HomecareCRM Industry Insights
| Making Room for Sales in Home Care | |
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 Making Room for Sales in Home CareIt’s Friday night, and you’re visiting your favorite restaurant. You have a reservation, but you arrive to find a one-hour wait. Now, imagine that this same scenario plays out week after week. How long would you continue to return, no matter how delicious the food, if the service was poor? Now, imagine that you are a patient waiting for care, or you are a referring physician who needs treatment for a patient. No matter what level of care you offer patients, referrals will dry up if service is sluggish. One contributing factor to poor home care service is the industry’s blatant aversion to sales and sales training. According to a February 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal, the home care industry is expected to top $4 billion by 2013. Considering the country’s current economic situation, this number represents staggering growth. We are incredibly fortunate to be in one of the fastest growing industries in the country, an industry that justifies wise investment – in good people, good training, and good systems. However, it is unsettling to see how many home care companies are hesitant to address their sales efforts. Sales are what drive business in every industry, but we in the home care industry choose to hide salespeople under titles like “patient care representative” or “patient service consultant”. Whatever the titles, these salespeople are the front line for growth in your company. At a time when the industry is expecting its greatest influx of new companies and new clients, it is time that home care embraces sales in order to achieve continued success. Soft Titles, Not Soft Practices Due to the delicate nature of our industry, most companies feel the need to cloak sales under obscure titles in order to avoid alienating clients and referral sources. However, a soft title does not have to mean soft sales practices. If you dance around sales, you make your front line employees ineffective. Most “sales” employees are former nurses or medical care professionals. These pros are well-versed in patient care, but most have little to no sales training. Even if you provide training to these employees, very few have the extensive sales knowledge it takes prioritize time, cost, and effort when executing a sales strategy. Without great training, managerial support, and a well-rounded sales plan, employees are forced to be reactive rather than proactive. Something else to consider is the way your salespeople approach referrals. Home care salespeople tend to pattern themselves after other healthcare sales practices, touting freebies, giveaways, and meals for the staff rather than identifying something of real value for their clients. For example, home care salespeople could promote a superior level of customer service, offering to keep physicians and referral sources informed of patient status, admissions, discharges, service levels, re-hospitalizations, and more. This type of follow-up is almost unheard of and considerably more valuable than a steak dinner. Another issue caused by lack of sales-specific training is that salespeople tend to repeatedly target the same core group of referral sources. They get comfortable with their referral base, and they are rarely active in recruiting new referral sources. Haphazardly choosing referral sources is a huge time-waster. An easy way to streamline new sales efforts is for salespeople to research other potential referral sources in close proximity to some existing relationships. That way, when they call on current referral sources, they can leverage those trips to open new doors. Additionally, access to industry research can give your salespeople the opportunity to consider potential margins, volume, or market share when choosing which new referral sources to pursue. If your salespeople are taught to be proactive and consistent in their pursuits of new referral sources, you will see a measurable increase in your referral conversion percentage. Moving Past the Stigma of Sales Because of the fractured position the industry takes on sales, front line employees are often mismanaged. Patient care representatives are expected to do the job of both administrators and salespeople. This dual role causes oversights of vital information and processes. These missteps actually diminish the level of patient care, the very thing our industry claims to value most. Mismanagement of sales will ultimately result in loss of growth for your company. When constructing territories and quota assignments, management often neglects to consider referral potential. If territories and quota are assigned arbitrarily without performing territory and referral potential analysis, your front line people have little chance to succeed. And, unlike other industries, most home care companies do not offer comp and incentive plans based on actual employee performance. As an industry, we fall short in proactively reviewing how our employees spend their time and what results this produces. Management tends to avoid performing systematic overviews of employees’ performance, coaching up and/or replacing as a result of this analysis. All of these functions are performed regularly by management in every other industry. Home care must move past the stigma of “sales” in order to grow in a healthy and productive way. Who Dictates Your Growth? In order to fill the holes in existing sales and marketing strategies, we must empower and create compelling incentives for salespeople. We must provide employees with the arsenal of information, training, and tools they need to be successful. Management should aid reps in identifying missed referral potential. Home care reps must be confident in the competitive advantages their company can offer to patients and referral sources. The most successful home care companies give employees access to real-time, fluid information, helping them understand the daily dynamic of how their business is evolving based on management and market issues – not stale resources and outdated materials. As a home care provider, you would never send a nurse into a home without the training and materials he or she needs to get the job done. Yet, year over year, the industry allows patient service consultants – with little sales training and virtually no sales support - to dictate its growth. Home care is an industry with a huge heart. Patient care is top priority. However, by ignoring sales, the home care industry is doing a great disservice to both patients and employees. Without appropriate tools and training, employees are forced to manage care plans, referrals, their own expenditures and mileage, billing, and the order signature process for 485’s, certs, re-certs, and more. Bogged down by these processes, patient care is delayed. In fact, the average time for order sign off is currently 1-3 weeks. This statistic is almost embarrassing. A patient waiting for care due to process-based failures is unacceptable to that patient and his/her family. Delay in patient care also affects your revenue. If a physician or other referral source finds your company’s practices archaic and neglectful, that source is likely to give future referrals to a competitor. By addressing sales head-on, home care has a chance to grow in a way that is both manageable and sustainable. And well-trained sales professionals never lose their heart for patient care; they just do a better job helping their companies deliver service efficiently. Sales are not optional. The only way to achieve continued industry success is to provide employees with the tools needed to perform their jobs: appropriate sales training, tools, and management. |
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