How Royal Oaks Coaches 15 Tours a Week in 5 Minutes a Day

Marketing Sales Manager at Royal Oaks, Kerri Lopez, on getting inside every tour without sending a mystery shopper, why the team that resisted Rilla most now uses it daily, and what changes when a rep can finally hear herself.

Senior living sales is one of the highest-stakes in-person sales conversations there is. The prospect is often in their seventies or eighties. The family is involved. The decision is irreversible in the way that most purchases are not — a person is choosing where they will live, receive care, and eventually die. The residency counselor has one job: build enough trust in a single visit that the family feels safe saying yes to a $4,000-a-month decision.

You cannot learn that skill from a debrief. You have to hear the conversation.

Royal Oaks is a life plan senior living community offering a continuum of care from independent living through advanced care services. On an average week, the sales team runs 10 to 15 person-to-person tours. Before Rilla, the sales director had almost no visibility into what was happening in those rooms.

"It's almost impossible for us to know what was going on on a visit with a prospect."

The traditional answer to the visibility problem is observation — a manager joins the tour, or a mystery shopper is sent in to simulate a prospect. In senior living, both approaches fail for the same reason.

"Anytime you bring a third person in, it changes the relationship between the prospect and the residency counselor. Those of us that have been in the industry for a long time can spot a mystery shopper and it just wastes everybody's time. We would much rather see true interaction, true relationships being built."

The rep adjusts. The prospect adjusts. What you observe is a performance of the conversation, not the conversation. And the coaching that follows is coaching on the performance.

The problem compounds at Royal Oaks because the team runs 10 to 15 tours a week. Even if a manager could attend without distorting the visit, attending ten tours a week is not a job — it's a full-time tour schedule that leaves no time for anything else.

Rilla records tours through a device in the room or carried by the residency counselor. The manager does not attend. No one else is present. The conversation between the counselor and the prospect is exactly what it would have been without Rilla — and the recording captures it in full.

"Rilla gives us the ability to actually be a fly on the wall."

For senior living, that distinction matters more than it does in most industries. The sale happens in the relationship. Any intrusion that changes the relationship changes the sale. Rilla is non-intrusive by design — one small device, no observer, no altered dynamic.

Before Rilla, reviewing a tour meant either attending it in person or listening to a full recording — neither of which scaled to 10 to 15 visits a week. With Rilla's summaries and script tracker, the coaching workflow changed.

"I spend approximately 5 to 10 minutes each day reviewing conversations to make one or two comments to the team so that they can see what they need to improve on."

The key is specificity. Rather than listening through a 90-minute tour to find the two moments worth coaching, the director can go directly to the flagged sections, pull the key moments, and deliver targeted feedback before the team's next tour.

"Being able to hone in on the conversations and the key moments, I can spend 5 minutes instead of an hour and a half or 2 and a half hours."

Across a 10-to-15-tour week, that compression frees the equivalent of a full workday that used to disappear into review.

The sales director is not the only voice in the testimonial. One of Royal Oaks' residency counselors speaks to what the coaching loop produces on the receiving end.

"I love when my manager gives me feedback from my tours. My active listening has improved and I can see that response in the people I'm working with. This just gives me a real fine-tuning chance."

Active listening is the core skill in senior living sales. The prospect needs to feel heard — their fears about losing independence, the family member's anxiety about making the wrong choice, the financial uncertainty. A counselor who is taking notes cannot listen. A counselor who knows the recording is running can be fully present with the person in front of her.

The residency counselor also describes how she uses Rilla as a personal workflow tool, not just a coaching input: "After looking at the script tracker, Rilla is my next touch point. I go to see what's gone well. It's like having a personal assistant that's taken notes for me so that I can utilize that information."

One of the most consistent patterns in Rilla deployments is front-line resistance at the start. Senior living is no different.

"While the sales team was resistant to begin with, they have come around and they are able to self-improve. To me, that is a huge benefit."

The mechanism behind the resistance turning is usually self-review. Reps who are skeptical of being recorded are often the first to become advocates once they hear their own calls. The gap between how a counselor thinks she sounds and how she actually sounds is almost always instructive — and almost always motivating once it is visible.

At Royal Oaks, the shift from resistance to adoption happened because the recording was clearly non-punitive. The manager is not listening to catch mistakes. The manager is looking for one or two specific coaching moments per day. The rep receives targeted, actionable feedback — not surveillance.

Most sales coaching frameworks are built for high-volume, short-cycle transactional sales. Senior living is low-volume, long-cycle, and emotionally complex. The average tour runs 60 to 90 minutes. The decision timeline is weeks to months. The objections are rarely about price — they are about fear, family dynamics, and identity.

Coaching for that environment cannot be built on call volume alone. It requires the ability to identify subtle moments — the point where the prospect mentioned her late husband, the moment the counselor talked past a hesitation instead of into it, the question the family asked twice that went unanswered. Those are the coachable moments. Rilla surfaces them.

"To me, that's priceless."

The Royal Oaks model is replicable at any senior living community running person-to-person tours. The core mechanics:

Replace observation with recording. Mystery shoppers and manager ride-alongs distort the sale. A recording does not. The rep performs the way she actually performs. The coaching is on the real conversation.

Cap daily review time at 10 minutes. Use Rilla's summaries and script tracker to identify the two or three moments worth coaching each day. Do not listen to full recordings unless a specific moment requires context. The goal is coaching frequency, not review thoroughness.

Anchor coaching to the script. Define the 6–10 key moments that should appear in every tour — the needs discovery, the emotional connection, the financial conversation, the next-step ask. Score against them. Reps know what they are being measured on and can self-assess before feedback arrives.

Lead with what went well. The rep who came around fastest at Royal Oaks used Rilla first to see what was going well. The accountability loop works because it is not only corrective. Reps who can hear themselves doing something right repeat it.

Royal Oaks is a life plan senior living community offering a full continuum of care, from independent living through advanced care services. The community serves residents and families across multiple care levels under one campus.

Rilla is the conversation analytics platform for in-person sales and service teams. The platform records, transcribes, and scores customer-facing conversations, surfacing coaching insights for managers and self-assessment tools for reps. Teams using Rilla typically see a 25% lift in close rate within 90 days. Learn more at rilla.com.