Here at Sherpa we’re thrilled to announce that along with the American Seniors Housing Association (ASHA) and ProMatura Group, a highly regarded mature market consumer research firm led by Dr. Margaret Wylde, Sherpa will collaborate on a groundbreaking research project that will explore the efficacy of sales initiatives in independent living, assisted living, and/or memory care settings.
You may remember the results from our 2016 research initiative with ProMatura. If not, you can brush up on the study’s findings here.
This year’s collaboration with ASHA will use a comprehensive set of recorded data of sales activities and prospect interactions that will be analyzed independently by the ProMatura research team. The goal is to quantify additional parameters that impact sales results.
“We’ve long believed that sales is both an art and a science, and are thrilled to be in a position of offering a growing universe of data for research and trade organizations,” says Sherpa CEO David Smith. “The more specific and data-driven we can become in terms of allocating our sales resources, the more effective we will be in focusing our sales efforts around activities that are successful.”
In 2016, Dr. Wylde examined data from Sherpa representing 302,159 interactions of 502 senior living salespeople nationwide with 23,480 prospects. The prospects studied were considering 41 communities offering independent living, 71 communities offering assisted living services, and 75 communities providing memory care.
ProMatura found that senior housing sales professionals who invested more time per prospect, as opposed to less time with the greatest quantity of prospects, significantly outperformed their peers on national benchmarks for tour-to-move in ratios.
“That discovery reinforced our belief and core direction at Sherpa to ‘mine the gaps’ of data that currently exist in the traditional senior housing sales process,” says Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer Alex Fisher. “We knew if we could measure and scale data on time spent in what we call The Selling Zone®, we could further refine our product to capture data around other hidden measures of sales success.”
With that core focus in mind, in late 2017 Sherpa launched two proprietary reporting dashboards: Know Thy Leads® and Team Productivity®. In Q1 of 2018, the development team will also unveil a custom reporting engine. The reporting enhancements make the sales process transparent and verifiable.
Using these advanced tools, Sherpa users gain insight from traditional data like inquiries, tours, move-ins, and general sales activities while also mining more sophisticated measures of sales success such as how effective teams are at overcoming prospect resistance or how much time sales teams are spending face-to-face with prospects.
It’s safe to say that 2018 at Sherpa is shaping up to be a data-driven and prospect-focused year for our friends, colleagues and clients. Cheers to another year’s journey!
