The best way to create a solid business foundation is to foster a customer centric, sales focused organization.  If the agency always approaches every decision with the question “what’s best for the patient,” then everything else will fall into place.  Acting in this manner does not run contrary to operating a good business—it simply keeps things in proper perspective.  It is entirely consistent with your mission.  By empowering all members of the agency to focus on selling its services, referrals will increase along with the pride felt for the company.

Customer-centricity marries sales with customer service.  Training teaches your customer service (intake) personnel how to recognize and respond to sales opportunities.  Customers are recognized as the organization’s most important asset.  The sales approach and management of customers takes a long-term orientation.

Customer centric sales techniques are built around needs assessment.  The sales people (both outside and inside) ask purposeful, relevant questions.  They have meaningful conversations with customers and offer solutions that are directly related to their needs.  This will empower referral sources to make the only logical choice—your agency.

Selling home care and hospice services requires the perfect balance of sales skills, people skills, product knowledge, enthusiasm and ethics.  Long-term success will elude those who are not passionate about home health and hospice.  There are easier places to make a living than selling these services, but no more rewarding sales career.

Passion and enthusiasm are contagious and they produce sales results!  Having a positive self image and visualizing success are essential to maintaining an enthusiastic attitude.  The sales team must feel that they are empowered, appreciated, respected and heard.  This is true in all realms of sales, but is especially true when selling an intangible such as the services we provide to our communities.

The Customer Comes First

Putting the customer first will pay big dividends in home care and hospice sales.  This includes the agency putting the needs and wants of the patients first as well as those of the referral sources.  If you ask 100 referral sources what is most important to them when selecting a home care or hospice, at least 95% of them will respond “that they take good care of my patients.” But when you ask what that means to them is when you start getting interesting, actionable insights that can be used to build strong relationships.

Train the sales team to ask how they can make a referral source’s life easier.  If you can make it demonstrably easier to refer to your agency, you will get the referrals.  Find out how the referral source would like to be treated and then create a customized “plan of care” for each of them.  We create individual care plans for our patients, why not for the referral sources?

Communicating Quality

The best way to communicate quality is to personify it—make it tangible.  How you communicate quality is a determent of successful home care and hospice sales and marketing.  The key lies not in just talking about quality, but rather in demonstrating it to each referral source in a way that is meaningful to them.  Every agency claims to provide quality services, in fact, quality in most home care or hospice referrals is presumed. 

Use tangible examples that demonstrate how quality shows up at your agency.  Here are just a few ways to do this:

• Use benchmarked data in graphical format to show how your outcomes compare to others.
• Utilize telemedicine and explain that your agency feels that this represents the new standard of care for many diagnoses.  That the agency has made this investment because it is consistent with providing the best possible care.
• Patient and family testimonials that speak to the wonderful care that they received from your company.
• Endorsements from local, well respected physicians.
• Introduce clinical field staff to the physicians and offices of the patients they serve.

Be passionate about home care and hospice, love what you do, act with integrity, and keep smiling. 

Until next week, Happy Selling!

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One of the biggest potential opportunities for home care agencies is internally generated referrals.  Companies often overlook these opportunities.  Most agencies have no idea how much business they are losing that is right under their nose.  Don’t be one of them! 

There are several major possibilities for internal referrals: 

Inter Company—The most common is that one division doesn’t refer to the others.  Example: An agency has home health, hospice, private duty and DME.  Typically there is little thought given to cross referrals and planned cross-selling of services.  What usually happens is home health division is referring patients to another hospice, the hospice is purchasing equipment from a competitor, DME isn’t considering internal home health referrals and hospice is using a competitor’s private pay agency.  An analysis of your agency’s referral patterns will tell you how big the missed opportunity is.  You should be able to recoup much of this business without any competition.

Individual Employees—Agency staff often live in the community your agency serves and have the opportunity to make referrals.  Are they sending this business your way?  Do they believe that the agency they work for is really the best choice for their friends and family?  Have they been trained to make the referrals?  Is there an incentive plan in place to encourage staff referrals?  Are family members in need of services offered a special discount?  Are there any divisive issues creating animosity between staff or departments? 

Board Members—The members of your Board of Directors know a lot of people in the community and can refer a lot of business.  Are you reminding them to generate business?  Establish a protocol for reminding board members of the need for their referrals, thanking them and recognizing their efforts.

Note to Hospital Based Agencies:  Internal referrals are even more important! Establish a strategy to sell and market to within the hospital, reaching out to case managers and discharge planners in the same way that is done with referral sources in the community.  Don’t take hospital staff for granted or create animosity by trying to “force” anyone to use you. 

Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies That Deliver Legendary Results without Busting Your Budget!

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It is possible to increase your referrals by 50% or more, simply by training the inside salespeople to ask for referrals.  The people in your intake department must be viewed as the inside sales force.  They should be not just taking orders but making suggestions and asking questions.  It is totally appropriate for them to ask the referral source if they have any other patients that the agency could serve. 

Many times intake coordinators have the most contact with the referral sources.  This has always been a very important point of contact for your agency.  The level of service provided by the intake department will color the impression that the referring entity has of the agency.  But of equal importance is the relationship that will promote referrals and make sure that the agency is receiving a maximum number of referrals and fully meeting the needs of the customer.

To put a face with the voice on the phone, take the intake coordinator out to meet key referral sources.  The more they bond, the more the phone will ring with referrals.  People like to deal with people that they like.  Encourage your intake coordinators to have pleasant (but at all times professional) conversations with the contact at the referral source.  The intake coordinator should communicate what they know about the contact with the outside salesperson, and vice versa, so that maximum relationship building may occur.

Another place to look for a boost in referrals is from internal referrals.  We frequently find that agencies have untapped potential from internal referrals.  Those are the referrals that are generated internally by your staff.  If your agency has more than one line of service or division, make sure that the divisions are making cross referrals.  There will always be people that your staff know that are in need of home care services.  Have an easy way for them to have their friend or relative taken care of in short order.  The referrals that are generated internally must be captured or they will be going to your competition.  Reading this you may think that this goes without saying, yet in agency after agency we see these referrals slipping away.

So, immediately after reading this and frequently thereafter, ask yourself the question:  “Am I doing everything possible to encourage my sales force (that now includes everyone associated with the agency) to get those extra referrals?” Analyze every possible connection and make sure that the systems are set up to make it really easy.  If your people have to move a mountain to get the referral to be taken and served by the agency, then they will not take the time or effort to make the referral.  By doing all of this on a consistent basis you will see a substantial increase in your referrals.

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This week, we wrap up our series of tips for helping you maximize the effectiveness of your marketing materials:

6) Use Simple Words and a Simple Style

Use short simple words to express your meaning.  Educated readers understand simple words while uneducated people do not understand long high-brow words.  Even if you have to substitute three or four words for one difficult one, you will be much better off.  Write at an educational level just under the lowest one in your target market.

Better to invoke a complex emotion from the audience than to create complex sentences that mean nothing to them.

7) Include a Call to Action

Include a call to action in your advertisements.  Offer a free booklet or report—something of perceived value to the intended audience.  Then provide an easy way to request it.  Include a direct response mail card, a toll-free number—whatever will make it easiest and least threatening for your prospect to request.  Include an e-mail address rather than a Web address for your prospects to respond electronically.  This allows you to start electronic conversations with prospects and not just count hits on your Web page.

7.5) Always Have a Plan to Maximize Benefit

Whatever you do, make sure that you have a well-designed set of processes in place to handle the responses generated by the marketing campaign.  Unless you convert these responses into new business, then you will have wasted your investment in the campaign.

Who will answer the phone when it rings?  How will the inquiry be handled?  What are your goals for number of leads and conversion ratios?  How will the follow-up be handled?  These are some of the questions that you must have answered before running the marketing campaign.

How you track the source of the inquiries will tell you how effective your marketing campaign has been.  If you have multiple marketing initiatives ongoing at the same time, you must know which are pulling the best results.  This is achieved by asking the caller how they heard about the agency and then recording this information for every inquiry received.  Over time you will see where your best return on marketing investment is generated.  To develop the best and most useful data, track the conversion ratio and value of each customer for each of your marketing campaigns separately.  That way you will be able to compare the actual impact of each initiative in bottom line dollars and cents.

Whenever you are creating a new print piece, follow these seven simple steps and you will see the performance of your brochure or print ad skyrocket.  This will allow you to see the maximum return on your marketing investment.  Good luck and good marketing.

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