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Stephen Tweed's Leading Home Care Report #16
The Magic is in the Mix: Seven Steps to Grow Your Home Care Business August 14, 2003
Welcome Jason, ...to this special report for CEOs and senior executives
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The Magic is in the Mix: Seven steps to grow your home care business
I agreed and spent a wonderful six months working with the senior leadership team to develop strategies for growth and to get the company ready for the new CEO. Mary Lynn Spalding joined the company in February 2000 and has done a superb job of completing the turnaround. As I worked with the leadership team at VNA to develop a strategy to grow the business and turn around the challenging financial picture created by IPS, we recognized the need to examine our competitive position in the marketplace. Although VNA had been the market leader for many years and was aligned with the premier hospital system in the community, we were not getting all of the business we deserved. Our competitive analysis showed that two of our major competitors, both regional proprietary chains, had very strong sales and marketing functions. They had focused on earning the business of patients coming out of our hospital, and they were successful in taking some market share. Since that time, I have worked with hundreds of home care companies across the country in developing strategies to grow their businesses. A major area of opportunity is in sales and marketing. Many years ago I was attending a convention of the National Speakers Association. (I just ended my term as President of NSA two weeks ago at our convention in New Orleans.) One of the presenters was a long time friend and mentor, Nido Qubein, from High Point, North Carolina. Nido was talking about growing our speaking businesses. His message was, "The Magic is in the mix." There is no one best sales or marketing tool. Instead, it is the mix of highly effective tools and techniques that persuades your customer to buy from you instead of your competitors. The same principle applies to home care. The magic is in the mix of tools and techniques you use to let your customers and potential customers know about your uniqueness. Here is a seven-step process you can use to grow your home care business using a mix of sales and marketing tools: 1. Assess your current reality Take time to step back from the day-to-day busy-ness of running your agency and objectively assess your current position in the home care marketplace in your community. Here are some questions that will help you: What is your current size relative to your major competitors? How rapidly is your agency growing? How is your agency positioned in your marketplace? How is your agency viewed in the employment marketplace? What do your patient satisfaction scores tell you? 2. Set Your Direction How do you want to grow your company? In our work with leadership teams in setting strategy for growth, we use a concept called the growth matrix. It explores four specific strategies to grow your company: I. Penetration: Sell more of your current products and services to your current market. II. Expansion: Sell your current products and services in new markets. In home care, this often means geographic expansion. III. Innovation: Develop new programs and services to sell in your current market. IV. Diversification: Develop new programs and services to sell in new markets. This is the danger quadrant. When you invest in totally new products for totally new markets, you are moving into unknown territory and you run great risk of failure. 3. Define your uniqueness What is it that makes you unique in your marketplace? What makes your programs and services different from your competitors? You need to be able to convince your potential customers that you are better prepared to meet their needs than your competitors. Otherwise, you are just a commodity and the only difference is price. And you don't want to be positioned as the bargain basement of home care. 4. Master the Art of Strategic Selling Strategic Selling is the process of using your uniqueness to persuade your potential customers to buy what you are selling. You persuade them that your home care company is better prepared to meet their needs, wants, and expectations more effectively than other home care companies in your marketplace. The strategic selling process has seven steps:
1. Prospecting You need to master the skills in each of these seven steps. 5. Support your sales effort with a creative mix of promotion Marketing and promotion are the things you do to open the door for selling, and to make your phone ring with prospective customers. It's much easier to sell a prospective customer who calls you than it is to make a cold call. Effective sales promotion can go a long way to helping you build the relationships you need to grow your business. Here are the top techniques for marketing and promoting home care services:
* Sales support materials 6. Recruit capable people There is a truism that we have observed over and over again in home care. "The company with the best people wins!" If you are a great place to work and can attract and retain the very best people, you will be a winner in the marketplace. Customer relations are a mirror image of employee relations. When you hire and retain great people, they will take great care of your patients and customers. That means that recruiting and retention are key parts of your marketing strategy. If you convince people to buy what you are selling but then you can't deliver because you can't get the staff, you have a disappointed customer. If you convince people to buy because of exceptional service but the staff member you send out has a negative attitude, you have a disappointed customer. If you convince a doctor to give you a referral and then the nurse you send out botches the relationship with the physician, you have a disappointed customer. Finding and keeping top talent is a key part of your strategy to grow your business. 7. Measure and manage your growth. We have a saying in our company; "What gets measured gets managed. What gets rewarded gets repeated." If you want to grow your company, start measuring the results of your sales and marketing activities. Report the results to your senior leadership team every month and make the results a key agenda item. You'll find that attention gets focused on sales. The results will be increased numbers of referrals, admissions, and revenue dollars. Remember that there's no one right answer. The Magic is in the Mix.
Let Leading Home Care help you master the magic of the mix!
September Teleseminar on "The Magic is in the Mix"
You won't want to miss this opportunity to explore new ways to reach out to your customers and prospective customers. You'll learn new ways to persuade them to buy home care services from you instead of from your competitors. Sign up today! Just click on the link below.
Click here to register for your next Teleseminar
It's not too late to sign up for Today's Teleseminar
As the home care marketplace becomes more competitive, you need to make sure your customers are not just satisfied. They need to be delighted, enthusiastic, overjoyed! We begin at 1:00 P.M. Eastern time today, Thursday, August 14, 2003. Click on the link below and register right now. Diane will send you the phone number, the pass code, and the learning guide for you to copy and distribute. Get everyone in your company who influences customer experiences and have them listen in. You'll be delighted with the results!
The Customer Service Companion: The essential handbook for those who serve others
Here are some snippets of wit and wisdom from Leslie Charles: "Serving customers can sometimes be stressful. Having no customers is even more stressful." "If you're having a bad day, keep it a secret. Most people don't want to know. And some are having a worse day than you." "Service is an exercise in personal leadership. Look at the best leaders. They don't lead. They serve." "Practicing good service means you will go home feeling good about yourself instead of bad about others." To order your personal copy call 1-888-668-9333 today, or click on the link below: Order the Customer Service Companion online now!
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