Listen as Kevin Colley, Head of Sales Bridge Senior Living, sits down to discuss where we’ve gone wrong in sales, and how new technology is giving senior living a chance to course correct. Hear insights on AI, embracing new tech, and becoming one of the biggest industries. 

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Produced by Solinity Marketing.

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Intro

Welcome to season eight of Bridge the Gap, a podcast dedicated to informing, educating, and influencing the future of housing and services for seniors. The BTG network is powered by sponsors, Aline, NIC MAP, Procare HR, Sage, Hamilton CapTel, ServiceMaster, The Bridge Group Construction, and Solinty and produced by Solinity Marketing. Bridge the Gap in three, two.

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00:37 - 00:50

Lucas McCurdy

Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast: The Senior Living podcast. Another exciting episode here at the Aline Innovation Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. We want to welcome Kevin Colley, corporate head of sales at Bridge Senior Living. Welcome to the show.

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00:50 - 00:52

Kevin Colley

Thank you. I appreciate you guys having me.

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00:52 - 00:59

Lucas McCurdy

Very glad to sit down with you. Excited to meet you. There's quite a few good conversations happening here at this event, right?

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00:59 - 01:02

Kevin Colley

I feel like every break there's a great conversation.

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01:02 - 01:13

Lucas McCurdy

Yes, yes. Well, from your perspective, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges? And then we'll follow that up with some opportunities that you're seeing the industry go through right now.

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01:13 - 02:31

Kevin Colley

I’ll start at a few places. I'm head of sales, so I'm going to stay in that lane. And it's appropriate here today. We've heard some speakers and some of our biggest challenges are the ones we create on our own, quite honestly. As sales leaders, we've got to follow up with our customers and do that way better than we do currently.

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So that's one of our biggest challenges internally. I saw a stat this morning that said we reach out to a customer three times and then we're done. 80% of salespeople do that. So, we can kind of think of our customers as they've sat and it's taken them a long time to make this decision to pick up the phone.

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And in a lot of cases six months, maybe two years. And I feel like it's our duty. We owe it to them to be very, very responsive. If anybody's made the difficult decision in life that you've got to pick up the phone, you didn't want to, you finally did. It took all that courage, and then all of a sudden, you got a voicemail, or you left a message and nobody called you back. That's extremely disappointing. So there's lots of outside influence on our business. But I think internally I think that's one of our biggest opportunities.

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02:31 - 02:53

Josh Crisp

Well Kevin unpack that a little bit more for us. So you know what causes that. Is it a lack of training? Is it training just the way we've always done it? Is it turnover? Is it all of that? Well, what would you kind of summarize some of the areas that we could immediately get better at blocking and tackling?

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02:54 - 04:38

Kevin Colley

I think you hit the nail on the head. There's a lot of places we can do it and a lot of it. First of all, I can't stand it when we do things the way we've always done it. Right? So at brands we try to do things a little differently, even if it's 1% different. We're improving and innovating over time.

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But I think some of it's driven by leadership. Because, you know, again, some just some things I've heard throughout the day is, you know, leadership calls and says, hey, who's your next move in? So you, on the receiving end of that, feels this pressure to I've got to, I've got to get Lucas to move in right now. Right. And he becomes my sole focus.

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So I think it's a lot of us driven by leadership because we're the way we approach our teams. I always think that's how I teach our sales team. I think our pipeline is like a people mover, like at the airport. You get on and you've got your traditional terms. You've got your hots, you've got your warms, you got your colds. The second we as leadership start just focusing the teams on the hots, they keep coming to the front door, but the tools and the warm stop that that people mover kind of stops. And a lot of times they get off, or they go somewhere else.

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So we've all seen you have ten move-ins in a month. In the next few months, you have one. You have to, just because of that paradigm. Is that, we're kind of pushing them so hard on this front, on these, on this top layer, that all the rest of the folks in that pipeline are kind of stopped. But you also said some other things. Turnover is always challenging, right? I mean, if we strive for retention, that's a huge goal every year. And, thankful that we're getting better at it. And you see the results, right? When you have sales leaders that are in place for multiple years, they're typically the higher occupied communities. Right. So I think that certainly has a lot to do with it.

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04:38 - 04:58

Josh Crisp

We are talking a lot about technology. Technology is a tool, sometimes maybe a technology helping solve some of our problems. Where do you see where we are right now in the industry? And obviously we're forward looking, thinking or like where we need to be, where we think we need to be. But right now, where do you think technology is playing a part in helping us be better?

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04:58 - 06:41

Kevin Colley

Look, I think technology drives everything we do virtually every single day. So I will give you a kind of dual answer, if that's okay. I think first of all, we've got to get everybody to be fully functional, functioning on our technology platforms and have buy-in. We all have a lot of great technology tools. A lot of our teams don't embrace them, and leverage them every single day. Then they're kind of worthless tools. Like Aline is an example, it is a fantastic tool for us. You know, kind of leads the direction of our sales organization every day as long as we do our part. It's a fantastic tool. And there's so many variations of kind from Aline to leveraging their data with like, Power BI as an example to kind of lead us and trends and, trends don't tell the entire story, but they tell a pretty big story in my opinion.

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So, I think technology and AI is obviously coming on strong and it's got a key role in our business. I'm probably not the best expert of that yet, but I'm trying to get there. I think we have to embrace that and leverage it. I know a lot of our partners are, and I just think if we don't stay ahead of the curve, we'll be behind pretty quickly.

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06:15 - 06:43

Josh Crisp

So a lot of discussion here, specifically. And I think a whole sort of educational track around AI. Your approach with your sales team, are there some practical ways that you could share with our audience? We've heard from operators from single, building communities to larger regional operators. Their executives are coming here to try to learn where to start. So where have you guys started? What's working for you?

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06:43 - 07:51

Kevin Colley

I think it starts just a couple small steps for us . Number one kind of just how does that online experience look and feel and How does our automated response look to you as a customer? Because I turn that into a pretty seamless approach. In the past, there have been people on the other side chatting and it's amazing some of the things we say to our customers.

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I kind of clean that up for us a little bit. And I think there's also a way that we've leverage internally is just leverage AI and how we message our customers as well. As simple as just let's, let's write out what you want to say and let's just clean it up and tighten it up. So we kind of get right to the point where we need to go.

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It also takes care. I heard it's funny, some of those four paragraph follow up emails we heard about today as well. Like, we don't need paragraphs like, let's just get to the point. And I certainly help us clean those things up. So I'd love to tell you we're you know, we're we both both feet are in the deep end. We're not there yet, but, just simple, baby steps for now, I think. But we've it's cleaning up our, our approach to our customers that makes sense.

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07:51 - 08:29

Josh Crisp

What's most exciting to you? You know, and when I think back to, as a provider or as an operator coming to events and sitting through educational sessions, doing the networking, doing the round tables, I think if you're not careful, you could almost go 1 or 2 ways. You can either be really excited, I've got to leave and go do all these things, or you can hear all the awesome things and think, oh, I'm not doing any of that.

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There's this huge burden that I'm going back and where do I start? But what are you as you're experiencing this summit with a lot of other great providers and what's giving you energy? And where do you think, like the great opportunities are going to be for us to rally as an industry?

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08:29 - 09:35

Kevin Colley

Well, first of all, I'll go back to how we're going to go back if we're going to take these if I always use the word nuggets. We're going to take some of these nuggets back and see how we can, put those into place as quickly as we can. To your point, we can't. Sometimes we do that.

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It's a detriment to our teams because all of a sudden we have 17 new things we want to roll out to our teams in the year. We have to be cautious about that. But I do. I'm super excited about AI and just learning more about that. And, and I think more than anything at conferences like this, you hear, again, I just have great conversations with people, and you may hear one small little nugget that you can take and put it into your own company's culture and turn that into something.

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But sure, it's interesting. And, we took one small nugget and I'm going to keep the nugget to myself. We took one small thing like a year ago and turned it into a culture changing aspect of our company. And it's in our that it's changed our occupancy in such an amazing trajectory just by doing a couple small little things that that you kind of overlook.

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09:35 - 10:20

Josh Crisp

I'm asking so many questions here really Lucas you jump in where you want, but I'm curious too. So you're at high level sales and a big growing organization. We're hearing all these emerging product types, right, that traditionally haven't been under the umbrella of senior housing, which to me is super exciting. But I would imagine for a sales leader of teams that manage, operate multiple types of communities, there's pros and cons and challenges with selling each type of those products. Where are you seeing the most energy? Where are you seeing the most traction in the market right now in the markets you serve? Is there any product type that it's like, man, this seems to be where we're kind of hitting on all cylinders right now, and the market's really rising to seek out this type of product.

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10:20 - 11:22

Kevin Colley

I would say assisted living has been a huge growth area over the last year. Although I think we're excited more about the opportunity for IUL coming. You know you guys know who's coming right. Yeah. So we're excited about that. And I think the opportunity is just to innovate for your, your communities and how you do things slightly differently.

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Customers, even the customers today are different from customers. Five years ago, and customers in five years can be way different than customers today. So I think that's our charge, kind of like that blue ocean strategy is it's like thinking about, what's let's get ahead of it before that tidal wave kind of hits and be ready for it.

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So it's exciting for us. It's a little unnerving, I would say sometimes too, because, you know, you're leading a company in one path and that is not the right path. Right. So, but we're excited about that. I think it's going to be a game changer here in the next couple of years for sure. We're starting to see a lot of uptake and occupancy in that interest.

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11:22 - 11:38

Josh Crisp

Lucas, you get to see a whole other side of this, the aesthetic side and the renovation side. And what the industry is doing to equip those sales teams to have the best housing product, the best service line to represent the industry. And you've got to see a lot of bridge buildings through the years.

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11:38 - 11:56

Lucas McCurdy

Yeah. Great. Great company. And great offering, and great, great culture, great team. And so kind of on that final topic of culture, any final words of encouragement, to maybe some of the younger professionals that are looking at sales, marketing, senior housing as a potential career, what would you say?

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11:56 - 12:45

Kevin Colley

I'm glad you brought that up because as you mentioned, retention earlier and I'm finding so much value in hiring outside of our world. I think I don't want to be cliche, but I will for a second. I mean, there's so much purpose in our and our business. We just sat through an amazing speaker this morning and talked about purpose.

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Right. And I think you could align that to anything. But our business over so many others gives you that daily purpose. And, you can be a great sales leader. You can be great at sales. Come in your business, you can still be wildly successful, but you can also have that that added purpose piece that you don't always have.

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I'm sure you guys have friends and colleagues out there that, you know, and maybe while successful. But they may go home and just be like, hey, what I do, you know, and you don't see that in our business very often.

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12:45 - 13:09

Lucas McCurdy

It's a bit of a common bond that ties us all here. I've said it year over year for me as an outside vendor partner to the industry, that what has always been wonderful for me to see and what has drawn me to this industry is the people. Yeah. It's because of that level of purpose. And it helps provide me with that purpose and passion too. And we see that it's a common bond.

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13:09 - 13:24

Kevin Colley

Well, I think it's also exciting for folks, not our industry, to understand. We're going to be one of the biggest industries there. There possibly is. Right. So don't you want to jump on that train now? And that's a great way to build a lifelong kind of legacy in our career. Career too, right?

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13:24 - 14:12

Josh Crisp

Yeah. And I think that's a huge opportunity for us as leaders in the industry to rally together to really refine and determine what our messaging to the outside world is as an industry, because when if we can reach that group that probably doesn't know anything about us and the little bit they know is just scratching at the surface.

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And I've said it for a long time, no matter what you're studying, no matter what your expertise, no matter what age you are, there's probably an opportunity for you to apply that in our space at some level. So we're going to need all of these folks because, the next many years ahead of us, are going to be booming with a lot of opportunities to engage people on their purpose. And what a great, rewarding career to be in.

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14:12 - 14:44

Kevin Colley

I agree, and I think I say this for our sales teams and or all of our teams all the time . You know, if you don't need senior living, you probably don't even know a thing about it. Right? So I think it's kind of our charge and our responsibility to get out there and showcase what this wonderful space looks like to people out there.

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And, you know, I was trying to tell our teams, like, let's, let's operate like we don't have walls so people can kind of see. And I want them to see all these amazing things we're doing every day. Because it's pretty cool. We do a lot of great things.

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14:44 - 15:12

Lucas McCurdy

And this is a great platform to do it on. And that's part of the mission of Bridge the Gap is to educate, inform and influence all aspects of senior housing. And, you know, we have a very niche audience in the senior housing industry. But we know because they've, outsiders have reached out to us. Is that this episode or, you know, our network, our platform and podcast does reach people outside of the industry. So it's a great platform to continue this conversation. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.

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15:12 - 15:13

Kevin Colley

It’s a pleasure.

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15:13 - 15:27

Lucas McCurdy

And for those listening that want to connect with bridge and, maybe discuss career opportunities, you can scroll down in the show notes there. You can connect with us on btgvoice.com. Also, LinkedIn is a great spot and thanks for listening to another great episode of Bridge the Gap.

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Outro

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