We reviewed the first half of 2026 for one of our clients, a senior living operator in which we run lead response for over 30 of their communities.
In 6 months our team placed more than 32,000 sales activities on their behalf, including calls, voicemails, texts, emails, follow-up tasks. That comes to roughly 815 hours of pre-sale work across the portfolio.
But the question this article serves to answer isn’t just about what we do as a lead response agency, it’s about what these sales directors now have the freedom to accomplish when these tasks aren’t on their massive to-do list.
Across our data it takes roughly 9.8 sales activities to book one tour with a prospect.
These are calls that go to voicemail, texts that get read and not answered, emails that sit unopened. People are hard to reach, even if they raise their hand asking for information.
Multiply that across a month of leads and you quickly find out that following up properly is close to a full-time job on its own.
When we work with sales directors at these communities, these are professionals who are already busy handling tours, move-ins, medical paperwork, transitions, admin work, marketing the community and much more.
The family waiting in the lobby is urgent. Completing move-in paperwork that has a deadline is urgent. Lead response is often the first thing to drop down the list because it’s not considered urgent. Yet, it’s the lifeblood of these communities, and even though the urgency doesn’t feel as high, it’s still incredibly important.
Time isn't the whole explanation.
If it were only about hours, the calls would happen during the slow weeks, but even then, we’ve found that there’s a ton of resistance for sales directors to pick up the phone and make the calls.
It’s because this part of outreach is the least pleasant part of this industry. Having deep and emotional conversations about a decision that’s one of the most important in someone’s life is draining and difficult, and often people on the other end of the phone are not in a good mood.
It’s tough to go from an exhausting phone conversation with an adult child directly into an in-person meeting where suddenly the sales director must be chippy and upbeat. The context switching is almost impossible for a normal human being to do.
Which is why handing off lead response does more than free up hours, it removes the tasks that energetically deplete the sales team and that they usually don’t want to do anyway.
It frees them up to be more strategic on higher value tasks and focus on their strengths.
There are a lot of things that sales directors can do with this time they now have. If they aren't doing pre-sale activities, they also don't have to switch context as much. Here are just a few ideas of what we see sales directors doing at communities where we take lead response off their plates.
Professional referral relationships.
Discharge planners, SNF social workers, elder law attorneys, home health, hospice, geriatric care managers.
Referrals from these sources make up a small share of total leads, in the range of 6%, but roughly three quarters of the tours they produce end in a move-in. Cost per move-in runs a few hundred dollars against several thousand for a referral agency.
The catch is that most of these relationships are best built in person through a lot of manual effort and time. It's lunch-and-learns, dropping off materials, or being the name a discharge planner remembers at 4pm on a Friday.
This industry is relationship driven, and it takes months if not years of effort to build this type of rapport. It’s a long-term play but becomes available once enough time is freed for the directors to go out and put energy into these types of relationships.
Event marketing and creative engagement.
A tour is a large ask for a family eight months out from a decision.
A Medicare seminar, a caregiver support group, and a Sunday concert in the common room are great ways to get guests from outside the community to get a glimpse of what it’s like inside the community.
The point of these types of marketing events is to get someone through the front door without requiring them to announce that they're shopping, as well as continue to strengthen the bonds of current residents.
Many people that inquire about senior living aren’t ready to make a decision in that particular moment, and an event gives them a reason to come to the building with less pressure.
Families who have already walked your halls, met your chef, and watched your residents at lunch make a different decision six months later than families who haven’t.
Post-tour follow-through.
Aline's 2026 data puts industry tour-to-move-in conversion at 31%, down from 34% the year before. For a 100-unit community, those three points are worth about $396,000 a year in revenue from the same number of tours.
A tour that doesn't convert is demand you already paid for and then lost. While we get tours on the calendar, what happens after the prospect shows up is the responsibility of that sales director of that community.
The work that often closes a family after the drive home is the post-tour follow-up.
This looks like a follow-up call that answers the question they didn't ask in person, the second visit with the adult daughter who lives out of state, or the email that reaches all four decision makers.
Deposit through the first 90 days.
A signed agreement isn't a move-in yet. Between the deposit and the moving truck, adult children reopen the decision, a health event changes the plan, someone gets cold feet in the middle of the night. Then the first three months settle whether this becomes their new home and lifestyle, or they give a notice to move out.
Creating trust and a great first impression prevents buyer remorse, and the sales director who sold them is most easily on the hook to do this. Early move-outs are expensive and length of stay is more indicative of NOI than any lead source.
Creating resident advocates.
Families referred by current residents convert at two to three times the rate of cold leads, and a resident referral credit costs a fraction of any paid channel.
A sales director who has time to walk the building collects testimonials or referrals while the family is still grateful, gets the video of the resident who plays piano in the lobby every Thursday, or finds the adult son who will speak at an open house. That's content, social proof, and a referral pipeline, and all of it comes from being present rather with the community rather than having their head buried in their emails.
While creating freedom for sales directors to do all of these strategic things seems like a no-brainer to us, the most common concern before handing off lead response is losing visibility into the pre-sale process.
What we found is it's actually the opposite, and in practice, you get more of it.
When our team works inside of your CRM, every call, text, and note is documented, usually at a much higher standard than was set previously. We send reports and context to the sales directors before tours. Because of these high standards, it creates more trust and more stickiness to the tours.
The sales directors can see what was discussed, what the family's situation is, and what questions came up. When a lead is ready to tour, it arrives as a booked appointment with a summary attached on their calendar.
Do you know how much time you could save your sales directors by relieving them of the burden of lead response?
NextWave offers a free audit of your follow-up process. You'll walk away knowing your actual contact rate, your average response time, and how many leads went unworked last month, And we can project how many hours these sales directors can save so that they can focus their time on what they need to be focused on.
If you want to see how your community's current lead response compares to what's possible, NextWave offers a free audit of your follow-up process. You'll walk away knowing your actual contact rate, average response time, and how many leads are going unworked each month.