The Legendary Sales Leadership Letter 
 August 19, 2008

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Mike's Message

Dear Friend,

We only remember the gold medal winners. Coming in second is not memorable! On a recent family trip to Europe, we visited Croatia and discovered that the second longest "great wall" is in Ston, Croatia. As was pointed out to us by several proud Croatians, it is only second to the Great Wall of China in length and is visible from outer space. How many are familiar with this tremendous feat of construction? Coming in second does not gain top of mind branding.

The Olympics are another great example of this concept. The gold medal winners are remembered and the others are not. As the debate waged over how to rank countries in relative Olympic success, I read a comment from a Chinese Olympic official, “a gold medal is worth a thousand silvers.” Who wins the Olympics? Each of the Olympic power houses views this based on their stats. How you spin the situation is based on where you will come out best.

Know where your organization comes out best and sell based on being the best! If your outcomes make you the best in your market, get the news out! People like winners. If a specific program you offer is proven best, let the world know about it.

Michael Phelps establishes himself as the best of class. His eight gold medals set a new Olympic record and at the time he earned the eighth gold, he alone would rank in a tie for fifth place with other nations competing. Phelps individually generated results that beat the combined production of almost two hundred other countries! As the top medal winner, is he the best at every event in the Olympics? Of course not; he is the very best at his specialty, swimming.

Everyone in the organization should know how to proudly verbalize why yours is the best. Nobody remembers second place, so find your gold medal attribute and tell the world!

Best,

Mike Ferris

Director

Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Consulting Division

mferris@simione.com

Feature Article

Practice Makes Perfect

by Michael Ferris

Sales training is important, but it's refreshing that knowledge is even more important. Large corporations require regular sales training. Even their top sales people are sent to  training seminars on a regular basis to refine their skills. The very best sales people in all industries are constantly working to improve their productivity. Most work on a commission basis as this is the only way they can constantly raise their income. As with most professions, smart companies observe what the top performers do, and then try to emulate them.

After a home care agency or hospice takes the first step in training their sales team, they must then embark on a program of continued coaching and training. The most successful sales people are constantly improving their approach and technique, and having their knowledge refreshed. Ongoing learning is part of being a professional sales person. Sales is an art form, and it requires practice to achieve excellence.

Hiring sales people for home care and hospice requires a focus on finding those applicants that possess the personality and character necessary to deliver the results. It is better to hire someone with good sales skills and experience selling an intangible -- service. They should have the core competencies to be able to effectively do so. Careful hiring practices are essential to assembling a highly effective sales team. Do not hire anyone who is not cut out to be a sales person. The craft is one that requires practitioners that have the innate skills to be good sales people. They must be self starters and should be motivated by the desire to compete and win. They should be focused on consistently beating their own goals and setting new sales records.

The sales person should earn their way through their sales productivity. Just as a field nurse has certain productivity standards, so too, should the sales team. Set goals based on beating the referral patterns observed in the same month in prior years. Every market is different, but once you have several years of data under your belt, you should be able to predict which months are the strongest and the weakest for referrals.

Another way for the sales team to "sharpen their saw" is to maintain a sales learning library. There are many great sales books, and most are available on tape. Just visit your favorite local or online bookseller, and you will find more than enough to choose from. Make them available to the members of the sales team. Some agencies will require certain reading. If you do, make sure that the sales people submit book reports to the group. Each will find different important parts to the same sales book. By having them all report back to you and the team, everyone will get more out of the assignment. If you send a member of the sales team to a conference (such as the NAHC Annual Meeting which has many sessions on home care and hospice sales and marketing), make sure that they know that upon their return, they will have to give a report and share their knowledge with the entire team. Make attendance a reward for exceptional sales performance.

Create reminders to keep the sales concepts and practices in the minds of your sales team. Have meetings on a regular basis that allow the team to share successes and get help when they are stymied. Set up regular required e-mail reports for the sales team members to submit to sales management on a daily or weekly basis. Review the basics of sales on a regular basis with the entire team. Even your most seasoned sales people will benefit from these reminders of how it is done. All sales people get into bad habits or take shortcuts; only with regular reminder programs can you guard against this, and provide your people the support they deserve.

Goals and plans must be maintained and monitored. Goal setting can be the most motivating process if you make it become a part of the way your team operates. Each team member must take ownership of their goals, and be responsible and accountable for producing the results. Well planned activities are the way goals are achieved. There should be support in the form of current referral reports and coaching. Invest in coaching for the sales team, and the entire investment of team and coach will pay many dividends.

Finally, help the sales team make the intangible seem tangible. Selling home care and hospice services are selling intangibles. You are selling a service that most do not need when you contact them. Anything that you can do to make it tangible will pay off big time. An example would be the practice of taking telehealth reports to the physician, and showing them how their patient is progressing. If you can find out when the patient is having his or her next scheduled appointment, then you can have a fresh copy of the latest telemedicine report in the chart. This provides a tangible item that shows the doctor what is going on in the home. While most sales reps don't want to hear this, taking orders to the physicians provide a reason to be there, and tangible proof of the services being delivered. Coupling that with telemonitoring reports and any other updates on the patient will make their job much easier in the long run.

Whatever you do in the way of selling and marketing your services, don't do it halfway. Hiring sales people is only the first step. Giving them the initial training is the next. The final step is to make sure that they have ongoing support in practicing the basic sales activities. Keep them practicing and they will continue to out produce the competition. Remember that if you are marketing your services, you are in sales. Think accordingly. Act accordingly. Happy Marketing!

Sales Training Corner

Still Time to Join Us for August Square One Bootcamp!

There are just a few more days before our August Square One Bootcamp begins!  It will be held August 25 - 27 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  We still have a few seats left so sign up now!

September Square One Bootcamp Dates   Announced!

If you can't join us in August, then make plans to attend our September Square One Bootcamp:

September 29 - October 1, 2008
Courtyard Marriott Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

Reserve your seat now!  You have two registration options:

To lock in a seat with a $500 deposit, click here.

To lock in a seat with your full payment, click here.

Click here to view a brief video of what makes the Square One Bootcamp experience so special!

52 Week eSales Training Course

Our groundbreaking and highly-acclaimed 52 Week eSales Training Course is available for one to one hundred students.  It provides a weekly lesson (takes about 30 minutes to complete) that will keep your sales team members' skills sharp. Students have said that the course supported them in becoming better at their profession, increased their referrals and forced them to review the basics. On average, our 52 Week eLearning participants have increased their referrals by over 31%! 

"With the help of the 52 Week eSales Training Course, I have been able to increase our accounts by approximately 20% and have increased referrals and admits by an even greater percent.  Thank you, and my company also thanks you!" -- Barbara Edmisten, Highland Hospice

Special offer for Sales Leadership Letter subscribers:  Enroll up to 10 students for one low price of $599 (does not include audio CDs)!  Click here to take advantage of this offer.
 

Sales Tip

Hire People Who Can Sell

Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? We constantly are barraged with questions about how to hire the "right" sales people. Many of the questions center around generalities such as, “can nurses sell?” or “should we hire pharmaceutical reps?” or “we only hire people who know home health or hospice.”

The difficulty with each of these statements or questions is that you have to hire the person. Start with the expected results to be generated -- grow referrals through their sales efforts. Start by hiring people who have a demonstrated track record of sales success. They must be able to demonstrate their aptitude for selling an intangible, handling problems and a drive to succeed. Hire those who will best represent your organization in the community. Select sales people who are passionate about making a difference.

Hire the best! Be very selective in your hiring process. Just as you would only hire the best medical professionals, so too should you approach the sales professionals in your organization. Use proven sales interview processes and stick to your game plan. Don’t immediately fall in love with a candidate and start violating your basic premises.

Here are a few common don’ts based upon our experience:

• Don't hire a sales candidate because they are a nurse. Hire them because they can sell. Nurses that are great sales people are many times the perfect solution, but, don’t think that you can teach them to be a sales person if it is not who they are. Having a nursing degree is a plus, but is not the key consideration.

• Don’t hire a sales candidate because they have a background in pharmaceuticals. Selling pharmaceuticals is completely different from selling home care or hospice. We have seen super stars who come with drug sales experience, but there have been way too many who were miserable failures.

• Don’t hire a sales candidate because they have sold for a competitor. Too many times the assumption is made that a sales person can bring their referral relationships with them from a competitor. Be wary of this scenario. If the relationship with the referral sources is purely a personal one with the sales person, then they have done a poor job of selling the agency they represented. Expect a significant lag time with the best sales people with prior home care or hospice sales experience as they resell their referral partners on the value added of working with your group. 

Sales Leadership

Call Coaching
Overcome the Resistance

The fear. In all of our work with referral and admission managers, the toughest challenge is to get them to listen to incoming referral calls. Yet it's the most critical thing they can do to help referral coordinators overcome caller delays, referral source concerns, and scheduling barriers. But it just doesn't happen. Why?

Both the manager and coordinator are so uncomfortable with the listening process that it's avoided like the plague. Yet any quality process involves periodic supervision and coaching so that new skills and behaviors can be implemented. After all, aren't supervisory visits part of the QA imperative for field staff and care teams?

One-sided doesn't work. Many managers think that just casually hearing one side of the conversation is enough for coaching purposes. One manager recently said that she listens when she's in there and can correct them then. But what we've found is that the most important part of the call is what the caller says, not what we say. Referral coordinators often miss the cues (subtle and otherwise) that come from directly hearing the caller's requests and responses.

The fix. Here are a few tips that may help overcome the monitoring fear factor:

Monitoring methods. Part of the resistance is that the dual headset used (so that both parties can hear the conversation) is clumsy. It's not the headset per se, but the cords running everywhere that are the problem. So try to set it up in a way that minimizes disruption of the typical work environment and desktop. Try to run the cords behind the desk and have the manager sit to the side of the coordinator versus right next to her.

Better yet, see if you can upgrade your phone and computer system so that calls can be tracked and monitored from the manager's desk. Rather than sitting next to staff, a manager can view the incoming call log, select a call to monitor, and listen right from the comfort of his or her own office.

The more the easier. The more consistent the monitoring occurs, the easier it becomes for both manager and staff. If it's only done once a quarter, it becomes a nerve-wracking event. If, on the other hand, it's done for at least an hour 3 times a week (the minimum we advise), then it's just part of the process and is much more acceptable.
 

Questions and Answers

Reader Questions and Answers

In each Legendary Sales Leadership Letter, we answer your questions.  Send them to us or call (800) 653-4043 and we'll make sure that yours are answered in a future issue. 

Here are this week's questions answered:

Question:

How can my sales reps help discharge planners convince the physician that hospice is appropriate? The discharge planners are often left with the task of talking to families if hospice is chosen and my reps offer to be available for those consults. Are there any methods that would assist them in relaying information to the patient AND physicians in addition to the educational materials they receive? 

Answer:

The number one complaint from discharge planners related to physicians and hospice is their belief that doctors don't know much about hospice. Many times your sales people are on the same side as they are and any way that they can help educate the physician will benefit them as well. Work with the discharge planners to find out where their frustrations lie. And remember, the number one thing that they want from a hospice is easy and quick to refer.

Question:

Do you think large lunch and learns for physicians' offices really work?

Answer:

I don't think so in most cases. Certainly not as a way to get in the door. There are too many people and you will not set yourself apart from everyone else who is falling into the huge practice lunch trap. Work on specific doctors and their staff within the office and you will be much more successful in the long term. If you have some doctors referring and are trying to expand in the practice, that's when you may want to consider taking lunch (or breakfast/snack -- they are much easier and less expensive).

Question:

What should be my qualifying criteria in trying to determine my A prospects and A star prospects? P.S. The number of admissions, number of procedures, payer mix, would be important but what are the key elements to make the final determination?

Answer:

In most agencies the determining factor is number of Medicare Admissions.

As a rule of thumb, you can manage about 25 'A' and super 'A' accounts.  They should be seen once a week and will take about 60% of your time to service and manage them.

Most agencies are defining an 'A' account as being one that generates at least one admission per month or 12 - 18 per year. It will vary based on your territory. The super 'A' accounts are usually 18 or more per year.

Most have a distribution of approximately 20 'A's' and 5 super 'A's."

The other determining factors are potential and type of referral. If you have to pick between top accounts, look at what the potential is for each account. What percentage of their business are you getting now and how much more do you think is achievable? Some will have more desirable patients than others and that will come into making final determination of how to allocate your time.
 

Ask Polly

Admissions: What's on Your Dashboard?
By Polly Rehnwall

You may not know it, but your CEO and CFO are looking at certain pieces of information that they consider important enough to know on a daily basis. That's what's on their dashboard. But what's on yours? What do you need to look at every day in order to stay on top of your referral and admission activity?

Here are eight key outcomes that should be tracked and reviewed daily. The report should be on your desk by 9 a.m. and should reflect all the activity that occurred the previous day. It doesn't have to be fancy, but we discourage handwritten reports, as we want to make better use of the electronic tools at our disposal. But however you get it, what's important is that you're actually receiving it and acting upon it as needed.

Key Referral Outcomes

1. Total new referrals. How many referrals came in yesterday (including those vague information requests which we know are referrals)? Remember, this includes those where we forgot to ask their name. Plus, if your liaisons are getting direct referrals in the hospital (a no-no in our book, as they should all come through the referral center), these need to be included in the daily tally as well.

2. Scheduled visits. This is absolutely the #1 indicator of census growth today! Of the new referrals that came in, how many did we schedule for a visit? No excuses allowed! Don't leave some out because the family didn't call back yet. Remember, there are tactics we can use that can generate an earlier return call. For the referrals without a scheduled visit, indicate why, using the reason codes from AdmitRight or your referral tracking system.

3. Scheduled same day. This is absolutely the #1 indicator of length of stay today! Of the visits scheduled, how many did we schedule the same day? No excuses here either! Family out of town? How creative were we in figuring out how to get a consent signed when they're out of town? Here again, for those visits that weren't same day, a reason code needs to be listed.

Key Visit Outcomes

4. Consents signed. Of the initial visits we went on, how many resulted in signed consents? There may be reasons why they weren't signed (no POA, no patient available at the visit, etc.) but once again, we need to document why there was a negative outcome. The reason may be valid, but you want to know why.

5. Patients admitted. Obviously, this is the million dollar question. This is your census and is the most visible indicator of meeting your mission. Once more, if they weren't admitted, why not?

6. Same day admits. Last, but certainly not least, of the admissions that occurred, how many occurred on the same day as the referral? This is directly related to length of stay and the quality of your program. The reason not admitted same day can be traced directly back to why the visit wasn't scheduled the same day as the referral.

Key Pending Outcomes

7. Total pending referrals. Whether visited or not, indicate how many referrals are on your pending list. Working this list is one of the most important tasks that your referral center team should be doing daily!

8. Admissions scheduled. Of the pending referrals, how many have an admission scheduled and when will it occur? We know why the visit wasn't originally scheduled, so you don't need to indicate that here, but make sure you know what's finally getting done.
 

About Us

Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Consulting Division

Supercharge Your Referrals, Revenues and Profits!

Headed by two industry powerhouses -- Michael Ferris and Polly Rehnwall -- Our Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Consulting Division is designed to give you the easiest experience possible by providing the most comprehensive solutions to supercharge your referrals, revenues and profits!

If it only took one phone call to deal with all your marketing and sales needs, would you make it?

In an environment of growing competition and shrinking margins, you have to increase volume and improve market share in order to be successful. That means having a skilled sales team, quality marketing strategies and a customer service model that improves your conversion of referrals to admissions.

With every type of solution we provide, you won’t just beat the competition -- you’ll establish your competitive advantage for years to come!

Our Proven Process:

• Evaluate and assess talent, model and process

• Design customized solutions

• Assist with implementation

• Coach your staff

• Train your sales people

• Support your organization's continued success

Delivering optimal results begins with an evaluation of your sales, marketing and customer service program in order to design solutions custom tailored to your agency and your area. Our experts know home health and hospice, bringing years of marketing and sales experience and best practices to you.

Customized Solutions:

Have one or a few specific needs?  We can guide you through creation and implementation quicker and with more success than anyone else.  Below is just a small sample of our capabilities:

• On-site Sales, Marketing, or Customer Service Consulting and Training

• Referral and Admission Management Consulting and Training

• Square One Sales Bootcamp

• Marketing Program Development

• Interview Sales Candidates Video training / Corporate Videos

• Collateral Materials, Sales Letters, and Advertising Consulting

• Mystery Shopping / Market Analysis

With just one phone call, you can tap into all the resources and knowledge of the home care industry’s touchstone consulting powerhouse -- Simione Consultants.

We have an ability no other company can offer -- the only one stop shop to handle all your marketing and sales needs.

Home Care Consulting Pioneers

Simione Consultants, LLC was the first organization of its kind dedicated entirely to home care -- a commitment we continue to maintain today.  For more than 40 years, we have demonstrated we understand and are responsive to the changing and diverse business needs of home care and hospice organizations.

Value Driven, Success Outcomes

More than 800 home care organizations have trusted the team of experts at Simione Consultants, LLC to get them through the challenges of yesterday and today, and to gain the leading edge for tomorrow.  We provide expert assistance to hospital-based and hospital-affiliated agencies, visiting nurse associations, hospices, small proprietary agencies, and large national chains.  The size, capabilities and commitment of our uniquely qualified consulting staff offer unparalleled industry insights and innovative yet practical solutions.  Our track record of engagements with successful client outcomes is unmatched.
 

Closing Thoughts

As the Olympics come to a close, we have been exposed to the stories of these amazing athletes. The one common ingredient is a singular dedication to be the very best at what they do. They have a consistent and programmatic training regimen. Every preparatory activity is carefully orchestrated to deliver optimal performance. Are your sales people prepared to win gold?

As a reader of the Legendary Sales Leadership Letter, you know how important sales training is to your long-term success. We have seen our training clients continue to grow their referrals, retain key sales personnel and nurture their most important asset -- the relationship with their referral partners.

The Square One Bootcamp came into existence three years ago when one of our training clients suggested it as a way to train their new sales people. I have worked with this particular client for over four years, conducting on-site training and providing strategic consulting. Each of their new sales people attend the Square One Bootcamp as part of their training and orientation.

Regular sales meetings and sales training are essential to the professional growth of your sales people. We can construct a customized sales training program to fit any situation, one that will empower your sales team to hit new record heights in referral production. When conducting your annual sales meeting, we will bring the best home care and hospice specific training program to you. Our forte is developing customized training solutions to fit our clients' varied needs.

Let me know how we can support you in achieving your goals for 2009 and beyond!

Best Regards and Happy Selling!

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