat.com, www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com, and to find out more about Roy Barkers consulting and advisory services visit www.roybarker.com or email roy@roybarker.com See full transcript below.  Roy Barker:                        Good morning, everyone. Welcome to episode four of the Senior Living Sales & Marketing Podcast. Just as a reminder, you can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play. Please download and rate the podcast to make it easier for others to find. You can also sign up for our newsletter at www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com. Also, check out our sister podcast at the [00:00:30] businessofbusinesspodcast.com.  Today, I want to welcome Marty Ramseck with PI Midlantic to the show. We did another show for the Business of Business Podcast, talking about the predictive index and how it relates to turn-over in general. As me and Marty talked further, I felt like it would be good to do an episode that was focused strictly [00:01:00] on the Senior Living Sales & Marketing teams. Marty has a very extensive background in senior living and in sales. I think that the sales process ... That's one reason why I started this podcast is that, the sales and marketing process has become a much more important function in the senior living industry. Now more than ever, with the [00:01:30] economic environment with the affordability issues, with the competition that's coming online. Both other senior living providers and at-home care. It's more important now that when we do capture lead, that we're able to do everything that we can do to possibly close that. I'm not talking about being a used care salesman. My philosophy is always building relationships. But, [00:02:00] I think we have to hire the right people that aren't used car salesmen. That know how to build relationships with prospects in order to increase our occupancy. Having said all that, Marty, welcome back. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk to me again. Marty Ramseck:               Thanks Roy, great to be here. Roy Barker:                        If you don't mind, why don't you just tell the audience just a little bit about your senior living history and just a little bit about the predictive [00:02:30] index. As well as, PI Midlantic. Marty Ramseck:               My senior living history goes back to 2002, where I was the VP of Sales for Center of Senior Living. Which was at that time nationwide, but now it's an international company. Many Senior Livings not only in America but throughout in Europe and Canada. Then I spent about ten years [00:03:00] with a company called LivHOME where we did in-home care, versus assisted living care. But we did in-home care, custodial care for seniors. Then two years at Vintage Senior Living. Again, a high-end senior living on the west coast, California and Washington. So over that period of time, I have about 15 years in the senior living industry. Experiencing both in-home and assisted living care.  A little bit [00:03:30] about predictive index. Predictive index is a behavioral assessment that looks at a person's behavioral strengths. In terms of, what do they bring behaviorally to a company. In terms of, the behaviors that you'll see in that person. Then from that, you can understand what motivates them, the motivating needs, better ways to communicate with them, better ways to coach and train them. Once you understand what their behavioral needs are [00:04:00] and wants are that way. PI Midlantic is a consulting company based out of Annapolis. We're in Maryland, and Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Along with, Northern and Southern California. My job is to work with companies and consult with companies. Help them with predictive index and help them get better results using this behavioral assessment tool. To hire better, coach, train, and engage their employees in a more productive way to at the end of the day get better results. Roy Barker:                        [00:04:30] Well, I think that not only your background but your product, it's a very good combination for the senior living sales and marketing teams today. So let's talk a little bit about taking the predictive index. Can you kind of explain what that process is. If I ... excuse me. If I called you today and said, "You know what? I'm fixing to hire Joe or Sally. [00:05:00] I really would like to do the predictive index on them." What does that process look like? Marty Ramseck:               Yeah, it's a very simple process. It's a process of ... we send them out of ... everything's done online. We would basically email them a link to complete the predictive index. Generally speaking, it's a real short assessment. That's one of the values of predictive index. It doesn't take the person who takes it a lot of time to do it, it takes about six minutes to complete. From that, we'll understand [00:05:30] their behavioral needs. Predictive index measures four behavioral needs of a person. It measures their dominance, which is their drive to control or insert influence one's environment. It also measures their extroversion, which is drive to people and interacting with people. It measure patience, which is the drive for stability and familiarity with one's environment. It measures formality, which is the drive for detail and to do things perfectly. In [00:06:00] each one of those drives, they have a high dominance, which is more a drive for taking challenges. Or a low dominance, which is more seeking harmony. In high extroversion, which is seeking people. Low extroversion, which is more task-focused. High patience, which is more process-oriented. Low patience, they're more variety in terms of [inaudible 00:06:24] their tasks throughout the day. Then formality, you can determine how much detail they're into. How much [00:06:30] rules and processes they're looking at versus how much they're looking at more general guidelines. In terms of, how they like to be worked with. Roy Barker:                        Yeah, and I think there's a fine line between being an overly aggressive salesperson versus being someone that knows how to pursue prospects and do thoughtful follow-up. Will the predictive index [00:07:00] kind of help separate those two individuals? Marty Ramseck:               Yeah, that's a great point. I think what we've seen ... What you see with predictive index is that in the Senior Living business, you're gonna find people that do well. Or high with extroversion, which means they connect very, very well with people. They're low in patience, which means they're very results oriented. Their detailed, some detail, but not [00:07:30] over the top where you don't want really getting behind and falling love with the CRM system and doing that all day. But the key you want to see in Senior Living that's probably changed most over the last 15 years is the dominance. Dominance is the drive for results, it's the drive for challenging, it's a drive to get people to take the next steps. When I first started Senior Living back in 2002, you didn't need a lot of dominance in your Sales people because there was not as much competition, [00:08:00] there wasn't as much option. So you're looking for more of a ... really to serve the natural role of [inaudible 00:08:08]. A person that worked well with people, didn't push them too hard because there was not a lot of competition out there. Today you see that dominance driver, needing more dominance, because there is more competition. You need to drive them a little bit more for the next steps. It's also the drive to control. Today you need somebody that really controls the Sales process. In terms [00:08:30] of, getting people to take the next steps and keeping themselves in control of what's happening next in the Sales process. That is a key behavior that you want to see in your Salespeople. But, at the same time, they can't be over the top. In terms of, too controlling or too driven because you're gonna push people away. But you have to kind of manage that a little bit where you do have somebody that can drive somebody t

The Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast Episode 3 features an interview with Heather Deveaux freelance writer discussing the importance of content in todays sales and marketing. Heather loves helping clients who need specialized content for websites, blogs, or other writing needs. Heather’s unique ability to create content that conveys your message to customers will result in more value, more authority, and more sales. Heather can be reached at www.heatherdeveaux.com and see her new project The Freelance Writing School at www.thefreelancewritingschool.com You can find out more about Roy Barker at www.roybarker.com,www.seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com  and listen to his other podcast at www.thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. The podcast is also available for download on iTunes, GooglePlay, and Stitcher. Search Roy Barker or The Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast. Below find the full transcript of the interview.   Roy Barker:                        Good afternoon and welcome to episode three of the Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Roy Barker. As a reminder, you can find our, this podcast is now on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, so please do a search, download it, and rate it, and that'll make it easier for others to find the podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter at www. [00:00:30] seniorlivingsalesandmarketing.com, and you can check out more about me at roybarker.com. You can reach me at roy@roybarker.com. Be glad to talk to you about sales and marketing, or employee retention. Topics that you may have for your particular community.                                              I wanna introduce our guest today. Heather Deveaux is a freelance writer, and what I [00:01:00] wanted to touch on is content, and basically, how creating content can help in the sales and marketing. Especially in our industry where, it's so very important where you're gonna be moving a family member or a loved one, that a lot of the prospects really check out communities a lot on the internet. And so having content out there is not only a great [00:01:30] way to help them find out about your community, but it's also a great way to start building a relationship with them.                                              So Heather, thanks a lot for being with us, and welcome to the show. Heather Deveaux:            Thanks, Roy, I'm glad to be here. Roy Barker:                        And if you don't mind, just start out by telling us just a little bit about yourself and what you do, and then we can jump right into it. Heather Deveaux:            Sure, so as you said, my name is Heather Deveaux, and I am a freelance writer. [00:02:00] I live in Canada actually, on the east coast of Canada, and I've been freelancing full time now for about a year. And before that, my experiences were in adult education and higher ed, and I worked a lot in college settings with adult learners who were re-training to re-enter the workforce, and before that I did a short stint as a secretary, like an administrative [00:02:30] assistant. And I have a military background as well, so it's a pretty diverse, and it allows me to write on all kinds of different things, and that's what makes my job so much fun. Roy Barker:                        Great, great, and just for full disclosure, Heather does help me with a lot of writing. She's a great editor. She makes sure to get all my, "Fixing toos and y'all's," out of there so it sounds much more professional. She does great work and, at the end of the show, we can tell everybody how they can reach [00:03:00] out and get ahold of you, but you also have kind of an exciting other, it's a sister project, but tell us a little bit about what you've got going on. Heather Deveaux:            Yeah, so it's called the Freelance Writing School, and this is, it's happening right now, like it is a live project now, I've been documenting it, sort of on YouTube and I've started a podcast as well, to sort of document how I'm building this project up. But I've [00:03:30] started accepting registrations for the school, and this weekend I'm launching the online version of the school, and so the project is designed to teach people, as I said, my background is in adult education. So the project is designed to teach people how to start and run a freelance writing business of their own. And this is something that I've been literally dreaming of most of my adult life.                                              It's always been my dream to have a school, to teach people how to [00:04:00] sort of make their own way in the world, and I've always done that through other schools that people owned, and now I'm in the process of developing my own. And so, I always say I'm so excited about it, and as a writer, I should have a better word than excited that I say over, and over, and over again, but it really is something that's really close to my heart and I truly am excited about it, and thank you for asking. So I'm happy to have the chance to talk about it whenever I can. Roy Barker:                        Yeah, yeah and that's very good, [00:04:30] because unlike myself, I'm more analytical and numbers focused, even though I love to write. I run into a lot of issues, so I think it's great that you're gonna be able to help and mentor people to be better writers. I myself, I will usually either think I have a great topic and a lot to say, and I get five sentences out and don't know where to go from there. Or, the other thing is, have a great topic and vere off, and end up [00:05:00] down the rabbit hole that doesn't have a lot to do with where I was going, so that I think a school to help people like me to be able to go through and focus, and know the steps that I need to take as a non-writer, to be able to get my message across, I think that'll be great, so I'm excited about that.                                              And like I said, at the end I'll let you give the websites and podcast where people can find you, but for now I want to kind of jump into, writing [00:05:30] as a sales and marketing tool, and some of the, start off I guess with the basics. Some of the types of content, I know that you've got the easy ones, the blogs and the articles, but what are some other types of content that you use or that you help your clients use, as a sales and marketing tool? Heather Deveaux:            Right, so that's a great question, and the thing that I would start off by saying is that, [00:06:00] I'm a writer but, content takes many different forms. So this podcast is an excellent example of how to do some sales and marketing around your business. It happens to be about sales and marketing but, this is a prime example of the kind of content that you can use to spread the word about your products and services. So the other great thing that is about podcasts, is that you can have a script or a transcript that goes along with it, which [00:06:30] becomes immediately valuable in a text form, which is a second type of content.                                              From that, you can use excerpts from your transcript and from your podcast, which you could use to promote on social media, which would be a third type of content. You can create graphics, which have quotes related to your podcast or your transcript about your podcast, which can be a fourth type of content, and we could just keep going down. There's rabbit holes we could crawl into all day [00:07:00] long here. But basically content itself is, just anything that you're putting out into the world, to promote your products and services. And although you tend to think that, and when I say you I mean everybody, although we tend to think that content is written, it is much more than that. And ironically, we're sort of moving in this direction of visual and audio, you know video is very popular right now. But content comes into play with that stuff when you're talking [00:07:30] about your SEO, your Meta Tags, your description, that sort of thing.                                              That all has to kind of come into play, and so the different

Roy Barker speaks with Ken Tucker about reputation management and local search engine optimization SEO. Ken is the founder of Changescape Web and specializes in search engine optimization, website design, reputation management, social media marketing, lead generation, and marketing automation.  Ken is a StoryBrand Certified Guide, a Master Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant, an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional (since 2010), and an SEO for Growth Consultant (stlouis.seoforgrowth.com). Ken is the author of Social Media Marketing for Restaurants and co-author of Reputation Management (Marketing Guides for Small Businesses). Ken created and taught one of the first college credit Social Media Marketing classes in the US at St. Charles Community College. He has taught a course on Content Management Systems. He serves as Co-Chair of the St. Charles County Chambers of Commerce Technology Committee. www.changescapeweb.com stlouis.seoforgrowth.com coloradosprings.seoforgrowth.com https://changescapeweb.com/online-reputation-management/ Also, visit Ken’s Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Ken-Tucker/e/B06XT3FDG5/ Ken's recommended reading is Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Building-StoryBrand-Clarify-Message-Customers/dp/0718033329/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523237552&sr=8-1&keywords=the+story+brand Below is a complete transcript.    Roy Barker:         Hello, everyone. This is Roy Barker with episode three of the Senior Living Sales and Marketing Podcast. Today, we are fortunate enough to have Ken Tucker, the Founder of Changescape Web, which specializes in search engine optimization, website design, reputation management, social media marketing, lead generation and marketing automation. Ken is a story brand [00:00:30] certified guide, a master duct tape marketing certified consultant, and an inbound marketing certified professional and an SEO for growth consultant. Ken is the author of Social Media Marketing for Restaurants and co-author of Reputation Management. Ken created and taught one of the first college credit social media marketing classes in the U.S. at St. Charles Community College. He has taught a course on [00:01:00] Content Management Systems and serves as a co-chair of the St. Charles County Chamber of Commerce Technology Committee.                               Ken, welcome to the show. Ken Tucker:        Thanks, Roy. I'm glad to be here. Roy Barker:         Appreciate you taking time out of your day. There's so many great subjects that you're an expert in I would love to talk about. I think we're probably gonna have to end up having you come back again to address some of these, 'cause the two that have been on my mind this last [00:01:30] week, that I really think that you can speak to, are going to be the reputation management portion and the local search engine optimization. Of course, as you know, in the senior living industry, reputation is everything because we take care of people's loved ones, and so somebody getting a bad review or bad word of mouth going around can be very detrimental to the stream of prospects coming in. Then [00:02:00] also, some of our markets are getting more and more crowded and they're getting more and more noisy. So, making sure that we can tune in on the local search engine optimization is gonna be key to growing occupancies for our industry going forward. So having said all that- Ken Tucker:        Yeah, absolutely. Roy Barker:         Having said all that, let's start out with the reputation management piece. We talked a little before the show, and I guess [00:02:30] I see this as becoming more critical that, back in the olden days of the internet when reviews were created and all these different services out there like Yelp, that had reviews, it seemed that my opinion was to help the next consumer, whether I liked it or not, maybe talk about the good points, the bad points. But if I went out and had a one off bad experience at a place, I probably wouldn't take the time [00:03:00] to come home and write them a really bad review. But I feel like as we've progressed, that reviews have become a lot more punitive, and maybe I was having a bad day, maybe the company that I was at, whether it's a service or a product, maybe they were having a bad day. We just didn't gel, and so now I rush home to write a bad review. Or even worse, I've heard cases of businesses [00:03:30] that have actually been held hostage by customers saying, "If I don't get more than what we bargained for, then I'm gonna leave you a bad review." And some businesses are so dependent upon these that they end up having to give in and meet their needs to get a good review, or at least not get a bad review.                               So, kind of what are you seeing out there and what is your take on that? Ken Tucker:        Well, yeah, I mean everything you mentioned is certainly [00:04:00] as possibility. And it's a real shame, you know, that people are being very punitive about things. Look, everybody's gonna have a bad experience from time to time. You know, and everybody's gonna deliver less than stellar service from time to time, it's the reality of things. I think that, you know, one of the important things that we see is, first of all you've got to be monitoring the reviews that are coming in about your business. If there are no reviews about your business, [00:04:30] that's a strong indicator as well because you're allowing somebody to fill in the void with what they think their perception is. And the reality is, if there are no reviews and your competitors have strong reviews, they're gonna assume that nobody cares enough about your business to write a review about your business. So, we strongly recommend businesses take control over their own reputation management, and doing that through what we call building [00:05:00] a review funnel.                               So a review funnel is certainly gonna give you monitoring capability to see what people are saying, but it's gonna give you a place to drive people to, to write a review and also have the ability, that you know, if somebody comes in and like you said yesterday, they could have been one of your greatest champions and today they had a bad day or a bad experience or something happened with the care that, you know, is maybe more complex [00:05:30] that you need to have a conversation with them but they immediately ... Look, it's emotional, right? So they feel like they need to go out and do something. Roy Barker:         Right. Ken Tucker:        So, when they go to this review page, if they give you three, or the way we set it up frequently is on a five-star rating system, if they give you three stars or less, they actually are gonna get a popup window that comes up and it's actually a request for feedback to say, "We're sorry you didn't have a great experience, what [00:06:00] can we do to help?" And that's gonna be an email that's gonna be sent to the business so that they can address that concern. They're not gonna be taken to a review property, such as Yelp or your Google My Business page or Facebook.                               If they give you a four or five star rating, then it's going to take them to those review sites that you've deemed are important for your business, for people to go write reviews and they can be healthcare specific or they could be general directories. [00:06:30] And then people can go through ... But you already have a pretty good idea, I kinda refer to it as a review gate, where somebody is gonna click on, you know, that based on the number of stars they're gonna give you, they're gonna be taken to a popup that then has, okay here's my Google link, here's my Facebook link, here's my Yelp link, here's my Healthgrader's link or whatever's appropriate, and then they can go from there. That way [00:07:00] you're kind of intercepting those experiences where people need to vent before they're actually gonna go out there and write a review.                               Now, there's absolutely nothing you can do if people go directly to your Google My Business page or your Yelp page and they go write that review. In that case, but if you do take control over the process and you drive people to this review page, you're gonna have a little bit more [00:07:30] control. Roy Barker:         Okay. Ken Tucker:        So, that's one thing. Roy Barker:         Okay. Ken Tucker:        I guess the other thing is, you know, when somebody does go out there and write a less than stellar review about your business, we always recommend that you respond to those reviews, but be really careful about that. Actually, when you look at ... You know, what Google is wanting to see right now, is it wants to see response to every single [00:08:00] review that's out there, whether it's positive or negative. If it's negative, what we recommend a business do is they go out and they say