By Stephen Tweed 
What are you doing to grow your private pay home care business in 2018? Are you out there identifying referral sources, making contacts, building relationships, and asking for referrals? Are you considering hiring a sales rep to call on referral sources?
All of the data from the annual Home Care Benchmarking Report from Home Care Pulse show that the best way to grow your business is to make personal sales calls on high potential referral sources.
The first email I opened the other day was from a customer who had attended one of our Private Duty Field Trips. He was asking for a few minutes on the telephone to talk about hiring a new sales rep. We set up a time to talk later that afternoon.
My client explained that he had successfully applied a number of the ideas he had gathered at the field trip and had hit a new high in his billable hours per week. However, he had been the owner, CEO, marketer, and chief sales person, and his business had hit a plateau. He felt it was time to hire a sales person to extend his reach and continue to grow his business.
We talked about the process of defining the role of the sales person, developing a Role Clarity Worksheet, using our online sales assessment to select the right candidate, and how to on-board the new person.
How to Get Started
“That sounds great,” he said, “but how do I train this new person in the process of selling. I know how I do it, but I don’t know how to teach someone else how to sell home care.”
That is a really important concern. Over the past ten years, I’ve talked with a hundred or so home care company owners who have gone through the process of hiring an outside sales person. While I didn’t specifically count them, I would say that 30% of them were successful in hiring the right person. 70% of them had to let their new sales person go within the first year. Most of them waited to long to make a change. They probably should have pulled the plug after 60 or 90 days.
After our conversation, I offered a suggestion to my caller. Several years ago I wrote an e-Book for home care owners called Six Secrets to Selling Private Duty Home Care. It is a step by step system to connect with high potential referral sources, develop a personal relationship, and persuade them to refer potential clients to your company. I sent him a link to the book
https://ceoforum.leadinghomecare.com/store/books-bundles/
Six Secrets
Since you are a loyal reader of Home Care CEO Report, I thought I’d share the six secrets with you today. If you like what you see, I’ll show you how to learn more.
- Find the Right Prospects – There is a huge difference in the total dollar value of a client from one referral source to another. You need to know where your best clients come from.
- Make More Calls – The most successful sales professionals in home care make more calls, and more productive calls than the not-so-successful sales reps.
- People Buy from People They Like – First you need to hire a sales professional who is likeable. Then they need to know how to develop rapport with the prospect. All things being equal, people would rather buy from a friend. All things being unequal, people would still rather buy from a friend.
- Be More Interested in Them Than They Are in You – The greatest sales pros in home care ask great questions and show interest in the prospect as a person before they begin to present your agency’s programs and services.
- Master the Four P’s of a Powerful, Persuasive, Presentation. – Presenting your offering to a potential referral source is no accident. The best sales pros have a clear process of Strategic Storytelling to present their company and its services. They connect with the emotions of the buyer through a well planned and executed presentation.
- Ask for the Order — Again and Again and Again. – The best sales pros are closers. They keep asking for the order until then get it. The sales losers leave behind a brochure with the offer, “If I can help you please give me a call.” There are some proven ways to ask for the order.
- Bonus Secret – Here’s one more bonus secret – “Be a Fred”. What does that mean? That’s the secret. You’ll need to read the book to find out.
Before I sent the link for our bookstore to my caller, I went to my own digital book shelf and pulled up a copy. I took 30 minutes to go back and re-read my own book. “Wow,” I said. “Who wrote this? There’s some really good stuff in here.” 😊
If you are serious about hiring and training a high performing sales professional, or you would like to build your own home care sales skills, you can order a copy of Six Secrets to Selling Private Duty Home Care. There’s some really good stuff in there that really works.
My Personal Guarantee
I’ll give you my personal guarantee. If you read the book and do what it says, you’ll get enough new business in the first 30 days to pay for the book ten times over. If not, call me and I’ll give you your money back – 502-339-0653
And If You Liked That
If you like the Six Secrets e-Book, there are two more e-Books in our books store to help you grow your hours and numbers of clients:
- Increase Your Income Selling to Bank Trust Officers and Other Trusted Advisors – Our data show that the clients with the highest dollar value to you come from “Trusted Advisors” – bank trust officers, estate attorneys, and Geriatric Care Managers. Here’s how to find them and connect with them to earn referrals.
- Capture The Caller: Turning Inquiries into Admissions in Private Duty Home Care – You can increase your revenue without spending another dime on marketing if you improve your conversion ratio. That’s the percentage of inquiries that you convert to customers.
