Relationship Art

Service providers are selected because of relationships. If you want to improve your business at one of your accounts, then you need to ask yourself this question. ?What I can do to improve the relationship between this account and my organization?? Yes, this is going to be hard work, but it will have immense rewards if you truly build a relationship with these accounts that resets the market expectations in your favor.

For example, stop faxing orders and face to face forms to the doctor?s office. Instead schedule a 10 min session with the physician to bring the orders to him personally for him to review and sign the documents. Your sales rep is already going to this account anyway, why not make this sales call a chance to talk with the physicians? This will save their practice time and money.

Another example teaches them about Advance Care Planning, CPO, and TCM billing practices.? Offer health education series to your faculties. Hold house rules meetings at your facilities to ensure that your organization is providing the highest level of customer service to the facility staff as well as the patients that live there.

One other thing I have to mention.?Many sales reps feel that they can start to decrease the amount of times they visit an account because they are referring each and every month. Well, I conducted a study with one of my full-time sales reps and the only thing that changed was the amount of sales calls to the account. We used the same clinical team and high standard of customer service, but the result of the study was shocking.

Just using one account as an example, the sales rep was making weekly calls and we were getting 6-8 home health referrals a month with a 90% conversion rate on admitting clients from this?referral source.? The sales rep decreases visits to biweekly, and the total number of admits was cut in half. We continued this visit pattern for 2 months. By the end of the second month, we had only 2 admits.? The impact on the agency was 6 less patients serviced by just one account. This was about a $40,000 loss in revenue.

Lesson learned! Visit your accounts weekly or someone else will move in! Go be amazing.