Join our Newcomer Welcome Orientation—led by long-time members of the SMASH community to gain rapid insights, build vital connections, and learn how to navigate our unique and powerful learning ecosystem with confidence.

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The pace of change has moved beyond what most organizations were designed to handle. New technologies, new customer behaviors, new team expectations, and new competitive pressures are forcing leaders to make decisions before the future feels clear.
In this keynote, Mathew Sweezey, SVP of AI Products and Transformation at Monks and author of The Context Marketing Revolution from Harvard Business Review Press, will explore what it takes to lead when the old playbooks no longer move fast enough. Drawing from his work helping teams redesign how marketing, sales, creative, and operational work gets done, Mathew will show why transformation is not just about adopting new tools. It is about changing how people work, how teams make decisions, how processes are rebuilt, and how organizations learn to move faster without losing trust, clarity, or control.
Mathew will translate the idea of becoming “AI-native” into practical leadership terms: not using AI because it is available, but rethinking the way the organization operates so teams can respond faster, create better outcomes, and keep evolving as the market changes. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of where their organization may be stuck, what needs to change first, and how to begin building a team that can adapt at the speed the future now requires.

In this fast-paced, 7-minute ED Talk, discover how CRM and marketing automation tools are revolutionizing the way senior living organizations engage with potential residents and their families. Learn how automated workflows, personalized messaging, and intelligent CRM systems are streamlining lead management, enhancing follow-up efficiency, and improving audience targeting. Explore the power of data-driven insights, automated nurture campaigns, and seamless integrations to boost conversions and accelerate decision-making. This session will provide you with the latest tools and strategies to optimize your marketing efforts, so you can leave with practical, actionable insights to implement in your own organization.

Participants:

In this high-energy, 7-minute ED Talk, uncover how innovative strategies and tools are transforming sales performance in the senior living industry. Discover how data analytics, performance tracking, and automation are empowering sales teams to work smarter and achieve higher conversion rates. Learn how predictive analytics and AI-driven insights help identify the best leads, optimize outreach, and personalize the sales process. Gain practical tips on improving follow-ups, enhancing team collaboration, and leveraging real-time data to drive more effective sales strategies. Walk away with actionable insights you can implement immediately to boost your sales performance and elevate your team’s success.

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In this fast-paced, 7-minute ED Talk, dive into the world of data measurement and metrics and how they are driving smarter decision-making in senior living. Learn how to effectively track key performance indicators (KPIs), measure marketing ROI, and use data to optimize operational efficiencies. Explore the power of real-time analytics, customer journey tracking, and data visualization tools to gain actionable insights that guide strategy and improve outcomes. Whether it’s occupancy rates, lead conversion, or resident satisfaction, this session will arm you with the metrics and tools you need to enhance performance and demonstrate measurable success in your organization.

Participants:

In this engaging, 7-minute ED Talk, explore the digital strategies that are shaping the future of senior living marketing. Learn how to leverage digital channels like social media, SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising to increase visibility and attract new leads. Discover how to build a seamless digital presence that resonates with today’s tech-savvy consumers while enhancing engagement and conversion rates. From optimizing your website for better user experience to creating compelling digital content, this session will provide you with the tools and techniques to craft a powerful digital strategy that drives results and keeps you ahead of the competition.

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In this dynamic, 7-minute ED Talk, explore how strong branding and compelling creative drive connection, differentiation, and results in senior living marketing. Learn how strategic brand positioning, visual storytelling, and creative consistency help organizations stand out in a crowded marketplace and resonate with today’s consumers. Discover real-world examples of innovative creative approaches—from messaging and design to audience targeting—that enhance brand visibility and engagement. You’ll see how creative performance can be measured alongside traditional metrics and how impactful visuals and storytelling influence perception and decision-making. Walk away with actionable ideas to refine your brand, elevate your creative, and apply proven strategies to your own marketing initiatives.

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AI is transforming senior care sales and marketing, making it faster, smarter, and more effective. In this rapid-fire ED Talk, you’ll get a 7-minute snapshot of how AI-driven solutions are optimizing lead generation, automating follow-ups, enhancing audience targeting, and boosting conversions. Learn how predictive analytics, chatbots, and AI-powered content are reshaping engagement and decision-making. With each presentation following the same format, you’ll quickly grasp the latest innovations and walk away with actionable insights to bring back to your team.

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Wingspan Integrated Marketing

Local search is being reshaped by AI-driven results, shifting trust signals, and increasingly precise geographic targeting critical to senior living. AI Search Overviews and conversational engines now influence visibility before users ever reach your website. In this session, Kent Lewis will outline seven essential trends and strategies: optimizing for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), dominating hyper-local markets with geographic content, strengthening structured citations and entity authority, maximizing Google Business Profile engagement, earning and managing reviews strategically, building topical authority through helpful content, and leveraging behavioral signals like engagement and conversions. Senior living professionals will leave with practical, future-ready tactics to improve rankings, increase visibility, and generate more qualified local leads in an AI-first search landscape.

1. Apply AI-era local search strategies including AEO, structured data, and entity signals to improve visibility in Search Overviews and conversational results
2. Build and execute a hyper-local content and Google Business Profile strategy that captures high-intent, geographically targeted traffic
3. Increase qualified local leads by leveraging reviews, behavioral signals, and topical authority to strengthen trust and conversion performance

Every senior living marketing team is using AI to write more content, faster. That's the problem. When your competitors are prompting the same tools with the same generic inputs, "efficient" starts to mean "indistinguishable." Families choosing a community for their parent can tell when content feels manufactured, and the data backs that instinct: consumers who say heavy AI use would decrease their trust in a favorite brand doubled from 20% to 40% in the past year alone. For small marketing teams in senior care and living, where one or two people are responsible for blogs, social, email, and sales enablement, AI isn't optional. But using it well requires more than a good prompt. This session gives marketing leaders a practical framework for building an AI workflow that protects brand voice instead of diluting it: how to codify what makes your community's voice distinct before you ever open a chatbot, where AI should do the heavy lifting versus where a human has to stay in the loop, and how to keep resident and family stories (the content senior living families actually trust) from getting flattened into generic copy. Attendees will leave with a brand voice framework they can build in a week, not a quarter, and a clear line for what AI touches and what it doesn’t.

Marketing teams are fighting harder than ever for every lead. We have adapted to Google's constant changes, leaned into AI, optimized SEO, invested in paid media, and worked to create compelling content. Yet despite all of that effort, many organizations continue to lose opportunities in the same place: the middle of the funnel.

Consider these familiar scenarios (all true cases in my organization):
Case 1: A prospect finally submits an inquiry. The salesperson calls, leaves a voicemail, sends an email, and maybe attempts one more follow-up before daily priorities take over.
Case 2: A prospect schedules and attends a great tour. The interaction goes well, but no next step is defined. Weeks later, the prospect resurfaces saying “I never heard back from the sales person” or even worst, they inquire through a Third Party Online Referral Agency!
Case 3: Someone attends an event, engages deeply, and leaves inspired, but contact information is never captured or follow-up never happens.

The issue often isn't lead volume. It's what happens after the lead enters the funnel.

This session will explore how senior living organizations can build a practical Middle of Funnel (MOFU) strategy that nurtures prospects with intention, creates emotional connection, reduces anxiety, and builds trust over time.

Participants will learn:
• How to identify where opportunities leak from the funnel
• Which MOFU metrics actually matter beyond lead volume
• How to use resident stories and authentic content to create emotional connection
• Ways to reduce barriers through education and personalized experiences
• How to use behavior-triggered automation without losing the human touch
• Small commitments that gradually move prospects toward sales readiness
• Real examples of how Emerald Communities improved engagement, waitlist growth, and occupancy while remaining under budget

Attendees will walk away with a framework that can be implemented immediately:
1. Inspire
2. Educate
3. Visualize
4. Community Connection
5. Micro-Commitments

Because generating leads is only half the battle. The organizations that win will be the ones that know what to do after the inquiry arrives. Potential panel discussion questions:
- Are we over-investing in top-of-funnel and under-investing in nurture?
- What behaviors signal that a prospect is ready for the next step?
- How many touch points does today's senior living consumer actually need?
- What role should residents play in the nurturing journey?
- How can automation support relationships without replacing them?
- What metrics should sales and marketing teams own together?

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Most lost deals don't lose to price or competition. They lose in small moments no pipeline report catches: the implication question never asked, the spouse conversation that derails, the holiday objection that stalls momentum, the tour that goes well but ends nowhere, the marketing promise the sales call doesn't deliver.

Allie Smith-Goodwin at SRG analyzed 2,000+ live and simulated sales calls to find those moments — five recurring gaps hiding inside deals her team felt confident about. This session shares what those gaps sound like in real conversations, and how seeing them reshaped her team's training, coaching, and marketing alignment.

Three Actionable Takeaways

-The five moments where winnable deals are most often lost — weak discovery, spouse/family dynamics, seasonal objections, tour follow-through, marketing-to-sales gaps.

-A practical method for turning a noticed pattern into a targeted coaching priority tied to inquiry-to-visit, tour conversion, and move-in outcomes.

-How to strengthen sales-marketing alignment using what your frontline hears directly from prospects.

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These incredible Roundtables are a unique way to meet and learn from like-minded peers on a variety of critical topics. It is a lightly facilitated setting to brainstorm, share challenges, new ideas, and successes, gaining insights and ideas from your peers and colleagues.

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Search hasn’t just evolved. It’s been rebuilt. AI-powered engines no longer return a list of links. They generate answers—pulling and combining information from across the web. That shift changes what it means to be visible. In healthcare, the stakes are higher. Accuracy, trust, and authority aren’t just ranking factors—they determine whether your content is surfaced, cited, or ignored.

This session introduces Relevance Engineering, a practical framework that unifies SEO, AI search, and digital visibility into one goal: making your content the best possible answer.

You’ll learn how modern search works and what to do about it: Create content that gets selected by AI systems, not just indexed Build entity-driven authority that strengthens trust and visibility Structure content for extraction, citation, and reuse Expand beyond your website to show up across search and AI-driven experiences

As AI-generated content floods the web, the advantage shifts to organizations that deliver accurate, verifiable, and context-rich information. If you want your content to be found, trusted, and used in an AI-first world, you need more than SEO. You need to engineer relevance.

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Senior living operators are rethinking how marketing and storytelling get done. Rising costs, slow turnarounds, and generic messaging are prompting a key question: should this work move in-house?
This panel features operators who have built internal marketing agencies. Panelists will share their experiences building teams, navigating challenges, and integrating in-house marketing with day-to-day operations and resident experience.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

-Identify what drives executive buy-in for an in-house marketing model
-Define the core problems in-house agencies are designed to solve
-Understand which roles are essential to a successful in-house strategy, how to manage turnover and use AI to fill talent gaps
-Anticipate the toughest implementation challenges and lessons learned

Most sales dashboards in senior living were built to report the past, not navigate the future. In today’s senior living environment, sales leaders have no shortage of data—but many are still struggling with direction. If your team is still measuring activity volume and tracking raw lead counts as KPIs, you're not running a sales intelligence operation. You're running a scoreboard. There's a difference, and in 2026's tighter market, it's going to show. In this session, sales performance strategist Amanda Richards will challenge the way leaders think about dashboards—and introduce a more focused, actionable approach. Drawing on real world experience she will share what high-performing operators are tracking now and why the teams watching these numbers are consistently outselling the ones that aren't. If you leave this session and your CRM still generates 14-tab reports nobody reads, that's on you.

Participants will leave with practical strategies to:
• Cut through the noise and identify core KPIs: Learn how to confidently reduce your metrics and focus on the small set that truly drive occupancy—without losing critical insight.
• Measure impact, not just activity: Shift from tracking lead volume and surface-level activity to understanding conversion, velocity, and where performance is breaking down in your funnel.
• Align sales metrics to operational goals: Connect your dashboard to broader business priorities to strengthen accountability, improve cross-functional buy-in, and ensure your entire team is working toward the same outcomes.

If your dashboard is telling you everything—but helping you decide nothing—this session will provide the clarity and focus needed to turn data into action and results.


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Sales and marketing leaders are being asked to make better calls with more inputs – pricing, concessions, how their buildings benchmark against comparable market properties, new supply coming online, and the financial performance sitting behind it all. In this session, NIC MAP COO Kyle Gardner walks through the latest market data on senior living: where rates are moving, what concession trends the market data shows, how occupancy is trending across care segments, and what new financial benchmarking data shows about how buildings are performing. Attendees will leave with a read on what the data says and a preview of the financial benchmarking conversation continuing at SMASH Focus in May 2027. 

Most senior living marketing organizations are data-rich and insight-poor. The dashboards exist. The tools are running. The agencies are reporting. But when it's time to make a real decision — where to shift budget, which channel is actually driving tours, whether the campaign that looks good on paper is moving the needle on occupancy and revenue, the answer is rarely clear. And in a high-consideration, emotionally complex sale that unfolds over 5 to 18 months across multiple family stakeholders, guessing is expensive.

This workshop gives marketing leaders a practical framework for connecting business goals to the metrics that actually matter, cleaning up the data issues that quietly undermine every insight your team and your agencies produce, and using AI to surface patterns your current reporting isn't showing you. The focus is strategic, not technical — built for leaders who set the direction and need to ask better questions of the people pulling the levers. You'll leave with a clear, repeatable framework you can put to work in your next agency meeting.

Key Takeaways:
- A framework for connecting your organization's occupancy and revenue goals directly to the marketing metrics worth tracking — and the confidence to stop reporting on everything else Practical methods for identifying and closing the data gaps that are undermining your agency's ability to give you accurate insights — without a platform overhaul
- A working approach to using AI to accelerate analysis and surface growth opportunities — so you can ask smarter questions and make faster decisions with the information you already have.

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Most senior living sales organizations have a coaching program. Regular one-on-ones, call reviews, and role-plays, yet true transformation in skills and habits doesn't happen easily. Eventually, numbers plateau, the same bad habits creep in, skills dull over time, and coaching sessions become everyone's least favorite part of the week. The problem isn't that coaching isn't happening, it's that as high at 90% of sellers say the coaching they receive isn't relevant or helpful. With today's buyers arriving heavily AI-researched, emotionally guarded, and navigating family dynamics that most sellers aren't equipped to address, sellers need to be better than ever, and the moments that determine whether a sale moves forward are rarely the ones getting coaching attention. This lab introduces a different lens. Instead of asking, "Are we coaching enough?" we ask, "How can we coach the right things with excellence?

Key Takeaways:
1. A framework for identifying where your pipeline is actually breaking down and aligning your coaching focus to match those gaps
2. A series of practical tools you can use in your training and sellers can use immediately to have deeper, more human conversations with today's buyer, practiced live in the room.
3. New concepts and ideas to make your next coaching session deeper and more impactful than ever before.

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Your sales team is doing everything right. Leads are moving, tours are converting, deposits are landing. And yet — somewhere between the signed contract and the occupied unit, revenue is quietly walking out the door. The next wave of revenue growth in senior living isn't coming from a new campaign or a bigger sales team. It's sitting inside the processes you run every day: move-outs, unit turns, contracts, billing, onboarding. When those processes are misaligned, you're not just losing efficiency — you're leaving real, recoverable revenue on the table. Elaine Scheelk, Chief Strategy Officer at Canterbury Court, found $1.8M in new and recovered revenue in a single year — not by selling more, but by looking harder at what was already there.
This lab goes beyond the obvious. You'll hear how cross-departmental alignment between sales, operations, and finance becomes a direct revenue lever — and you'll explore unconventional revenue streams most communities haven't considered: vendor-sponsored publications, resident-driven marketing programs, on-site partnership revenue, and more. Then you'll apply it: structured table exercises help you map the hidden revenue flows in your own community before you leave the room. If you're still measuring your team's performance only by leads and move-ins, this session will permanently change how you read your P&L.

Three things you'll leave with:
1. A framework for identifying revenue trapped inside your operational workflows — from unit turn timing to billing accuracy to contract execution — and how to start unlocking it immediately.
2. Strategies for building cross-departmental revenue accountability, so sales, operations, and finance stop working in silos and start driving financial outcomes together.
3. A menu of unconventional revenue streams — vendor partnerships, resident referral programs, community-produced content, and more — that are already within reach for most communities.

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Whether you are a first-time attendee or a SMASH veteran, you’ll want to join us for this one-of-a-kind experience, where you can catch up with industry colleagues, make new friends, and create valuable connections. After a day of learning, it's time to unwind. Whether you're new or a seasoned alum, join our first-night reception. This is where the SMASH community connects, relaxes, and creates lasting memories.

Sponsored By: Wingspan Integrated Marketing

The first wave of AI search was generous to established players: communities with a strong digital footprint were surfaced in AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers, and many saw an easy traffic bump from AI channels. That phase is ending, and the ceiling on that initial growth is closer than most teams realize. AI decides what to show based on patterns it recognizes across your website, listings, directories, and media footprint. The good news: you have far more control over those patterns than you think. This session walks senior living marketers through the signals that shape what AI understands about your community, how to track your AI visibility, and the strategic steps to take before the plateau impacts your occupancy. You'll leave knowing how to direct your agencies, what to measure, and how the next wave of AI visibility is actually built.

Three takeaways:
1. How to monitor your AI referral traffic and track your AI visibility, so you know when growth is slowing and how well you're showing up.
2. How to shape the signals across your website, listings, directories, and media footprint so AI recommends your communities to the right audience.
3. How to describe your offerings consistently across every channel so AI gets your community right.

Today's senior living prospects are doing more research online than ever — but too many community websites are designed in ways that leave visitors confused, disengaged, and clicking away. This session takes an honest look at what's working, what isn't, and how your website can become a true relationship-building tool.

In this session, you will:

**Review current senior living websites** — and learn what common design and content patterns are silently driving prospects away
**Discover tips to engage customers** with your senior living community website, turning passive visitors into active inquiries
**Walk away with practical next steps** to improve your website's engagement and connect more meaningfully with families at every stage of their search

Most comp plans are built to be fair. Almost none are built to be effective. The result is a plan that looks reasonable on paper and quietly rewards the wrong behavior every single pay period.

This session is a working diagnostic, not a lecture. Drawing on the forthcoming book The Carrot IS the Stick and decades spent designing hundreds of commission plans across industries, Erik W. Charles walks through how to read your own incentive plan the way it actually performs in the field. You will learn where plans break, why the rep is almost never the problem, and how a few specific changes to line of sight and plan design can move the number. The argument rests on more than experience. Erik braids in the academic research on motivation and incentives, from Locke on goal setting to Condly's meta-analysis showing measurable average performance gains, and translates it into plain language you can use Monday morning. Sales will do what you pay them to do. This session is about making sure that is the thing you actually want.

Attendees will leave with:
- A method for stress-testing an existing comp plan to find where it drives the wrong behavior before it costs a quarter
- The research-backed principle of line of sight, and how to rebuild the link between a rep's daily actions and their payout
- A clear way to tell a measurement problem from a culture problem, so you fix the plan instead of blaming the team

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Senior living leaders are under constant pressure to grow revenue, improve the prospect experience, and support their teams without adding headcount. In this provider-led session, QSL and Compass Senior Living will share how they're building AI-Powered Workforces that help experienced sales and marketing teams do their best work—not replace them.
Hear firsthand how they introduced AI, earned employee buy-in, overcame resistance to change, and identified the right opportunities for AI to eliminate repetitive work. You'll leave with practical lessons, proven adoption strategies, and a framework for using AI to strengthen your workforce, improve team performance, and deliver better business results.

Learning Objectives:

-Learn how QSL and Compass successfully introduced AI to experienced sales and marketing teams and built lasting adoption.

-Discover where AI creates the greatest impact across the sales journey, from inquiry response and follow-up to CRM documentation and coaching.

-Walk away with a practical framework for building an AI-Powered Workforce that empowers people, improves the prospect experience, and drives stronger revenue performance.

Sponsored By:

Sponsored By: Experience Fresh A 50th anniversary campaign at Friendship Village ended with a full building. Getting it funded, and proving it would deliver a return, was the harder work.
Brett Arndt, Founder + CEO of Experience Fresh, and Carmen Fronczak, CRO of Friendship Village, walk the campaign end-to-end: how the investment was pitched internally, what got measured and what didn't, which numbers moved and in what order, and where brand credit stops and sales execution starts. Attendees see the actual pitch structure used to secure funding and the KPI set used to defend it afterward (including the metrics that triggered budgets and the ones that fell flat).
This session is built for marketing and revenue leaders who believe in the power of brand but keep losing the budget argument.
Session Learning Objectives: List 3 actionable takeaways participants will learn during this session
1. Participants will see an outline and structured pitch that survives a CEO, CFO, or board.
2. Data to lead with and data to leave out and build a defensible brand measurement set (Return On Experience vs. Return On Investment).
3. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for quantifying brand initiatives to secure ongoing executive buy-in.

Most marketing budgets and agency reports are still built around the small percentage of consumers who are ready to inquire, schedule, or buy now. The larger growth opportunity lies with the people who are actively researching, comparing, reconsidering, or quietly moving toward a decision—but have not identified themselves as leads.

This workshop moves beyond the familiar 95:5 theory and focuses on what leading marketing organizations are doing differently now. Drawing on patterns, data, and lessons from Warschawski’s work across healthcare, financial services, hospitality, higher education, consumer brands, and other high-consideration categories, Sam will show leaders how to build a more complete demand-generation system around the full spectrum of buyer intent.

Participants will examine how to recognize early and mid-stage intent signals, create a smarter mix of paid, owned, earned, social, search, and direct engagement, and reduce overreliance on form fills and last-click attribution.

Through guided exercises, attendees will evaluate their current demand strategy, identify where future buyers are being lost or ignored, and develop a focused plan for improving audience development, investment decisions, and measurement.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Evaluate how their current marketing investment is divided between capturing immediate demand and building future demand—and identify where the mix is limiting growth.
- Develop a practical intent-signal framework that helps marketing and agency teams recognize, engage, and prioritize consumers before they become traditional leads.
- Build an action plan with clear investment priorities, testing opportunities, and leading indicators of progress.

Most senior living teams are still running a playbook that’s costing them move-ins.

The impact shows up in familiar ways: inquiries that don’t convert, tours that stall, and more sales effort without better outcomes. The gap is not at the top of the funnel. It’s what happens after an inquiry comes in, where routing, response, and follow-up either move a family forward or quietly lose them. At the same time, the buyer journey has shifted. Adult children and future residents are researching earlier, comparing differently, and forming expectations before they ever speak to a community.

This two-hour working session focuses on that intersection. Participants will diagnose their current buyer journey and identify where their approach is misaligned. The session then moves into redesign, with structured exercises on routing, first response, follow-up, and the balance between automation and human engagement.

The session concludes with a signature leave-behind: a SMASH-branded Sales and Marketing Blueprint built around the new buyer, the new digital journey, and the operating decisions that actually drive inquiry-to-tour conversion.

Key Takeaways
- A buyer-journey diagnosis you complete during the session, identifying where your current routing, first response, and follow-up design are misaligned with how today’s families actually research and decide
- A practical framework for redesigning your playbook around inquiry type, urgency, and decision context, including clear guidance on where automation helps conversion and where it undermines it
- A completed SMASH-branded Sales and Marketing Blueprint you leave with in hand, built around your current gaps and ready to pressure-test with your team.

Track Sponsored By:

The biggest barrier to growth in most organizations isn't a marketing problem or a sales problem. It's a conversation problem. When marketing, sales, operations, and finance each optimize for their own metrics, the buyer journey fractures — and so does performance. In this hands-on Lab, executive coach and facilitator Daniel Stillman gives leadership teams a practical framework for diagnosing the internal friction that stalls decisions, fragments accountability, and turns peers into obstacles. Using his "If Only" Audit, participants surface the polarized narratives that create silos, then flip the lens to decode what their most difficult stakeholders actually need. The session culminates in a live redesign of how leadership teams meet, decide, and measure progress, moving from status reporting to growth conversations. Every participant leaves with a Collaboration Playbook: a working framework they can bring back to their next leadership meeting.

Senior living leaders have spent years fighting to rebuild occupancy. But in today’s market, a full building does not always mean a financially healthy building. Discounted residents, lost revenue days, weak rate integrity, payer mix, delayed unit turns, uncaptured care, short stays, and services given away for free can all create the same uncomfortable reality: occupancy is up, but revenue is not keeping pace.

In this two-hour working session, Mindy Whitworth and Carmen Fronczak will guide attendees through a practical Revenue Health Playbook designed for sales and marketing leaders who need to lead a broader organizational conversation. Through interactive table exercises, participants will identify where occupancy is masking revenue weakness, examine the revenue levers sales and marketing can influence, and practice framing the case to operations, finance, clinical, and capital partners. Attendees will leave with both a near-term action step and a longer-term revenue health priority they can bring back to their organization.

Three Actionable Takeaways
1. Diagnose where occupancy is masking revenue weakness by identifying the impact of discounting, lost revenue days, payer mix, uncaptured care, short stays, and services that are being delivered but not monetized.
2. Map the revenue levers sales and marketing actually influence — including rate integrity, move-in fees, referral-source mix, deposits, ancillary services, annual re-rates, and product development — and identify who else must be involved to act on them.
3. Build a practical Revenue Health action plan with one immediate step to take this week and one larger cross-functional priority to pursue over the next year.

Enjoy an engaging midday experience designed to foster meaningful conversation and strategic connections. Join fellow attendees for curated roundtable discussions over lunch. Each table offers a unique opportunity to dive into timely topics, explore innovations, and exchange perspectives in a relaxed, collaborative setting.

When occupancy stalls or move-ins slow, the first place leaders look is the sales team. But the root cause is often elsewhere — buried in operational inconsistency, siloed communication, and organizational structures that make it hard to see what's actually happening across communities. This conversation examines the systemic dynamics that quietly erode occupancy and revenue performance, and what leadership can do to get ahead of them.

Three Things You'll Walk Away With:
1. A practical way to tell the difference between a true sales problem and a systems or process breakdown that's been misread as one — so your interventions actually land.
2. Early warning signals that visibility gaps exist across your communities before they show up in your occupancy numbers or your bottom line.
3. Concrete steps for building the kind of cross-functional alignment — across sales, operations, and leadership — that creates consistent performance at scale rather than community by community.

Track Sponsored By:

Marketing leaders often know where additional investment is needed. The harder challenge is building a case that earns the confidence of a CEO, CFO, COO, or board.

Too many marketing recommendations are presented through the language of media performance—clicks, impressions, cost per lead, and campaign activity—when executive leaders are evaluating a different set of questions: What business problem are we solving? What happens if we do nothing? What is the likely financial and competitive impact? Why is this the right investment now?

In this session, Susan will provide a practical framework for translating marketing evidence into a concise, decision-ready business case. Attendees will learn how to connect occupancy, available inventory, conversion performance, local market dynamics, competitive pressure, revenue opportunity, and organizational priorities without overwhelming executives with marketing detail.

Using portfolio-level scenarios, Susan will demonstrate how the same underlying data can be presented differently depending on the decision being requested, the executive audience, and the business risk involved. She will also show how to frame investment choices, present credible scenarios rather than false precision, anticipate common objections, and recommend a course of action with clarity and confidence.

Participants will leave with a repeatable presentation structure they can use to move marketing conversations away from tactical defense and toward informed business investment.

Learning Objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- Translate marketing performance and market conditions into the business language CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and boards use to evaluate investment.
- Structure a concise executive recommendation around the business problem, supporting evidence, available options, expected impact, and cost of inaction.
- Present marketing investment scenarios and tradeoffs in a way that builds confidence, anticipates objections, and makes the requested decision clear.

Most senior living marketing spend fires at the bottom of the funnel: the inquiry, the tour, the follow-up. By then, families have already decided who they trust. That decision gets built upstream, in conversations, reviews, and stories that most operators never manage.

This session brings an outside-industry view of how trust actually gets built, and how it now gets discovered. We will map the voices shaping a family's choice before a tour is ever booked: residents and families telling real stories, the staff and executives who become the human face of a community, and the trusted local voices most operators have never treated as marketing. You will see how businesses outside senior living have built this into a repeatable system, and why those same signals are increasingly what AI reads when a family asks it which community to trust.

Take home:
- A map of the trusted voices already shaping your reputation, and which ones you are leaving unmanaged.
- A practical way to source real resident, family, and staff stories that your team can actually run.
- The upstream trust signals worth measuring, and why they now double as your AI discoverability.

For many senior living communities, referral development efforts have been focused on hospitals and medical providers. But sustainable growth requires a broader, more intentional referral strategy. Referrals are not just a supplemental lead source; they are one of the strongest drivers of occupancy and long-term pipeline health. When referral development becomes intentional, measurable, and consistently coached, it becomes one of the most reliable paths to consistent occupancy growth. In this session, we’ll look at how to identify and prioritize high-impact referral sources beyond hospitals, including partners who influence older adults earlier in the decision-making journey.

Key Learning Objectives:
1. A framework for identifying and prioritizing referral sources beyond hospitals that align with your market, customer demographics, and growth goals.
2. Strategies to build referral relationships that strengthen your Independent Living pipeline and wait list, including professional partners, community organizations, and influencers who connect with prospects earlier in their decision-making journey.
3. A practical leadership approach that helps sales teams manage their time effectively and maximize ROI through consistent referrals.

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Most organizations unintentionally create confusion in the sales process by trying to be everything to everyone. You've probably heard that your customer is the hero...but what role does your brand play? When your messaging, sales conversations, and customer experience don't embody a clear role, you are making it harder to do business with you, elongating the sales process and losing business.

In this engaging keynote, behavioral economist Melina Palmer shares a practical framework for identifying whether your organization should show up as a mentor, sidekick, or sword in the customer journey, and why trying to play multiple roles at once creates friction. Through real-world examples and behavioral science principles, attendees will learn how clearer positioning and more consistent communication can reduce hesitation, improve trust, and help families make confident decisions faster.

Key Takeaways
- Why customers should always be the hero, and the costly mistakes organizations make when they forget it
- How to identify the right role your organization should play in the customer journey
- Practical ways to reduce friction and build trust through more consistent messaging and sales conversations

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Wrap up your Tuesday with Cocktail Connections — SMASH’s signature evening networking experience! Hosted across individual suites, this relaxed reception invites you to unwind, explore, and connect in a casual yet engaging setting. Look for directions to sponsor suites! Sponsors:

SilverAssist

Get ready for a rapid-fire, high-energy session unlike anything else on this year's agenda. Five leading sales and marketing minds from across the senior living industry are taking the Mainstage to deliver 50 tried-and-tested, ready-to-run solutions in just 50 minutes — real strategies pulled straight from the field - not sales pitches, not theory, not fluff. Just honest feedback on ideas that are working in senior living. This is fast-paced, round-robin style content built for people who want to walk away with ideas they can implement immediately and see results fast. Whether you've been in this industry for twenty years or twenty days, you'll leave with new tactics, fresh perspectives, and at several ideas that spark something you hadn't thought of before. If you caught this breakout session in the past couple years, you already know the immense value that comes from this panel — but this year is different, and we mean that literally. We're taking the format to the Mainstage for the first time, with a twist you'll have to attend to see. Let's just say it's going to change the way you think about sales, marketing, and how well those teams work with the partners around them — including a can't-miss operations angle we've never covered before. Come early, because seats will fill up fast, and you won't want to miss a single minute of this one. Bring a notepad, charge your phone, and get ready for the fastest, most solutions-packed 50 minutes of the entire event.

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It’s 2026. Data should drive nearly EVERY element of a smart email marketing program, from the timing to the content, to how you learn what works.

But how do you use the deeply personal data you collect during a year-long, high-consideration, emotionally charged sales process to personalize marketing without crossing into the TMI territory? If you’re trying to create relationships, there’s a fine line between, “I know you” and “I’m watching you.”

Jessica Best, 20-year email marketing and data-driven marketing veteran, will bring us the balance of how to be useful and relevant, without turning OFF our prospects (and current clients). Bring your questions: You’ll want to put these ideas to work right away, and Jessica will help us clear the road blocks preventing us from diving in.

3 Key Takeaways:
1. Segmentation & Versioning – the “coincidentally” relevant way we use language, messaging, or even whose story we share (adult child vs the senior/self) to make our prospects feel seen (but not literally)
2. Data-driven timing, aka Automation – extending our communication across a 6-18 month sales cycle… without having to remember (and send) everything manually
3. Individualization, aka Personalization – the rare cases where calling out individual-specific details can lift response rate and make people more comfortable instead of less.

The user journey is changing fast. People no longer click ten blue links to visit websites for information; they get answers from ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI chats. In this session, Matthew Capala from Alphametic will draw on his nearly 20 years of experience in SEO, CRO, and UX to show you how to future-proof your website for the clickless web.

You will learn how to get your website pages cited in AI answers across the web, how to measure performance using the new AI-era KPIs, and how to optimize your content for GEO, AEO, AI bots, modern algorithms, and the agentic web to increase your ROI.

Walk away with a practical playbook to keep your senior care brand visible as AI continues to reshape the marketing funnel.

The senior living consumer has fundamentally changed, and AI is accelerating the shift faster than most operators realize. Today's prospect is no longer entering the sales funnel uninformed. Before ever visiting a community website, consumers are using AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to research care options, compare providers, evaluate reviews, analyze reputation signals, and narrow their consideration set. The result? Lower lead volume, but dramatically higher intent. This session explores how AI-driven consumer behavior is compressing the traditional senior living sales funnel and reshaping the role of Sales and Marketing. Attendees will learn why trust, digital reputation, social proof, content strategy, reviews, website quality, and emotionally intelligent sales execution are becoming the new competitive advantage. Panelists will discuss how leading organizations are adapting their sales process, marketing strategy, websites, social media presence, reviews, and reputation management to meet the expectations of a more informed, emotionally prepared, and AI-assisted consumer. The panel will share a current operator AEO plan being developed by experts and a proof case demonstrating fantastic results. This is not a future-state conversation. It is already happening.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Understand how AI is reshaping senior living consumer behavior and compressing the traditional sales funnel into a faster, higher-intent decision journey
- Learn why trust signals-trust assets including reviews, website quality, social proof, awards, reputation, and published content are becoming critical drivers of lead conversion
- Discover how sales teams must evolve from "educators" into trust validators, emotional guides, and decision facilitators in an AI-informed marketplace

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