Home Care Growth Kit: Sales Tips to Blow Away the Competition
Today's Home Care Growth Kit chapter is all about finding manageable ways for your agency to increase sales as effectively and easy as possible. Most of our "Growth Kit" series shares our own best practices and advice from multiple industry experts, but for this topic we're relying heavily on content from Steve the Hurricane , including his famous slogan "Blow Away the Competition."
These tips move from easier to harder:
Everyone who answers your phone needs to be able to elegantly handle a sales call
Let's face it, there are lots of phone calls that come into your home care agency, ranging from "where's my caregiver." to "my mom went into the hospital today," to "I quit [from a caregiver]" and more. The team members answering the phone need to handle each of these calls differently. Sometimes the needed response is compassion. Sometimes it's "sense of urgency." Other times you need to sternly but fairly get caregivers to do what they're supposed to be doing.
But the bottom line is that the "My mom needs care" call is different and anyone who answers the phone needs to handle the call the right way. There's an adage that "You only get one chance to make a good first impression."
Here's a great video on how to handle the incoming prospect call:
Get the Right Kind of Home Care Clients
The decision for a family to get home care for the first time is a tough one. The family may have been putting it off because of mom's protests, or maybe because they don't know how to deal with the long term care insurance, etc.
Going back to the well with Steve, he has defined a way of finding the best clients that will result in the most growth for your agency. He calls them NERDs.
Learn more in this Video:
Tips for Breaking Through Your Home Care Agency's Revenue Plateaus
Next up is some advice from Home Care Pulse about how to break through revenue plateaus .
The article starts by sharing a number of rad flags that your agency should be monitoring for. Some of them are obvious like seeing a reduction in hiring levels or inquiries, but others are more subtle. Your staff should review these regularly and put plans in place to address them.
But then it gives you a strong play book for how to overcome the hurdles. Here are a few of the ideas:
- Increasing Caregiver retention helps you increase sales
- Nurture Referral Sources
- Keep your website fresh
- Ask happy customers to review your agency on Google
- Review and Revise Your Strategic Plan
Here's a link to the full article .
Get More Google Reviews
Following upon the suggestion to increase your Google Reviews, Home Care Marketing Pros (formerly Providentia Marketing) shared a great article on exactly how to do that. The title is Effective Techniques to get more Customer Reviews on Google . As a preview, the article tells outlines the following strategy:
- Communicate the Value of Reviews to your Staff
- Ask for Reviews in Person
- Make it as easy as possible to leave a review
- Showcase and Engage with the Reviews you receive
- Keep Exceptional Service as your Focus
Here's a link to the full article .
Big Idea: Field Coordinators
Another really big idea we learned at a recent conference with Steve the Hurricane whose company has recently been rebranded as Home Care Evolution , is the idea of field coordinators.
We'll do a full article about this, but here's a preview:
- The idea is to promote a small number of your best caregivers to be field coordinators.
- These coordinators should visit each client/caregiver pair on a regular basis, and you should charge a premium for this service (at roughly twice your usual hourly rate).
- Once you have these coordinators on staff you can differentiate in a lot of ways, including:
- When a key prospect (read about NERDs above) inquires, you can send a field coordinator to meet the client and their family within one hour.
- You can start cases same day or next day by staffing with your field coordinators (at a premium rate) and blow away competitors who offer "a caregiver in two weeks."
- With field coordinators, you can take on clients that aren't quite ready for home care and have your field coordinators visit them (for a premium fee) for short visits
- These coordinators also raise the level of care across your organization and boost your reputation
We hope that these tips help you and your team accelerate sales and help your business thrive!
If you have any questions about how Ankota's home care management software can help your business, please click below to contact us!
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us .
Kenyon Homecare Consulting can help you with all of your agency's needs. Whether you need assistance with your start-up, recruitment and retention, clinical or operational issues, regulatory compliance, or financial concerns, we can help. Call us today at 206-721-5091 or contact us online to see how we can help you reach your goals
Kenyon Homecare Consulting reposted this article with permission of Jed Hammel who authored it and originally posted it to the Ankota Blog.
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