This is part of our series to help you get more referrals whether you are in home care, home health care or hospice. Our methods have been tested and proved efficient over the years as we kept on testing our marketing to increase our referrals.
Home Health Marketers:
They are key to your business and the most expensive component. Make sure to hire the right person (a lot can be said here) and to monitor their performance.
Once hired, you would assign “a territory” to your rep to pursue and very importantly set expected monthly referral targets and revenue to achieve. This is critical to your growth and difficult to achieve without a proper digital solution that gives you an overview on all sales activities at any given time.
In order to control costs and achieve the desired growth, make sure that the base monthly salary is low but enough to sustain that person’s basic needs and then add two types of commissions: One for each referral, paid monthly and the other paid as a yearly bonus if the desired sales target was achieved (could be equal to a one-month base salary). This will ensure that home health marketer is working hard not only to bring referrals but to also generate the expected revenue.
This can be a daunting task to initiate and more importantly to follow up on if you are not subscribed to a specialized sales management platform (a CRM) that gives you full control of your sales process at any time.
It is critical that this tool comes with an easy-to-use mobile app so that your home care marketer record all daily tasks and achievements without resisting using it. Ideally such app would have a feature allowing you to see where your marketers went, what they incurred in expenses (with a receipt photo) and automatically compute mileage costs. There are plenty of good platforms on the market that will help you control the sales process that you are so heavily invested in.
Have a great website and SEO:
In many instances, this is your client’s main entry point to your home health care or hospice agency and is a key to marketing your home health agency. Make sure it is modern, clear and simple to use. Collect and post your testimonials and write content that will help you in your SEO rankings on search engines. For that, make use of what you think are key words that people would search for and critically important is to write and post on your website relevant articles periodically so that Google “crawls them” and pushes you further up in the SEO rankings. Ask your suppliers, customers to have a “backlink” to your website and you will do the same to point to their website. A great weapon to boost your ranking position!
If needs be hire consultants:
Once your agency is up and running, you can hire one of many great consultants out there to improve your overall performance whether in marketing, human resources or finance. Companies such as Home Care Pulse or BlackTree HealthCare Consulting– now SimiTree- will help you among other things increase your patient referrals and improve your financial performance.
More to come:
What we discussed above represents part of what you need to do in order to optimize your efforts to generate home health referrals. Stay tuned to more articles that will guide you in your journey to successfully run and grow your agency!
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 1998. Contact Isoratec about CRM software at https://www.isoratec.com/
