One of the biggest challenges your organization faces is in getting enough referrals for the company to remain profitable. Many times, organizations think they can get enough business from just websites and word of mouth and I will tell you, these are the ones that typically don’t succeed.

If you look around at the top 5 organizations in your market, I guarantee you that they have a sales representative or a team of sales representatives. If you ask agency leadership, “what is the biggest challenge your sales representatives face today when trying to gain new business?” The answers are usually the same.

1.  Staffing.

2.  Having a Sales Rep that can get past the gatekeeper.

3.  Gaining relationships with the hospitals.

4.  Contracting with insurance companies.

5.  Leadership can’t relate to sales team personality and demands.

Today I want to share with you a few tips so you can get past the gatekeeper and gain more private duty, home health, and hospice referrals.

Here are your 5 tips to learn how to overcome the 5 Challenges:

1.  CHALLENGE: Staffing.

Buy the Recruiting and Retention program. One tip from the program will be worth 10X the cost. So many companies waste money by placing ads that aren’t effective. So many ads are placed and potential candidates are lost to a slow culture at an organization. This program will help you evaluate your current process, and give it an upgrade!

2.  CHALLENGE: Having a sales rep that can get past the gatekeeper.

If your sales rep can not get to the referral source they can’t build a relationship that produces referrals. We got you! Buy the High-Performance Sales Academy! This program teaches not only a repeatable, successful sales process but how to get past the gatekeepers to put it in action!

3.  CHALLENGE: Gaining relationships with the hospitals.

Hospitals can be a real challenge to gain access. In fact, we teach a whole class on how to access the hospitals in our High-Performance Sales Academy and spend time role-playing out the situations every month on our group coaching calls and really take the sales reps through all the what-if scenarios. You may also need to get a vendor clearance and your organization may also have to purchase in referral exchange EMR’s.

However, one way that almost always works, and it doesn’t require any special referral software, is to have your sales representative go visit any of your active patients that get admitted to the hospital. The sales representative can go visit the patient and after they see the patient, stop at the desk and ask them to page the discharge planner that has your patient’s room assigned to them. When the Case manager arrives, you now have a chance to do your qualifying sales call and find out if this hospital discharge planner has both the willingness and the ability to refer to your organization.

You want to be prepared to ask several questions so you can then easily position your organization to obtain referrals.  Here are a few examples of what I would ask. All of this is also taught in our High-Performance Sales Academy and more!

• What agency do you currently refer most of your patients to? This question typically gets an answer that is something like: We offer patient choice, or we provide the patient with a list.

• Can you show me if my organization is on your list?  If you’re not on the list, you can write a letter to the hospital corporate compliance officer to request to be on the list.  If you are on the list, you can say something like “Great, I’m so glad that you offer freedom of choice.

• Could you share with me: What criteria you use to help your patients receive guidance on selecting an agency from the list? How do they know what providers are great at wound care? Or How do they know what providers take their insurance? Or how do they know who can provide 24-hour care at home?

• Can you share with me 2 examples of when you had to refer a patient to a different provider than your preferred provider?

• How often do you have to give a referral to someone other than your preferred providers?

• Do you have trouble getting services provided quickly in any of the counties?

• Could you share with me 3 things that you love about referring to your preferred agency?

• Could you share with me 3 challenges that you have experienced in working with your preferred provider?

• Would you be willing to try my organization if I can solve any of your challenges?

• Is there someone else that is going home today that is just like my current patient, Mrs. Jones that I could also provide care to?

4. CHALLENGE: Contracting with Insurance companies.

Here is a secret. The busiest agencies in ton don’t have to chase after the insurance contracts. The insurance companies approach them to become a provider.

You see, when an insurance company comes into your area, they go to the hospitals and get them to become a provider. Then they ask who do you refer to? They get contracts with all the post-acute care preferred providers.

If you are not currently getting hospital referrals, you will probably be overlooked.

If you want to find the insurances that are providing care in your town just shop as if you are looking for insurance in the zip codes that you provide care. Here is the link to find the information Find Medicare Insurance Providers.

5.  CHALLENGE: Leadership can’t relate to the sales team.

I could go on for days talking about leadership failures when it comes to supporting sales reps. I myself as an agency owner have made many! Thankfully I have learned so much over my 28 years as a professional working in post-acute care.

Sales teams are like herding cats. They are loud, demanding, and want everything yesterday! If they weren’t they wouldn’t be successful. Now, of course, we have some really nice, people who are super successful too.

Often, it takes a strong personality to get past gatekeepers, and if you are not a strong personality, we have our Orientation and High-Performance Sales Academy that will teach you how to do it and still be your true authentic self.  But building a culture that supports sales is critical.

If you are an executive or owner and you just are exhausted managing your team, we got you! We are now managing sales teams around the country! We have expanded our team and hired a new incredible sales coach to support us.

Home Care Sales has grown so much over the last few years! We are prepared to expand even more over the next few years! Our sales management includes everything you need to go about your work of getting patients cared for while we take over the daily management of your sales representatives.

We include pdf flyers (personalized for your organizations), sales messages of the week with trigger questions, and all the teaching and coaching your salesperson wants or needs! What to learn more? Set up a time to meet with [email protected] (you can jump on his calendar here).

Melanie and I care about your success. We are on a mission to help every patient that needs and deserves care to get identified for services!

Let us help you by having you join in working with us!

Cheryl Pelekis, RN “The Solutionist”