Has your sales and marketing team ever needed to push to meet year-end goals in the last stretch of the year? It’s stressful, challenging to make up for lost time, and doesn’t make for a happy team. 

As a leader, helping your team start the year off strong with clear goals and a guiding vision for success is the best way to set your marketing team up for success—and actually achieve or even exceed your goals. 

Here are 5 simple steps to work through with your team now to ensure your team is meeting goals later and inspired to succeed as a team. 

1. Reflect on What Your Team and Community Does Best

It’s difficult to put your best foot forward without first taking stock of what you do well. Think through what your team and senior living community already do well, whether in marketing, in sales, or in services.

Brainstorm these questions with your team: 

1. What have we done well this year? 
2. How is our community different/unique? And how can we capitalize on the uniqueness?
3. How are we showcasing our differences?
4. How are we capitalizing on what makes our community/team/residents different?

For example, does your community have a farm-to-table dining program? Maybe your community partners with a college that composts? Does a local college partner with your community and offer complimentary classes? Do your marketing team members have a unique hobby or skill that they can share with residents? Has your sales and marketing team successfully sold villa homes over apartments in the last year? Maybe your sales team consistently met sales goals throughout the last year?

There are many ways that your team and community can stand out. It just may take a little brainstorming to identify your strengths and differences. 

2. Dream About the Future

After your team brainstorms your strengths, dream about what success looks like for your team and what you want to accomplish. This can be expanding the successes of the previous year or highlighting some things you’d like to improve on—either abstractly or concretely. For example, improving staff culture or beating last year’s sales goal by a specific number. 

Success will look different for each team, but it’s important that everyone is on board. You need the buy-in from your team so that everyone agrees to work together towards the same vision. 

3. Set Achievable Goals

Now that you have goals set aside, it’s time to specify them and turn them into achievable actions. You’ve likely heard of SMART goals. That is, be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based. 

Specify exactly how you’re going to achieve each realistic goal and the steps you need to take to get there. For example, let’s say your goal is to increase your social media engagement. To make this actionable and achievable, you might say you’ll increase your social media engagement by 10% in the next 12 months by increasing your current post frequency by 20%.

And, what are the specific steps you’ll take to achieve this?

(The good thing is you don’t have to know all the answers! Our team at Angell Marketing can help you set attainable goals and strategize the best course of action for achieving them. )

4. Establish Your Team

This step requires you to evaluate your team’s skills and passions and see how they can relate to the goals you’ve established. Assign roles to people with those skills or expertise. Maybe your marketing team member is has a passion for videography. You might utilize them in creating engaging videos to post on Facebook to contribute to your social engagement goal. 

Utilizing your team effectively means supporting people’s skills and passions, which can also give your team a sense of purpose in their work. 

Plus, your team doesn’t need to be limited to your marketing or sales employees! A resident or other community staff member may also have a skill or passion that can contribute to your team. 

For example, a passionate resident may start a popular yoga club, which can be used to promote your wellness approach and help you reach a wellness-related goal. These can then be used in marketing to prospects and leads, such as highlighting in sales appointments or a social media campaign.  

5. Celebrate Your Wins

It’s important to celebrate your wins and your team as you work towards your goals. Establish check-points for your goals, whether it’s biweekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. This will also help you know if you need to adjust your course to achieve your goals and allow you to celebrate what you’ve already accomplished. 

Your team deserves praise for their hard work, and it establishes a positive team culture when you celebrate each other.

Next steps

These 5 steps are a great starting point for setting your marketing and sales team up for success. Your team will be on the same page about priorities moving forward and will hopefully be excited for the year ahead and all that you’ll accomplish. 

If you’d like some help with any of these steps, we’re here to support your team. We offer consulting services to help you review your current strategies and point you in the right direction moving forward. 

Our full-service agency is also available to help you execute any (and all!) of your goals. Start a conversation with us here.