It’s Time, is the podcast from the One On One Sales Academy, built for the people doing the actual selling in senior living. Kristin Kutac Ward, President of Austera Group and a One On One Sales Master Class presenter, joined the show to walk through the framework she teaches in the Academy: the Stages of Readiness.
It starts with a problem most sales teams recognize. Prospects get sorted into hot, warm and cold, and the label decides who gets a call back. But a temperature tells a salesperson how hard to push. It says nothing about where a family actually is.
Four stages, and where everybody really sits
Kutac Ward replaces the labels with four stages, each defined by what the prospect is actually saying.
Denial — “I’m never moving.” 5%
Thinking — “I don’t know whether I should move.” 60%
Planning — “I don’t know when I should move.” 30%
Action — “I need to choose where I should move.” 5%
That distribution is the whole argument. Only five percent of prospects are ready to choose a community — which tracks with the reality that just five percent of seniors over 75 move in any given year. Sixty percent are still working out whether a move should happen at all.
Most sales conversations are built for the five percent.
Thinking is problems. Planning is solutions.
The distinction Kutac Ward draws between the two middle stages is the practical heart of the episode.
Thinking is talking about problems. Planning is talking about what a solution might be.
A prospect in Thinking is still naming what’s hard — the stairs, the yard, the isolation, the driving. They are not yet interested in the answer. As one of her slides puts it: they aren’t interested in the solutions… yet.
So the biggest mistake is offering those solutions too quickly. The counselor hears a problem, recognizes it, and reaches for the fix — and the prospect, who was still describing the problem, feels unheard and backs away.
The work in Thinking is different. Draw out stories about earlier changes that went well. Ask direct questions about each problem area and what the likely consequences are. Leave an opening toward a small step forward, without pushing through it.
Trying to push someone out of Denial doesn’t work either. There the job is to state an intention to help rather than sell, acknowledge that the decision is theirs, and explore what staying looks like without passing judgment on it.
“You don’t talk someone into making a move. You listen them into it.”
That line is the episode in a sentence, and it is a harder discipline than it sounds. It means letting a prospect live and re-live her stories in her own home, and trusting that the listening is the work — not a delay before the real work starts.
Listen and learn more
Kristin Kutac Ward presents the Stages of Readiness as a three-part Sales Master Class inside the One On One Sales Academy, covering the problem with hot, warm and cold, the four stages, and how to help a prospect advance at each one.
The full master class and podcast library are available to Academy members. To learn more about membership and the training available to senior living sales teams, visit the One On One Sales Academy.
