What is your agency doing to ensure that you have strong referrals coming in for the rest of 2009?
Tell us what holiday promotions you’re planning for this year. How does it compare to past years?
Tell us what you/your agency are doing for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We invite you to share with us your photos, campaign ideas, etc.
An agency told us that their annual Staff Appreciation Day was a big success. They rented a party (group) area at a major league baseball game and had the best attendance by staff and families ever! They had door prizes and certificates of appreciation for staff members. The owner made a point to thank all of the families for supporting the efforts of the home care professionals. He told them that it is not easy being the family member of a homecare professional and that often the families do not get enough credit for their support.
Hand out framed certificates of appreciation for your awardees that they can hang in their offices or take home with them. Take lots of photos and create a collage that is mounted on foam board and can be hung in the office. That way each year there will be a new group of great photos that can hang in your office. This will create a longer lasting effect and will generate better attendance at each successive year’s celebration.
Ask your Board of Directors to attend and hand out the awards; this makes it that much more valuable to the employees. It also will allow your Board Members to get to know some of the staff and their families.
Invite your best referral sources and their families to join the celebration. Take the time to acknowledge those who do attend. This effort will help to build stronger relationships between agency staff and referral sources in attendance. Those who cannot attend will be impressed by the thoughtfulness of your agency, both for inviting them and for recognizing your staff.
In addition, make sure that you write about Staff Appreciation Day in the agency newsletter and include photos with the copy.
This is a win—win—win way to make your employees happier, your referral sources love you more and make recruiting easier.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris
Make sure you smile while talking on the phone. To help you maintain a smile throughout the phone call, buy a small mirror. Place this mirror near your telephone in your office. Check the mirror often to make sure you’re smiling. When you’re on the phone, you can tell whether the other person is smiling and so can the other person. That being said, if looking at yourself in the mirror makes you uncomfortable, then put something that makes you smile in front of you!
Excerpted from LEGENDARY RESULTS: Managing Referrals & Increasing Admissions Vol 1: Referral Management by Michael Ferris and Polly Rehnwall
Goal for the Month:
Time to plan a Holiday Helpers campaign! Start the process by defining the services you will offer. The promotion must include a Holiday Helpers services information sheet that lists all of the special services that can be provided during the holiday season. These are privately paid services that can range from housecleaning, decorating, shopping, package wrapping, meal preparation, holiday card addressing, travel companionship and companionship while family is away. Then distribute these flyers to your existing clients and patients, senior centers, referral sources and elsewhere. Offer gift certificates to adult caregivers in a special direct mailing.
Monthly Reminders:
Register now for the NAHC Annual Meeting and make travel reservations early for the best airline ticket prices. Consider bringing the entire sales team—there are often several sessions about sales and marketing. During the off hours, strategy meetings can be scheduled to discuss plans for the upcoming year. One tremendous benefit of exposing the sales team to a national meeting is that they will see that they are part of a dynamic industry filled with professionals.
September is Cancer Awareness Month including Ovarian, Pediatric and Childhood Cancer Month. Partner up with your local oncology specialists and the local American Cancer Society to heighten awareness of prevention and diagnosis for the general public and the elderly.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris
Want to know why your best referral sources choose your agency?
Ask Them! This is something that you should do often and using different methods. You should send them referral source satisfaction surveys, have the sales representative ask and senior management should call and visit.
Ask “What do we do better than any of the other agencies?” or “What are the two things you like best about our agency’s services?”
Once you know why they love you, then you can use this to develop your message.
Do any of the following sound familiar? Do you see some definite trends?
~ We have a multilingual staff.
~ We accept most referrals and do not “cherry pick” the easier and most profitable referrals.
~ We process the referral quickly and easily.
~ They like the quality of care given to our patients.
~ Our nurses are kind and caring.
~ Our staff is reliable, often going beyond their responsibilities to offer suggestions to the patient’s family or physician.
~ Availability—24/7
~ Reliable—can count on us to do what we say we will do.
~ We are committed to providing professional, ethical, and quality service.
~ We follow-up with our clients on a regular basis to assess service effectiveness and to make revisions that reflect changing needs and wishes
Let us know what your referral sources love about your agency.
The key to successful long-term Web marketing is to start an ongoing dialogue with the prospective patients or clients. The goal for your electronic marketing and even traditional advertising should be to build a list of people interested in home health, hospice or private duty. Then you can keep value added information coming to them on a regular basis.
This is the best way to leverage your Web site. Make it easy for them to sign-up by putting the sign-up box on the first page in a prominent location. Offer some item of perceived value, such as a free report, that will entice them to sign-up. Make sure that they opt-in to your list and then keep building!
Tip: Put an e-mail address in your advertisements to enable interested people to contact you for information or the free report. This will result in a much higher conversion ratio than just listing your Web address.
Note: If you are part of an integrated health care system or hospital based, make sure it is easy to find your agency’s information on the Web. Too many times I find that these home health agencies and hospices are hidden on some hard to find page on the parent company’s Web site. Get your own domain name and set up your own pages—the results will be startling!
Investment in sales training will pay for itself many times over. The best sales organizations in the world have regular and frequent sales training. Those agencies that invest in sales training today will see impressive results tomorrow.
There are many opportunities for sales training, including, but not limited to:
~ Home care- or hospice-specific sales workshops and conferences
~ Sales and motivational workshops and conferences that are not industry specific
~ State and national association meetings and conferences (a recent NAHC Annual Meeting had sales and marketing programs during every one of the educational sessions)
~ Teleconferences that are provided by home care- and hospice-related groups
~ On-site training and coaching
~ Books and books on tape or CD
Any sales training opportunities like those listed above will pay big dividends; a relatively small investment today will result in sustained long-term results. Furthermore, the retention rate of your sales team may also increase as productivity increases and salespeople see continued results.
It is increasingly important for home care and hospice agencies to provide support for ongoing education for all of their professional staff. Combine training for professional staff with that for your sales team when appropriate. This support can be an important strategic advantage when recruiting and retaining existing staff. It’s a win-win situation.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris
The most successful home health and hospice sales professionals are those that are the combination of:
* Passion
* People skills
* Knowledge
* Service
The only one that you can truly train is product knowledge! People either have a passion for home health or hospice or they don’t. They are good with and enjoy people, or not. They either get service, or they don’t. Nordstrom’s (famous for customer service) hires people that were raised to say please and thank you. Then they train their sales people everything possible to know about the product they will be selling. The same formula works in home health and hospice.
Hire the right people and then train them to be the most professional home health and hospice sales people. Sales training is a lifelong learning process; the best sales people in all industries seek to improve themselves every day—no matter how many sales awards they have won!
Set Goals and Seek Training
Anyone can set a goal, but training is what makes them possible to achieve. Learning the skills necessary to execute on your plan makes the difference. You can become great at anything, but not without practice. The key then to greatness is practice.
If you think about it, most people never practice. They don’t train and don’t seek coaching. If you invest 30 minutes a day in something, you can become good at it, no matter who you are. If you spend more time than that and really focus your efforts, you can become truly great. Tiger Woods hits thousands of practice shots every week. Piano virtuosos practice for hours every day of the year. How serious are you and your sales team?
Simione Consultants’ fall Square One and AdmitRight Boot Camp sales training dates just announced! Click here for more information and to register!
There are only two ways to grow referrals:
1) Gain referrals that would have gone to the competitor
2) Expand a referral source’s use of home health
Think about the process to gain each type of referral differently. When competing for referrals, you need to sell using competitive advantages. How you can make their lives easier is important. Know how you compare to the other agency they are using. Never trash the competition, but you should always make sure to know what is most important to the referral source and how you compare in those areas.
To expand a referral source’s use of home health services, you must first understand how they currently use them. Then ask good questions about the types of patients they serve and the ones that cause them the most challenges. This will enable you to present your services as a viable solution to them. These can many times be the easiest referrals to garner as they are ones that are currently going without. These referrals are good business and you are truly benefiting the community.
Excerpted from Field Guide to Selling Home Care Services with Legendary Results by Michael Ferris
They still work as a way to get new business for the agency. The key is to find topics that are of interest to the local medical community. Making the class interesting and enticing will get you a lot more attendees than if the hook is only that they get CEUs (continuing education units).
Who do you want to attract? Determine that before you develop the course. This gives you the ability to design the course for the desired audience. Make sure to have CEU approval for RNs, MSWs, Case Managers and Insurance Agents.
The potential topics are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that there would have to be plenty of different ones available. Typically you will want to have a core program that you do every year and several related topics offered during the course of the year. There may be new topics that come up—so be flexible.
Your programs can be delivered to a specific practice or facility. The most effective draw (unfortunately) is food—but the more unusual and interesting the subject the less you have to depend on food to get the people in the seats. Try to find a large meeting room in the medical building or hospital. Ideally you want them out of their office but within the building. Invite not only the practice that you originally booked the presentation for, but also the others in the complex.
Try different times of the day and week until you find what works best for your audience/attendees.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris
Memorial Day is a good time to celebrate the sacrifices of our soldiers and their families. It is a good time to stop and reflect on what freedom means to your patients and clients.
Here’s a suggestion for commemorating the contribution of all Veterans. Make a donation to a War Memorial or to Arlington Cemetery or a Veteran’s Hospital. Then you let your patients, clients and referral sources know that you have made a donation in the name of the patients you serve. This notification is sent out with a letter containing a patriotic message that thanks all that served the nation. It is effective to produce commemorative certificates that can be sent to all patients for Memorial Day or Veterans Day.
Your agency could also make a donation to the September 11th Family Fund and send this out with a message that commemorates the tragedy of this date in history.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris
Cinco de Mayo has become a very popular celebration in the U.S. One way to celebrate this holiday is to make a nice home made Mexican food luncheon for your most profitable accounts. Take small Mexican flags and other decor with you to decorate the offices.
Tie the celebration of Mother’s Day to various Women’s Health Initiatives. There are many issues of importance to women’s health that lend themselves to educating the community. Since many of your referral sources and clients are women, these initiatives will generate a good response.
Graduation season is upon us. You should know which of your referral sources have children who are graduating. Send congratulations cards and include a small gift for your better accounts. Picture frames are always a good gift for the proud mom or dad. Some type of gift certificate for a book store, video rental or electronics retailer for the graduate would be appropriate. Keep in mind that the value of any gift should be within the agency’s policy regarding the value of gifts.
Memorial Day is a good time to celebrate the sacrifices of our soldiers and their families. It is a good time to stop and reflect on what freedom means to your patients and clients.
Excerpted from 101 Home Care Promotional Strategies that Deliver Legendary Results Without Busting Your Budget! by Michael Ferris