Being in sales in the senior care industry is different. It’s a job that requires salespeople to be helping, caring, and empathetic while selling.

The onset of this pandemic has opened a new set of challenges before the senior living marketing directors. They now have to:

• Virtually engage with the family members of the residents

• Communicate about restrictions placed on visiting their elders

• Assure them from time to time about the well-being and safety of their elders

• Connect with the prospective residents and their families virtually

• Reinforce positive narrative about the safety and preventive measures that are taken in the facilities against the spread of COVID

• Give virtual tours of the community to the prospects etc

Wondering how to equip your MDs with knowledge, confidence, and enthusiasm to support the prospects and residents during these chaotic times?

A tested and proven method is to implement an ongoing, gamified learning campaign.

To implement this campaign, you can choose to run the learning mechanisms listed below:

1. Surveys

Purpose: To gather crucial information from your MDs. Like,

• How do they position your company with respect to the competitors in the market

• How well can they deliver your company’s brand message

• What are the top 3 questions that they find difficult to answer

Benefit: Anonymous surveys are a good way to collect information from the field. It helps you to identify training needs, customer questions that the MDs and EDs face, their understanding of your value proposition, and more.

How it works: You can choose to send surveys on any of these topics:

• The company

• Competitors

• Customers

• Market Landscape

• Existing residents

• Prospective residents

2. Gamified Quizzes

Purpose: To help the MDs and EDs retain crucial information like business knowledge, competitive intelligence, about the industry, different steps of the selling process, and more.

Benefit: When you send regular quizzes, your teams answer these questions. This helps them to fight the Forgetting Curve and increases the retention of knowledge.

How it works: Send out a quiz with 5 questions every week. Choose a different topic for each quiz, like:

• Foundational selling skills

• Objection handling

• Closing techniques

• Virtual tour etc

This way your MDs and EDs will be able to recall and retain important information for a longer period of time.

3. Remote Coaching

Purpose: To help your teams practice difficult sales conversations and to ensure that everyone delivers a uniform message while talking to prospective residents and their families.

Benefit: Remote video coaching enables salespeople to practice their sales conversations in a safe and supportive environment. It helps them to improve themselves through constructive feedback from their trainers and managers.

How it works: Create a remote coaching assignment around any sales scenario/ sales conversation and assign it to your marketing directors. The MDs prepare their script, practice several times, and record the video of their response. You have ensured that your teams practice their sales conversations.

Once they submit their response– you can evaluate it, give a score, and provide subjective feedback. You can also mark the best videos as “top” videos and share them with everyone. This gives recognition to the MDs who have performed well in the coaching. As well as create peer learning opportunities.

This is the best way to mentor your sales teams for peak performance.

4. Microlearning Feeds

Purpose: To reinforce crucial information from time to time

Benefit: Microlearning breaks up the lengthy learning content into shorter chunks of information. Delivering these short-bursts of information regularly to your team, helps them to absorb it quickly and easily

How it works: You already have a lot of PPTs and training videos. Break down that lengthy learning content into shorter, digestible chunks of information (you can split it topic-wise). Then, convert those smaller chunks into various interesting formats like infographics, videos, or short twitter-like feeds (called microlearning feeds). Deliver these microlearning feeds regularly to the learners in order to reinforce key learnings.

Create a Gamified Campaign

Now that you know of various learning mechanisms, focus on creating a gamified campaign out of them. Here’s how to go about it:

• Pick the learning mechanisms that you would like to use

• Create a quarterly campaign out of them (with weekly schedule)

• Then, gamify that campaign

We have created a sample campaign here with a weekly schedule to help you understand.

Once you have the campaign schedule ready, you can choose to gamify it in order to make it fun and interesting. Here’s how to do that:

• Create teams by regions or managers

• Run a competition amongst these regions.

• As the MDs complete weekly tasks, they win points. Points go up on the leaderboard and create the relative ranking

• Track scores from the team leaderboard and other participant leaderboards

• Announce winners at the end of the competition

Once the winners are announced, you need to reward them with exciting prizes and awards. Here are some awarding ideas you can use:

• Champion of knowledge: Present this award to the participant who comes on the top of the participant leaderboard

• The Legendary Team: This award goes to the team that comes on the top of the team leaderboard

• Best Video: Present this award to the participant who has submitted the best coaching video.

Campaign Communication

Now that you have a killer gamified campaign plan ready, it’s time to create enthusiasm about it amongst your reps.

Forgetting curve explains the rate at which we forget something that we have learned. Want to learn more about the forgetting curve and ways to over it?

Read this article: Ways to Challenge the Forgetting Curve

Want to know why gamification is important for employee engagement?

Gamification and Employee Engagement: the Why and the How?

Searching for fun activities to engage the seniors and the caregivers?

7 Fun Activities for Seniors and Caregivers to enjoy

Want to know how SmartWinnr helps the senior living industry?

Explore SmartWinnr for the Senior Living industry and learn how to drive higher occupancy rates, improve resident satisfaction and reduce caregiver attrition using our platform.

Interested to know more? Book a demo with us today!