This article is sponsored by Catalyst Senior Living Solutions. It is based on a discussion with Mary Cate Spires, Vice President of Marketing & Digital Strategy at The Arbor Company, Jodie Roberts, Director of Marketing Senior Services Of America, Brandon Christiansen, Director of Marketing at Primrose Retirement Communities, and Jeff Davidson, VP of Client Success at Catalyst Senior Living Solutions. This discussion took place on February 19th, 2025 at the SHN Sales and Marketing Conference.

Jeff Davidson: Thank you all so much for joining today’s session. You may have noticed that the original brand was Serviam, and now it’s Catalyst. This is a great opportunity to explain the transition. Catalyst Senior Living Solutions is the result of a merger between the Serviam’s Contact Center and Sherrie Bebells’s team with Senior Living Specialists. We are now one unified brand, offering comprehensive services under the Catalyst name.

Today, we are joined by three amazing panelists and clients. We’ll be discussing what we call the “silent killer” of senior living sales—inbound phone calls. Phone calls are the core of our business, and we have extensive data on this topic. Our panelists will share insights on phone versus web leads, conversion metrics, after-hours and weekend calls, and how persistence in follow-up is driving significant returns in sales and marketing.

So when we talk about phone calls, the first thing we need to understand is the scope and scale of what’s happening when prospects call our communities. We analyzed data from 2024, covering one million phone calls across various time zones and care levels. Here’s what we found: only 20-30% of inbound calls are sales-related. Of those, only 35% actually reach a sales representative on the initial call. That means 65% of sales calls are not being handled properly.

These missed calls might still be treated well, they might result in a great experience, or they might be logged into a CRM, but oftentimes, that’s not happening. To put this into perspective, we categorized communities by call volume and found that the average community misses 25-26 sales leads per month due to a broken inbound call process. For the top 25% of communities, nearly 50% of inquiries go unanswered.

Mary Cate, what have you seen in the past? You’ve been dealing with this for a while. How has Arbor approached this, and what results have you seen?

Mary Cate Spires: As a marketer, the first thing you always hear is, “We need more leads.” But I had a hunch that phone leads had higher intent and that we were missing an important data point. If you want to be really depressed as a marketer, go listen to your call recordings. Not because anyone is intentionally dropping leads, but because things fall through the cracks.

Years ago, we realized we were only tracking conversions from website forms and chat—completely ignoring phone call data. That skewed our decision-making because we were missing part of the picture.

Davidson: That’s a great point, Mary Cate. At Catalyst, we focus on tracking not only where leads come from, but how they engage from the very first touchpoint. When we look at conversion rates by lead source, we see some clear trends. Phone calls have the highest contact rate, close to 100% when handled properly. They schedule twice as many tours as web leads. They complete their tours at a higher rate, and their tour-to-move-in rate is significantly stronger.

On average, phone calls should be driving three to four move-ins per month per community, yet they only account for 25% of total lead volume. However, they contribute 46% of total move-ins. Brandon, how does this data impact your marketing strategies?

Brandon Christiansen: This data completely changed our approach to marketing. Before, if a lead called, someone would take a voicemail, write down a note, slide it under the sales director’s door, and maybe three days later it would finally be entered into the CRM. We were missing real-time insights.

Now, we track when leads are calling so we can adjust our marketing. Paid social ads now target evenings and weekends, when leads are most active. We optimized speed-to-lead, so our team responds immediately. We no longer rely on handwritten notes—every lead is automatically tracked.

Davidson: So I think the other thing that’s important to know when we look at how it when we look at the percentage of mix of those channels, so we know that those phone calls are performing extremely well through the funnel, but when we look at the the breakout of mix, they’re accounting for only around a 25% of total lead volume in our portfolio, but they account for 46% of the total move ins. Applying all that math kind of helps land that yes, these phone call leads are really important so I want to open up to Jodie, you know, you’ve been with us for about a year and a half now and seen some of this. From a content perspective, how does seeing some of this data impact your own tactical decisions on things like phone call placement or conversion and pathways on your website?

Jodie Roberts: This data makes perfect sense. We know that form fills happen earlier in the customer journey, while phone calls indicate high intent. Last year, I did a deep dive into our data and discovered that only 70% of qualified calls were making it into the CRM. When I listened to call recordings, I found that many calls were sent to voicemail but were never logged in the CRM. Missed calls meant missed move-in opportunities.

Partnering with Catalyst helped us capture and qualify more calls, ensuring every lead was properly followed up.

Davidson: One of the biggest challenges we uncovered was after-hours and weekend inquiries.

Brandon, your team implemented after-hours call coverage at Primrose and saw a 15% decrease in turnover. Can you talk more about that?

Christiansen: One of our biggest motivations for implementing after-hours coverage was reducing burnout among salespeople. Sales director turnover in our industry is huge, and we wanted to give our team a break.

By allowing them to be off on weekends and evenings, we kept them happier, more engaged, and more productive. At the same time, we maintained 24/7 lead coverage, which led to an increase in total weekend traffic by 46% year-over-year.

Davidson: That’s a great point. Many communities miss out on weekend and after-hours leads because their sales teams are unavailable. We found that 20% of all tour bookings happen after hours or on weekends. If you’re not answering the phone, you’re losing opportunities.

One other interesting byproduct of that set up is we start to see a lot of situations where your after hours ops phone answering is getting exposed and that’s a bad situation, that’s that’s something that we hear a lot of it’s like I press 2 and nobody answered, so it comes back to us and at least we can be a warm voice and take a message and make sure that gets to the ED or whoever needs to hear that. I think it’s an industry-wide issue. Who answers the phone when we’re on a skeleton crew overnight and those are important phone calls coming in? I think that’s just something that everybody in this room should, you know, really spend some time thinking about and making sure you’re architecting a really good phone path for everybody coming in.

Roberts: I just have one thing to add as well before we move on from this. We actually allow our marketing directors to have a flexible schedule, so they may work a Saturday and then take the Monday off. So, um, that’s also an option.

Davidson: The other data point I want to talk about on the right-hand side of this is the amount of positive outcomes that we see from outbound calls happening after hours and weekends. I think this is probably the edgiest thing that we do is that typically you’re only taking your outbound calls kind of during business hours. It’s like nobody wants to be bugged when they’re eating dinner and we’re very cognizant of that from a time zone perspective. But when you call people at 7 or 8 o’clock, I mean if they fill out a form at 9 p.m., call them 10 minutes later, see what happens, amazingly, you get a lot of really good connections and that just shows you know you obviously can only staff your, sales team so many hours in a day from a cost perspective, but you know, Brandon, what, what kind of results have you seen kind of with dialing in those after hours scenarios and what does that meant for you?

Christiansen: For our region, before we ventured into the evenings and after hours we didn’t really segment out a ton on weekends. Leads were coming in as long as they showed up before the end of the month we were happy, so then we started really taking a hard look at weekend traffic and, and understanding what that looked like. We’ve been with you guys now 120-ish so days or so and what we have seen is year over year we’re 47% weekend traffic period. My first train of thought was that I’m just cannibalizing my Monday traffic and lead generation hasn’t gone up and I don’t know about anybody else but November and December weren’t exactly happy days in marketing. I assume nobody else had fun those months, but whatever declines we saw, we actually countered that with increases in weekend traffic, so it actually helped us buffer against any lead generation issues that we had. Experiencing through the elections and, and subsequent times, we have seen that pick up on weekends that we just didn’t really fully know we were missing.

Davidson: Now we’re gonna kind of pivot into some other kind of core things that we help our partners deliver and that’s on speed to lead and persistence. Speed to lead is something that in this industry has gone from 5 years ago, nobody was talking about to now it’s kind of on the tip of everybody’s tongue. The thing that we see is that a lot of the CRMs out there are saying you’re doing awesome if you’re under 4 hours or under 2 hours, so we did a big study on this and we actually found that your contact rate falloff starts happening after 30 minutes of speed to lead. So from the speed component, you know how that really drove your internal sales KPIs and what is that kind of done for the organization holistically.

Roberts: As a business, we’ve only really been tracking speed to lead a KPI for our sales teams for maybe 2 years or so, and when we started publishing that data. Our marketing directors didn’t like it, right. They were like, so you expect me to answer the phone whenever it rings. It’s like, no, we’re not saying that you can’t have time off, right. The reality is that leads are up. We all know that compared to what we see at COVID, we’re seeing like an over 200% increase, and I think that’s only going to continue with the way the demographics are going. There’s just not enough time in the day to answer the phone and you know, to do the discovery that needs to be done.

Davidson: When we’re analyzing our KPIs, the industry kind of tends to go straight to lead to tour, right? That’s like the first kind of big KPI that that we’re tracking, and I would just challenge everybody in the room to see like how many of the of your prospects that are coming in are you actually having a conversation with and call that contact rate because that measuring that independent of your lead to tour really helps kind of break down what opportunities you have. From an outreach perspective, you might identify sources or channels or anything that you’re realizing that you’re not even having near as many conversations there. So I’ll just put it out there to measure your contact rate if you can because there’s a lot of value in that data point right there. And finally, talking about persistence. Persistence is another thing that is really challenging in the space, you know, if you’re a sales director or two sales director community and you’re dealing with 60 new leads coming in, you have 2 new leads every day you have to kind of start down this contact cadence path. So what we’re showing here is our answer rate based on a bucket of calls. In our full service engagements, we’ll actually call up to 20 times over a 90 day period if they’re not answering. What we see holistically is that the answer rates do really taper off over time, which makes sense. What’s interesting is that even though answer rates taper off drastically, the qualification of those prospects further down that haven’t made contact are still meaningful. A 4% answer rate probably doesn’t make sense for your sales teams to go make those calls, but after 6 attempts and no answer, we’re still finding that after they pick up more than half of those folks are ready to come in and have value that persistence. Brandon, know you were sharing some kind of amazing data on what that persistence element has kind of done to your weekend web leads.

Christiansen: On our web inquiries, we had been seeing when we started measuring out weekends our weekend specific web inquiries were going from a marketing qualified lead all the way to to deposit. At a clip of like 4%, which I mean it’s fine, um, but our weekdays were fantastically better it was like 10, 10.5% and so we knew that we had a little bit of a problem there and, and I think part of that right was the cadence had broken on the weekend, right? It’s a longer speed to lead. We’re not responding quickly, we’re not doubling down and having that text or having that next step. And as you guys have really taken the mantle on not only just replying but also doing those follow up steps and having that cadence we’ve seen that number go from 4% and this is only 120 days we’re now at 10.5%. It looks just like a weekday lead now for us which is fantastic but then also we’ve seen just getting into tours, when we look at our sales qualified lead opportunities moving those into tour. So it’s kind of like that contacted person on tour. That thing had been very stable on weekends, right around 46%. It’s now sitting at 65% over the last 120 days. We’re seeing big jumps on these weekend traffic telling us that not only were there people that we were missing, but we were missing some seriously high intent people on the weekends that you, you can’t afford to let go.

Catalyst Senior Living Solutions combines seamless contact center services with expert financial advocates to help senior living operators achieve higher occupancy. To learn more, visit: https://catalystseniorlivingsolutions.com/catalyst.