I am a firm believer that we are what we think we are and that we literally are a product of our thoughts.  Yet something about Barbara’s statement and the confidence behind it has caused me to ponder those words for weeks. So through my blog, I want to challenge you!  In the weeks since the interview I have asked myself, “If we manifest our reality,  what is it that I want to manifest ( this year, in three years, five years)?”  As I continue to conjure up this future reality, I find myself bound by my own chains of limitation.  On one hand I feel guilty seeking more as I am already incredibly blessed.  On the flipside, I realize that it is indeed true,  we do manifest our reality.  All we have to do is create the vision.

Last week I pulled an old journal out of my bookshelf from exactly 15 years ago.  One of the questions said, “Where will you be in twenty years?” My statement was: Married to David with two children, a boy and a girl. I will have sold my corporate janitorial business, have a new business that I love and will be living on the open water.  Okay, creepy. It’s fifteen years later and the fact is that I manifest my reality- exactly!  Seeing my journal gave me the confidence to believe that if I did it once I can do it again.  So the question again, “What do I wish to manifest now, as I enter the next stage of my life?”  More importantly, WHAT ABOUT YOU?  Spend time this week pondering your future, reviewing your priorities, and decide what you will do, be, and have in the next decade!  Time flies and my hope is you will look back in fifteen years and see your vision manifest as reality!    

Written by Traci Bild www.TraciBild.com

Like it or not, to grow sales and revenue, you have to sell. I know, it sounds strange that I would have to say that, but I am reminded daily when talking to people, that not everyone really gets this. A business associate of mine in the speaking profession has by far one of the best products and services on the market. She is an incredible speaker, writer, and business professional. Recently we spoke and I was trying to help her understand why her business was struggling. I first listened to her challenges and frustrations. I then asked some very pointed questions. Although she had a strong brand, great book, incredible recommendations and more, she was not closing sales. Here is what I asked, “How many people are you actually picking up the phone and calling each day in an effort to grow sales?” In her mind, people should be calling her. After all, that’s how it used to be. As you’ve heard me say again and again: Selling today is nothing like it used to be. I shared that although people say they want to hire me, I don’t wait for them to call, I call them and I follow up consistently over time until the sale closes or I know it’s a no go for sure. I could tell as I shared this information, she got it. The fact was, she had not been calling and seeing people. She had not been focused on Income Producing activities. What about you or the Marketing Directors within your organization?

For twenty years I have lived by a golden sales rule: Where there is activity, there is success (and I am referencing Income Producing Activities only). If sales are down, odds are, your Marketing Directors are NOT generating the activity needed to offset move outs and net up. No one loves to pick up the phone and deal with rejection. But the fact is, this is how sales happen. People buy people and no matter how great your postcard campaign or commercial is, without real conversation between two people, nothing is going to happen. I challenge you to take a look at the evidence today. How many phone outs have you done over the last 90 days (or your organization)? How many contacts have been made? What’s the contact to appointment conversion ratio? What do you need to do to enhance the result? Is it simply making more calls, calling during a more productive call time when people are home, or learning a phone system that produces appointments? The evidence will tell you the answer. Remember, where performance is measured, it can improved. Most of you measure this information - now it’s time to take a close, tough look at it!

Even more amazing is the fact that most of those who do know something about it do not have a favorable impression.  Why is that?  Why is it that a few negative stories influence people so that they can’t recall the incredible good we do?  What about the depressed widow who sat alone in her home for five years eating moldy food before moving into an Assisted Living Community?  Why is no one talking about how she is now walking every morning, eating three meals a day with friends, tending to the organic garden that the Chef uses to prepare the meals and the sheer joy in her soul?

I’ve concluded that no one (not you but the media) is going to talk about it so I am going to scream it from the top of my lungs!  It’s time people notice what a great job providers are doing, the passion they have for seniors and what a difference they are making every single minute of every single day in people’s lives.  Please, submit your stories to me at Stories@TraciBild.com so I can utilize them as I talk to press and work to get the word out. In the meantime, I will continue to do research and inform you of what people are saying about how they want to become better educated about what we do.  Together we can make a difference!

Why wait? You don’t need a sign. The time to do business is always now. And you always have a choice: you can choose to be discouraged and not try – or you can start growing the revenues of your senior community today.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out my new article, “Three Success Stories: This Economy Can Be Beat,” (Click here to read), I think you should. You’ll find out about three very different senior communities that took our coaching and training on board, and, through effective leadership and marketing, boosted their bottom lines in amazing ways.

And it demonstrates that you can turn things around now by making the right effort with the right tools.

I like to say, “Where there’s activity, there’s success.” The marketing teams at all three of those companies increased what we call “Income-Producing Activity” – that encompasses everything you can do to make sales happen. And the result? Well, guess what? Sales happened!

The fact is, by not doing everything you can to fill up empty units, you’re letting money fly out the door. Say you have 10 units empty that go for $3000 a month – that’s $30,000 you should be making every month, but aren’t! Not investing in your marketing team is actually costing you more money – because if you don’t up your sales efforts, those units will most likely stay empty until the economic picture improves.

Again, why wait - and why continue to lose money you don’t have to lose?

In times like these, you have to work smarter – and harder. That’s the simple “secret to success” for difficult times.

That means breaking down the sales process into chunks, and making the most of every step along the way. Personalizing each call or visit and engaging your potential customer to evaluate their needs so you can meet them are the most powerful tools at your disposal. Developing an effective Outreach program that yields the most productive referrals, as well as doing effective follow-up on every sales call or visit. It’s what I call “The Science of Selling.” It’s not rocket science – but it sure is a profitable science.

Make the investment. Make the effort. Make the most of now.

That’s how you prosper tomorrow.

You’re a marketing director at a senior housing community and you spend your workdays running around showing units, talking with leads and trying to fill vacancies.  No time to think about how you’re trying to market your community or what you might do differently to increase your growth.

Or you’re responsible for the budget and spend your day fielding calls on your Blackberry and crunching numbers on spreadsheets.  You’re so busy reacting to day-to-day events and putting out fires that you’ve starting to lose sight of what all those numbers really mean…

Both those scenarios scream to me that you need to take time out to work ON your business, rather than just IN your business.

When you’re only dealing with the moment - and not the long-term direction of your job or your company - it’s incredibly easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.  Think about those bank executives processing all those subprime mortgages – maybe if they had actually thought a little harder about what they were doing, we might have averted our economic meltdown!

One of the absolute greatest things I was ever taught by one of my mentors was to block out some time every single week to take a look at my business from a different perspective – without the immediate pressures of daily tasks, emails and phone calls.

I took that advice on board – and for the past 3 or 4 years, every Friday, I pack up my laptop and head off for the nearest Starbucks.  I avoid email, I turn off my phone and I spend three hours working ON my business.  What am I doing, where am I going, what do I need to do to move forward?   Is there an innovative product or service I can offer that I’m not…?  In other words, I take a big picture assessment of where my business is – and try to do necessary outside-the-box thinking to create new long term strategies to take things to the next level.

I can’t tell you what an incredible difference those few hours have made to my business.  During those years, we’ve experience phenomenal growth and doubled our sales.

Now more than ever, this is a time when the senior housing industry needs to change and adapt to today’s economic challenges.  We need new “big picture” thinking to cope with the rise in vacancies – and we can’t make a change for the better by continuing to blindly do what we’ve done before.

We’ve just started offering coaching services designed to do just that – take our clients outside their business and help them view it from a completely new perspective.  I personally coach executives and CEO’s, while my marketing team coaches marketing directors.  We hold our clients accountable for following up on agreed-upon plans of action and modifying patterns and behavior that aren’t advancing their companies or their careers.  Most of them begin to see the difference in their thinking immediately - and it ends up paying off like gangbusters.

I challenge you, whatever your role in your company, to take some time every week and examine what you can do to stand apart from your competition and create the business growth that’s required.  Get out of your work environment – away from the daily pressures and hassles – so you can clear your mind and do some real brainstorming.  It could be a bookstore, a coffee shop…wherever you feel comfortable and it’s the right atmosphere for thinking things through.

When you think ahead…you’ll find you don’t get left behind!

Everyone’s feeling the pain of today’s economy - and the senior housing industry is no exception.  We had it very good for a very long time and now, executives don’t quite know how to cope with a situation where new residents aren’t just coming through the door – as a matter of fact, some are going out the door and back to their adult children’s homes, due to financial strains.

The fact is we may be used to competing with other communities – but we’re not used to competing with a depressed economy.  It’s an entirely new situation and adapting to it has unfortunately been a frighteningly slow process. 

And actually, adaptation hasn’t been the rule.  Panic has been.  Executives at some communities are looking at multi-million dollar losses – and they need to turn around those numbers fast.  That kind of fear leads to two basic responses:

1)     They slash rent prices- which is risky business and could haunt the bottom line even longer than the current recession.

2)    They pour on the pressure to their marketing directors – without giving them any tools to help turn things around.

Number 2 is what I want to focus on in this blog.  Let me say straight out, pure pressure doesn’t do anyone any good.  Not the executives putting it on or the employees forced to put up with it.  Without any kind of accompanying change in strategy or planning and no additional training or direction, a marketing director is left with only a lot of extra tension – and not productive tension.

I know many marketing directors at senior communities that are just plain freaking out – to the extent where they’re actually getting rashes from all the stress and strain.  They’re good, talented people – but they have no idea how to produce more for their bosses!

The challenge is to adapt to these new times – to offer the vision and leadership to seek out new sales strategies and training – and to believe that things can be turned around.  Yes, times are tough – but if we believe we can overcome them, we will.

Shannon Duncan, in her book, “Present Moment Awareness,” says, aside from the obvious laws of nature, we are only limited by our beliefs.  “Beliefs,” she writes, “can be as real and insurmountable as the walls of a jail cell.”  I happen to believe that is right on the money

For example, did you know that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest geniuses who ever walked the earth, was diagnosed as being “mildly retarded” as a child?  What if he had held on to that belief?  The only way he would have come up with “E=mc²” is if he had lined up his building blocks in that order.

If you or the leadership of your community holds to the belief that you can’t change the current climate and there’s no way to boost your occupancy rate, to me, that comes under the heading of the self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Our training programs have turned around many, many communities – because they believed in our programs and implemented them effectively.  They believed things could be better – and that belief didn’t act as a jail cell.  It was more like a jail break that helped them see some daylight when it came to improving their bottom line.

So think about your community.  Are you locked into the old way of doing things that just don’t work anymore?  Or are you open to trying the new? 

And can you really afford not to do anything?

I received an email today from a client we just started working with – someone who is losing $5,000,000 per year in rental income.  As I read his email, I felt his pain and clearly understood his sense of urgency in turning this around.  As CEO, he knows this is simply unacceptable – and clearly that is why he has chosen to take action to get his people the systems needed to recapture this lost revenue. 

 I have the opportunity to work with many amazing companies within the Health Care industry every single day.  In any given week, we are coaching well over 200 professionals from a variety of companies all over the country.   What this does is give us perspective – and serves as a “Lab,” where systems can be tested, reformulated, and perfected.  We, in turn, improve what we do at least 1% every single day.  That means we never stop growing our training - and neither should you. 

I find it very interesting to observe people within our industry at this critical moment.  I believe leadership has never been more important than it is right now.  People are scared, investors are in panic mode, and executives are under more pressure than they’ve experienced in decades.  More than my training, what companies need right now are strong leaders with a vision and a plan - to not just survive, but thrive in this economy.  The good news is that we are in one of the very few industries that is doing well, despite the Wall Street meltdown.  Depending on how you navigate the waters, this could potentially be a time of incredible growth for your organization!

So, as I read the email from my new client as well as the many others he has sent out to his organization to buy into the training and to create urgency regarding the new systems being rolled out, I could not help but admire his spirit.  He’s rallying the troops, he’s putting forth a vision, he’s not afraid of what might happen.  He is truly the captain of his ship, steering it where he wants to go versus where the tide chooses to take it. 

For many years, our industry was growing at record levels and sales came easy.  That kind of smooth success doesn’t prepare you for the economic storm we face today. Today, Marketing Directors are frustrated and many have lost their confidence.  Executive Directors are working with smaller budgets and employee morale is at an all-time low.  People are facing both personal and professional pressure like never before.

 Whether you run an Assisted Living Organization, Home Health Care, or Skilled Nursing Centers, the #1 thing you can do today is set your vision in stone, scream it from the mountaintops every single day, and keep screaming - until people begin to lock onto your vision, your passion and your message and follow through on it.  The more fired up you are, the more energized your organization will become. 

 Helen Keeler was once asked, “What would be worse than being born blind?”  She replied, “To have sight without vision.”  Sadly, too many people are placed into leadership positions lacking a vision for the organization they will lead. 

According to John Maxwell, all great leaders possess two things:  they know where they are going, and they are able to persuade others to follow.  I cannot stress enough the importance of your leadership right now.  I am certain that one year from now, my client will not be losing $5,000,000 in revenue annually but netting an additional $5,000,000!  Yes our training is a key component - but his leadership and vision are the crucial catalysts to make it all happen! 

What about you?  Do you know exactly where you are going?  Are you persuading people within your organization to follow? 

Now, more than ever, your people need your leadership!

I believe your job isn’t done just because you’ve made a sale.  Doing the proper follow-through is the difference between making sure you have a satisfied customer - and someone who may end up feeling neglected after they’ve signed the contract.  The former will always bring you more business – the latter, not so much.

For more on what I consider to be the essentials in follow-through in the seniors housing industry, please take a look at my new article, “Achieving Supreme Customer Satisfaction” 

What you’ll see is that it’s all about the personal touch.  Small stuff matters a lot – especially to a new resident in a senior community who may initially feel lost and alone.  Making sure that person’s needs are met at move-in time will get their stay in their new home off on the right foot.

And speaking of feet, let me relate one example of how insensitivity to individual preferences can really lead to hurt feelings.  I remember when a woman was placed in a care unit at a senior community – and each night, before bedtime, the nurse would remove the woman’s socks.  The woman would get extremely upset and fight the nurse every single night.  But the nurse insisted on taking them off.  A nightly struggle that drained them both.

It turns out this woman had slept with her socks on all her life.  That’s what she was used to.  And suddenly she was in a strange environment, removed from everything familiar, and one simple thing that might have made her feel more comfortable – keeping her socks on at night – was denied her.

That’s an example of a power play that shouldn’t happen. 

On the other hand, when you do make an effort to address residents’ preferences and needs, it pays off in the end.  My clients are proof of that – here’s a testimonial from one of them:

“We began using the Traci Bild Sales System four years ago and it is now an integral part of our organizational culture.  Our occupancies have increased and our sales teams believe that they have been provided with tools that support successful outcomes.  Since implementing this system, we have improved our system-wide inquiry to appointment ratio by 20% & our appointment to move in ratio by 18%. We are believers in the system and attribute much of our revenue growth, our adult child satisfaction with the move-in decision, and our ability to meet the emotional needs of our residents to these powerful tools.“

-       Loriann Putzier, Chief Operating Officer, IntegraCare Corporation

Attending to your customers’ emotional needs is both the smart thing to do and the right thing to do.  It pays off in every possible way you can imagine – so make every effort to make it happen!

I imagine that many of you reading this blog started your workday pulling numbers.   By 9:00 AM, you knew where you were with your budget, how many units were open across your portfolio, if your traffic was up or down, and exactly how many sales were needed to hit occupancy goals.   

But what else was on your mind when you woke up this morning?  Were you focused on what you wanted or what you did not want?  Were you energized and on fire - or feeling a sense of dread and uncertainty? 

I find that people tend to focus on what they DON’T want:  I don’t want occupancy to slip further, we can’t move those one bedroom apartments, everyone is cutting deals, we can’t hit sales goals in this market, people can’t sell their homes, and so forth.

 It’s been proven that the brain loves to have a job.  So give it the job you need it to perform.  That means focusing on what you DO WANT:  I want our buildings 100% occupied with a strong, active, wait list; the one bedrooms are our hottest sellers, people want what we have as is, no incentives needed, we will break occupancy records in this market as our competitors have their guard down, we only need 5 more people who can sell their homes to hit 100%! 

See the difference?  If you are giving your brain a task, make it work FOR YOU, not AGAINST YOU!  Believe it or not, it’s a matter of science – the science of Neurolinguistic Programming, the study of how the words you speak affect your brain – and in turn, your ACTIONS. 

Now, more than ever, we need to pay close attention to what’s on our mind.  As a sales expert and performance coach, I have found this to be one of my greatest assets when coaching companies to full occupancy:  Teaching people how to transform their thoughts from what they don’t want to what they do want - what I call, “working the Mental Muscle.”   

I’ve personally worked with a Marketing Director who swore she could not fill the last open units because they were small studios “that no one wanted.”   Well, it wasn’t that no one wanted the studios; it was that the Marketing Director convinced herself that no one wanted them.  That, in turn, was reflected in her actions and, unfortunately, in her results.   After my coaching, those apartments filled within the month and the revenue gap was closed. 

To fully utilize the power of this mindset methodology, we are launching The Mental Muscle™, an official program that’s going to be an integral part of our training & coaching programs.   Whether you’re a CEO, National Sales Director, Regional or ED, NOW, more than ever you must be training people to use mind over matter. 

We are selling in one of the most difficult markets EVER.  Negativity is prevalent wherever we go – and that is impacting everyone’s sales.  I have noticed over the last six months, more than at any other time during my 20 years as a motivational speaker, that people are STARVING for mental stimulation, encouragement, and positive reinforcement.   As leaders, we must give it to them.   

Invest in books for your Marketing teams, audio CD’s they can listen to on their commutes and hold daily 10 minute POWER calls to pump people up!  Whatever you do, do not neglect the “Mental Muscle.”  If we do not build it, performance will suffer.   

Wait a minute.  Let’s practice what we preach and turn that around - if we DO build it, performance will soar!

Here’s an exercise for you to try as your first Mental Muscle workout:  for 7 days straight, starting today, pay close attention to your thoughts.  If you are panicked, feeling thoughts of scarcity, or are worried about your financial security; take notice and reverse course!  Immediately do a 180 and flip the words around.

Example:  “Oh no, we just dropped another 2% in occupancy; our investors are going to be furious.”  FLIP IT!  “We are 94% occupied company –wide, 6% to go & we are full!” 

The brain will think, “6% to go…” and, in turn, bring you creative ideas and ways to “Get full!”  Again, the brain wants a job!   I know it sounds strange – but the great news is WE DON’T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IT, WE JUST HAVE TO DO IT! 

The power of positive thinking is something you’re all familiar with – but the stress of today’s markets has made many of us stop believing in it.   Mark my words - If you believe you can fill your buildings in these times, YOU WILL!  If you think you can’t; YOU WON’T!   It’s that simple. 

Mindset is one of your greatest potential assets.  It’s time to step up, get out of your comfort zone and get your company going in the direction you want it to go - both physically and MENTALLY.   So begin your daily workout for the greatest muscle to inhabit your body:  your mind!  It may not literally be a muscle – but we’re going to work it like one!