What are the biggest mistakes home care agency owners make when building their sales process?

1. Not tracking referral sources

It’s important to see who in your network is referring to your agency. Without keeping track, it becomes impossible to measure the effectiveness of your referral partner outreach efforts.

So, when you receive any incoming call or email, it’s important that everyone on the team asks any prospective client or their family member how they heard about your agency. Keep track of how many referrals you are getting from each of your referral partners and pay close attention to see if those numbers are consistent, increasing, or decreasing.

2. Not preparing prior to sales visits

When starting out in building a referral partner network, identify 3 to 4 key referral partners in different areas such as a home health agency, a skilled nursing facility, a home hospice agency, an assisted living facility, or the case management team at a nearby hospital. Research and clearly understand what each of their needs are so that when you have the opportunity to meet you can clearly communicate to them what you can offer.

By better understanding their unique challenges, you can articulate how you can be the solution provider of choice in how your home care agency is prepared to help them.

For example, when speaking to an assisted living facility, their focus will be around maintaining their census. So, speak to how you can assist them with retaining the residents they have with services you can provide. When speaking with the case management team at the hospital, their focus will be on length of stay and rates of readmission.

So, speak to how your services can ensure a decrease in fall risk with transferring and other assistance, medication adherence with reminders, or even maintaining post-hospital appointments with transportation assistance.

3. Not getting to know referral partners on a personal level

In home care, developing referral partnerships is largely a relationship sale. By nurturing personal relationships, you’ll generate more consistent referrals from your referral partners. Expecting instant results is likely to end in disappointment. It will take time to demonstrate to referral partners that you are a trustworthy resource.

Find ways to connect such as volunteering at their organization, joining community networking groups, as well as following and commenting on social media.

4. Not having consistent and meaningful follow-ups

After having successful early interactions with referral partners, it is important to continue to stay in contact in meaningful and productive ways. For example, share feedback and outcomes of the referrals you’ve received to solidify why they made the right choice in sending you those referrals.

Additionally, you can email recent articles related to both of your industries to your referral partner with your thoughts. Another meaningful follow-up can include organizing an in-service training for your caregivers where your referral partner could speak to their knowledge and experience on a topic. Or, organize a cooperative effort in a community outreach event.

5. Not tapping into non-traditional referral sources

A lot of home care agencies focus on traditional referral sources such as home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, and assisted living facilities. There are numerous other medical and non-medical referral partners that you should consider partnering with. For example, professional fiduciaries and estate planners may be working with a client or family member who has chronic needs requiring many hours of daily caregiver services.

Additionally, there are many prospective clients from other medical referral sources such as those needing post-surgery care from cosmetic surgery or those receiving pregnancy care from an OB-GYN. Likewise, funeral directors can also be a good referral partner as families are often looking for solutions at a very stressful time which could include how a surviving spouse will be taken care of if their spouse had been their caregiver.

Lastly, don’t overlook the thought of sharing referrals with your competitors. Several agencies may not be inclined to accept certain clients due to the minimal hours of service whereas maybe you are. The opposite could be true as well. Another agency may also not have caregivers available at that moment to service a client and may send you that referral.

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