How to Use a Life Resource Planning Questionnaire and Survey to Make Sales to Aging Seniors
January 2, 2018 | by the National Care Planning Council
Over the years, we have worked with aging seniors and their children who were seeking advice relating to aging and the final years of life. They have come from all walks of life with a variety of questions and issues. Generally, their first interest is not in buying specific products or services. Instead, they want answers to questions and guidance for the challenges they face. This resulting need for a problem solving approach led us to develop a planning and sales system we call Life Resource Planning.
Life Resource Planning (LRP) embodies a concept called solution-based planning. This concept focuses on solving the needs of the client first. Using our approach, a potential client's problems are understood and fully addressed before any applicable products or services are brought up. With solution-based planning, a product sale or service sale will logically and eventually fit into the process.
Surprisingly, by solving challenges faced by aging seniors, we are able to sell more products and services than using a traditional sales approach. By using the Life Resource Planning system from the NCPC, you will increase the amount of sales of your own products and services. You will also provide a genuine service to the community and feel good about your contributions in helping families deal with their challenges.
Making Sales through Solution-Based Planning
Solution-based planning eliminates having to use manipulative closing techniques to persuade people into buying products or services that may not fit their needs. Through solution-based planning, you uncover problems the client currently has or will experience in the future. You then provide suitable solutions for those problems. Our system will even bring out issues the client may not have considered.
Our solutions are concepts, actions and strategies. The intent is to ease concerns, make decision making more practical, and to build confidence. A client will always take action on one or more of the recommended solutions found in each Life Resource Planning presentation. Using our system, if your product or service fits into the solution, it will be an extremely easy sale. The client will recognize the benefits of your product or service in the context of finding a solution. You will have to do very little persuading to make the sale.
Developing Rapport with both Parents and Adult Children
When you do this type of planning with aging seniors, you are almost always working with the adult children of those seniors. Aging individuals usually want the input of their children before they make a big decision. Include the children as soon as possible so that all decision-makers are present. Without involving the children, you probably will lose the sale.
One problem you often face is developing a level of trust, confidence and rapport with the aging seniors and their children with whom you are meeting. You can develop this rapport through a formal and comprehensive planning strategy rather than with a single-dimensional sale focused on a single product or service. Our approach embodies this comprehensive planning approach. When you use our system, not only will you make sales to the aging seniors, but you will also make the children your clients as well.
When you sit down and meet with the children and their parents, discuss the challenges being faced by the aging seniors. Then use our comprehensive planning system to help you meet those concerns and introduce solutions. Many of the solutions a Life Resource Survey introduces will involve products and services.
Using the Life Resource Planning Questionnaire and Survey
We furnish you with sophisticated, but easy to use, online software to help you identify all of the challenges facing your new clients or existing clients. They will be impressed when you use our online questionnaire to generate an authoritative and a personalized report of a broader spectrum of issues they are encountering or may encounter. We call this downloadable and printable report a Life Resource Planning Report. The Life Resource Planning Report opens the door for multiple planning opportunities for the aging seniors and their children. It sets you up as a problem solver and creates a more professional image for you. Such an approach will produce better trust and compliance from your clients.
Organizing a Local Planning Team
By using our comprehensive planning survey approach, you have the opportunity to provide many more products and services than just those that are unique to you. If you don't provide the particular products or services that your planning will uncover, we will help you organize a local planning team of advisers and providers to offer those solutions. Using our strategy, you can turn a potential rejection into a sale of many different products and services. By using a comprehensive planning approach, your newly acquired clients will be asking you to how to buy the product instead of your pushing them to do so.
