Sales optimization and management is a key component for any successful business, including post-acute care providers. Agencies hire home health marketers to promote their services with key referral source accounts hoping to increase referrals for their home health, hospice and home infusions agencies. Such accounts can be Physicians, Hospitals, Assisted Daily Living facilities, etc.

But hiring and employing marketers is very expensive and very difficult to manage, especially because they are always in the field, away from you. How can you ensure that they are doing all they can to promote your services and get new referrals to keep you thriving?

It all starts by using a proper Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) enabling you to monitor their sales effort from anywhere you are. This will let you know who they reached out to, when and the outcome of their sales efforts.  But this is not enough unless you can measure their performance against a number of benchmarks that would translate into points and then into an overall grade per sales person. Such system would display “the points” earned by each home care marketer at any given time. But what are points?

In order to rate the real performance of a home health and hospice marketers, points should be earned and accumulated (or subtracted) based on many criteria such as generated referrals, visits, phone calls, emails, accomplished tasks, overdue tasks, missed tasks and so on. As a manager you should be able to set the points that will be earned for each sales effort and the needed total points equivalent to an A/B/C or D grade per sales rep. This will result in a “Grade Weighted Average” that will let you optimize your sales process and increase your referrals and hence revenue.

How? Let me explain at least one scenario. Let’s assume that one rep is well connected and thanks to that generates a few good referrals monthly but hardly does any visits, phone calls, etc. In such case, you’d want to meet with your rep, congratulate him/her for the referrals while asking that more contacts be made with referral sources to get additional referrals.

On the other hand, you may have a hard-working marketer accumulating a lot of points by contacting/meeting the referral sources but with a poor score generating referrals. Here also, you would sit down with this person to understand why referrals are not being generated and suggest a solution to accomplish that.

This is one scenario and many others are possible but no matter the scenario, a Grade Card Report will definitely optimize your sales process in order to ensure that the money invested in a marketer is well spent.

The other very important point is that the Grade Card Report for all home care marketers will be seen by the entire sales team, igniting a healthy inter-office competition to boost your sales effort.

One advice is to include this report in your home dashboard to keep a constant eye on your sales reps’ efforts because before you know it, sales can start lagging without you realizing it. Then it may be too late to act!

In conclusion, we truly believe that a Grade Card Report embedded in your CRM is vital to fairly measure the performance of your marketers and boost your revenue, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Good luck selling and achieving growth!

Tony J. Onaissi is the founder and CEO of Isoratec, a home care technology company, and of Home Care Lebanon, a home health and home infusion business he founded in 1997. Contact Isoratec about CRM software at https://www.isoratec.com/