I have been in the home health care and home infusion industry for over 27 years and what I am about to discuss applies to your business.
For your agency to succeed, increase referrals and sustain the test of time you need to make sure that key elements are well in place, regularly updated and verified. I mean policies and procedures, digital tools, human resources processes, financials, marketing, sales and quality assurance that all go hand in hand.
I will limit my discussion here to sales and marketing that are key to increase referrals for your home health or hospice agency. Before even hiring your sales team, you must have spent time and resources marketing your hospice or home health care agency. This implies at least a simple, modern and easy to navigate website, a good 1st page ranking on search engines and/or the use of Google’s AdWords, an active presence on social media platforms, collecting testimonials from your clients and communicating with them.
Only then can you start hiring people to promote and sell your hospice and home care services. This is one of the most expensive if not The Most Expensive component of your Sales and Marketing investment.
Your marketer must be courteous, likeable, properly dressed, energetic, honest and knowledgeable. Not easy to find all such requirements in one person! The good news is that it is of course possible if you spend the time to search and properly conduct interviews and tests.
Once hired, you would assign “a territory” to your home health care or hospice rep to pursue and very importantly set expected monthly hospice and/or home care referral targets and revenue to achieve. This is critical to grow and get hospice or home care referrals 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 your home health marketer is working hard not only to bring home bound 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 agency’s marketers 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.
I hope that sharing my experience in home health care, home infusion and hospice along with software development will help in your efforts to achieve growth and happiness in your own endeavors.
I can be reached by contacting Isoratec as shown below.
(201) 350-5390 direct
