Join our Welcome Reception—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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI Is Rewriting Local Search: 7 Strategies Senior Living Marketers Can’t Ignore 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

Most senior living organizations track the traditional numbers, inquiries, tours, deposits, and move-ins. But what if the real drivers of occupancy success aren’t the numbers most communities are measuring? In this fast-paced and thought-provoking session, we’ll uncover four overlooked factors that have a major impact on conversion rates and occupancy growth: emotion, personal specificity, trust, and prospect profile completeness.
Drawing from Prospect-Centered Selling® principles and real-world data, attendees will learn why human connection consistently outperforms transactional selling.We’ll also explore compelling research showing that when prospect profiles contain 86.5 words or more, the likelihood of a sale increases by 30%. The takeaway? Better understanding prospects leads to better outcomes.
This session will challenge leaders and sales teams to rethink what they measure, what they reward, and what actually drives move-ins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The first wave of AI search was generous. Communities with a solid digital footprint got surfaced in AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers almost automatically — and the traffic felt like a gift. That window is closing. The ceiling on easy AI visibility is coming faster than most teams realize, and when growth plateaus, occupancy feels it.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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