By Stephen Tweed
Looking to grow your home care business? Having trouble getting more clients because of increasing competition? Can’t seem to stretch your marketing budget far enough?
Here’s a big secret. You can increase your billable hours by 10%, 20%, even 30% without spending another dime on marketing?
How?
Improve your conversion ratio of inquiries to admissions. That is, do a better job of converting those incoming telephone calls to in-home assessments, and do a better job of converting assessments to clients.
According to the 2014 Private Duty Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse, the median overall conversion ratio for the median sized company was 40.9%. That means that for every incoming inquiry or referral phone call, 41% were converted to clients. What is your actual conversion ratio? What percent of incoming calls do you convert to an in-home assessment? The industry average is 48.6%. When you do go into the prospective client’s home for an assessment, what percent do you convert to a start-of-care? The industry average is 84.2%.
Some tips on Converting Callers
Our research at Leading Home Care and The Academy for Private Duty Home Care suggests these things you can do to convert more callers to clients:
- Have the right person answering the phone. The person who answers your phone must be charming, must be curious, and must have a heart for service.
- Engage the caller in conversation. Keep them on the line for 7 minutes
- The goal of every incoming call is to schedule an in-home assessment
- Have the right person doing in-home assessments. It’s part client service and part sales. This person needs to be able and willing to close the sale
- Track every single call that comes in. No exceptions.
Engage Your Team
For more on how you can convert callers to clients, watch the videos on this month’s edition of The Monday Morning Marketing Meeting. The MMMM is a monthly packet of tools to help you engage your office team and your marketing team in growing your business.
The Monday Morning Marketing Meeting is free to Premium Members of The Academy. If you are a Premium Member, you will be receiving your packet in an email from Jill Scott. If you are not yet a member, here’s an opportunity for a Free Trial.
