Tag Archive for: covid-19

Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”

This week I had to focus my blog on answering a question that I get asked of me over and over by our home health friends. That does not mean that our In-Home Care providers should stop reading. In fact, it means the exact opposite.

Evaluation and Management of the Plan of Care is all about home health managing unskilled care providers that are caring for a complex patient that no longer has a skilled need.

Many home health providers have avoided Evaluation and Management patient types because before the Jimmo settlement patients were denied care because claims were rejected because Medicare said the patient had reached their maximum potential. 

Once CMS had reached a settlement, of the Jimmo Agreement it required manual revisions to restate a “maintenance coverage standard” for both skilled nursing and therapy services under these benefits:

Skilled nursing services would be covered where such skilled nursing services are necessary to maintain the patient’s current condition or prevent or slow further deterioration so long as the beneficiary requires skilled care for the services to be safely and effectively provided.

Skilled therapy services are covered when an individualized assessment of the patient’s clinical condition demonstrates that the specialized judgment, knowledge, and skills of a qualified therapist (“skilled care”) are necessary for the performance of a safe and effective maintenance program.

Such a maintenance program to maintain the patient’s current condition or to prevent or slow further deterioration is covered so long as the beneficiary requires skilled care for the safe and effective performance of the program.

There are situations in which the patient’s potential for improvement would be a reasonable criterion to consider, such as when the goal of treatment is to restore function. This would always be the goal of treatment in the inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) setting, where skilled therapy must be reasonably expected to improve the patient’s functional capacity to be covered by Medicare. 

However, Medicare has long recognized that there may be situations in the SNF, home health, and outpatient therapy settings where, even though no improvement is expected, skilled nursing and/or therapy services to prevent or slow a decline in condition are necessary because of the patient’s special medical complications or the complexity of the needed services.

I am going to be doing a webinar for Medicare Training and Consulting on April 14^th and invite all of you to grab a spot if you want to learn how to provide these services and how to use this as a way of building your business.  

Patients that are frequently receiving Evaluation and Management services often have multiple paid caregivers supporting the patients to remain in their home. Learn who could benefit from the services and how you can be a referral partner and grow your business-to-business referrals. 

To sign up for the webinar email Plonsey@aol.com. To learn more on how to grow your agency go to www.homecaresales.com. You can also have a personal tour through our products and services by emailing Mike@homecaresales.com.  

This past year, I spent a lot of time learning how vital recruitment and retention directly correlate to the agency’s success.

I have found that home health, hospice, and in-home care providers have more and more seniors to service.

With our population of aging adults increasing by over 11,000 new seniors day, WE WILL BE fighting over caregivers.

In a Gallup study, they found that 50% of all Americans have left a job because of their manager. That means we, as owners, need to make sure that we are building a team of leaders and not just bosses!

I’ve said it before, and I will repeat it here, “employees leave managers!”

A good manager needs to be a leader. Someone who can teach others. Someone who wants to make a difference in the world with other people. The real power of leadership comes from what we can do with and for others.

The value of leadership doesn’t come from having a position.

It comes from just being passionate about a cause; you can work with others to achieve a worthy goal. We all need great employees!

Home Care Sales believes so much in our agencies that we built a Caring Agency Mastermind for administrators and owners to learn what strategies are working right now. We call this our CAM FAM, and one member just signed on 55 new clients last week! You can do it too.

Learn what works and also get a chance to contribute by sharing your success stories to help other agencies grow while avoiding wasting time, money, and resources. As an agency owner, I want you to be able to support your administrators and executives.

Give your leadership the CAM FAM membership to have executives run challenging situations by experienced leaders and gain an accountability partner for taking action to move your needle. Sometimes leadership can be lonely. The CAM FAM has your back!

[Click HERE] Join today for a brighter tomorrow!  

Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”

This week I got to spend time coaching one of my most favorite owners of all times. We first met when I was speaking at the annual nurse entrepreneurs conference two years ago. 

I remember him quickly standing and walking towards the side of the stage, waiting for me to wrap up my presentation to about 1000 nurses. 

I was thinking:

“What did I say that motivated this man to make sure that he got time to speak to me.”

To my delight, he was a wonderful gentleman who was an owner of a private duty and wanted to open a home health and hospice organization. 

His first words to me were, “How did you learn to provide direction and delegate work to remove obstacles to let you open multiple businesses, and work as a consultant?” 

I immediately recognized where he was in his leadership journey. He had reached that major career transition point when a person needs to shift from doing the work to getting work done through others.  

This transition is difficult for many. It means giving up direct control over the work which involves more risk. More need to trust and equip others to get the work done and a shift in focus. 

Changing your view from personal achievement to enabling and empowering others to achieve. I invited him to be mentored by me for a few weeks to see if I could help him push through the change.

Over the next few weeks, I coached this owner. I uncovered another difficult transition that he and many owners face as they remove themselves from the daily grind of running their organizations. A major transformation happens when the owner stops being the expert in a particular function, area, or discipline and instead starts to lead others to become the experts.  

Personally, this was the hardest transition for me to experience.  Having to give up being the person most in-the-know felt like giving up a child. I could see that this was also a challenge for the owner that I was mentoring. 

Leaders who succeed at these transitions start developing new skills and know when it is time to stop relying on the old ones. 

They learn to set clear expectations, track progress, and communicate information that people need to do their jobs. I was able to help this owner shift his focus to helping others develop their skills and gain confidence.  

If you are having a hard time letting go of work, maybe you feel like no one else will do this the right way. You may even be correct, but this will undoubtedly lead to burnout. Instead, change your focus from doing the work yourself, to one of guiding, delegating, and trusting others to do the job. 

Shift your focus to helping others develop their skills.  Navigate these leadership rites of passage and you will not only help other people be successful in their roles, but you’ll be also on your way to becoming more successful in yours.  

If you are ready to evolve as a leader.  You may want to join our mastermind group. 

Members have worked on skills like:

• Providing clear direction and accountabilities.
• Delegating and distributing assignments and decisions appropriately.
• Monitoring progress of leaders by maintaining the flow of work and results (don’t worry…we provide the steps)
• Providing appropriate guidance and direction based on people’s capabilities.
• Intervening as needed to remove obstacles.

I enjoyed seeing this leader evolve. He created his leadership training manual. He implemented standards on patients on service for each clinical leader to manage. He mapped out a monthly calendar of expectations for the leaders to be prepared for the survey. Then he automated the process and just followed the calendar.  This lead to him to open new companies the same year!  Both Medicare-certified home health and Hospice.

When he needed to jump in and remove obstacles, he did but just by offering consultants to support leaders. This meant him not taking on the work himself. 

The result? 

He has several phenomenally successful businesses and a very happy life which gives him time with his family. 

It is exactly what most agency owners are looking for. That is what a mastermind group can do for you!

Are you ready? Apply Here!  Your transformation awaits you. 

Want to try to go about it yourself? Check out a great read Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Stop being a people-pleaser.  

Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”

Training Sales Representatives has been one of the most rewarding things I have done in my life.  One of the first things that I learned about sales in private duty, home health, or hospice, is that I am not selling anything. I am doing the work of a superhero. 

Many of you have read my blog posts and often have seen me write about how a salesperson must adjust their perception of themselves from that of a sales representative to a problem solver. 

I love teaching this. I show an image of a used car salesperson and share with them that is how I felt at the beginning of my post-acute sales representative journey.  

So what made me change my perception?

Well, one day when going to do a strategy sales call at one of my A+ accounts I ran into the chief of cardiology at the hospital that I was visiting. He happened to get in my elevator. I sheepishly said, “hello” and he saw my badge. He said, “oh your that health care consultant that stops in my office and provides our patients with information.” He reached out his hand to introduce himself with a big smile. (Pre-Covid). 

I reached out my hand and introduced myself. I said, “I’m happy to meet you, but you must have me confused with someone else.”  He said, “No, it’s you, Cheryl the consultant. Unless you have a twin, aren’t you the girl who brings me information on advance care planning and CHF program for our patients?” He went on. “Every month you put new educational flyers in our exam rooms for our patients.”  

…And that is the moment it really hit me.  

I was not a sales representative to this important physician, who (despite my best efforts) I never even got to meet. He perceived me as a “health care consultant.”  

Many years have passed since that great 2-min elevator moment, but the impact was significant on my sales career. I was, a health care consultant. I remember thinking about what I did at his office practice location that obviously put me in good standing with the Chief of Cardiology for one of the nation’s largest hospitals in the U.S.  

Today, my company, Home Care Sales teaches these successful strategies to sales representatives across the nation. This simple exchange has helped to further impact other soon-to-be superheroes to realize the impact they have on the lives of care providers and patients across their market.

It’s not the educational flyers you deliver to a doctor’s office or at senior fairs. It isn’t the promo items that you bring them once a month that cost you a dollar. It is how you service your accounts. It all comes down to how you approach your account as a business partner or, more importantly, as a problem solver. Not someone doing sales emails or sales voice mails, but someone who helps solve their problems.

I went back into my CRM to look at the sales notes from my stops at the Cardiologist’s office. I read in my documentation that they were trying to capture more revenue by adding additional services to patients visits. (Before you read too far into that, we are talking about handling more in-office…not referring for un-required MRIs or anything of that nature)

I did some homework and found out about advanced care planning. I made up an advance care planning book of forms and delivered the books to that office. I trained the billing person on the “how-to” and prepared a recording of me talking to the doctors at the location about what was in the 1-inch binder book and how they could maybe use them to add an additional up code for advance care planning to their routine visits. We teach these strategies in our Master’s program for High Performance Sales Representatives. 

If we break down what I did it would be something like this:

• Changed my self-perception to be “The Solutionist.”
• Approached my account as a problem solver.
• Asked questions to identify what this doctor’s office is trying to get accomplished right now.
• Provided the necessary resources to solve the account’s problem.
• Collected patients referrals and delivered incredible customer service

Now it may seem complicated, but it really isn’t. I used a weekly sales plan that had me consult on patient types that required more of my accounts time (and therefore resources). I provided educational materials that my accounts could share with their patients/residents on how to live a healthy long life.  

It is the same weekly sales plan that has been upgraded every year to get results for our sales reps, our Weekly Roadmap To Referrals.

I believe that sales representatives may need help to become or evolve into a sales consultant. 

Fortunately, I have had an advantage. I am a nurse and worked as a full-time case manager in patients’ homes so I could easily speak of the benefits that the patient and the referring account would receive when a patient was on my agency’s services.  

Now we know many sales consultants need to be taught these things in order to really produce high-value accounts that consistently refer. That’s why Home Care Sales, lead by two clinicians, built our “Weekly Road Map To Referrals Program.”  It infuses all the clinical knowledge you will need to become a community health care consultant without having to be clinically trained.

The Road Map To Referrals is a weekly plan that allows you to be all that you want to be to your accounts.  You gain clinical insights and the exact questions to ask to uncover what is really important to your accounts. 

It also comes with an hour of coaching every month with Melanie and I to have you overcome any objections you are facing while you are trying to sell your services. If you aren’t using our Weekly Road Map to Referrals you should be.

The fastest way to get started is to reach out to mike@homecaresales.com or sign up with Mike to see the program in action: https://calendly.com/mike-home-care-sales

Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”

Last week I wrote about the frustration that our sales reps deal with every day.

Getting a hand in their face. Being ignored. Why because our contacts and prospects are just too busy. They don’t want anything to stop them from being productive and they just want us to leave them alone.

I shared a little about using something called the Gap Theory.

Have you ever found yourself watching a stupid TV show because you just want to know what happens in the end? Have you ever stayed tuned to the 10:00 PM news, even though you were tired, because the lead was “When we return, see how the man eluded the police by scaling a 50-story high building!”

The reason is when we want to know something we don’t already know, we become curious and WANT the answer. It is like getting an itch, and we want to scratch it. To scratch the itch, we will invest our time.

We’ll stay up later to watch the news even when we are tired. We’ll sit through a stupid TV show, and we’ll even return a salesperson’s call. This gap in knowledge is called the “Gap Theory” and it is a salesperson’s best friend.

“Gap theory” is when there is a gap in our knowledge that can’t be filled. It creates pain. The pain won’t go away until we gain knowledge or fill the gap.

You want to get more prospects to call you back? Fill the gap. Shift your thinking from: “What information do I want to convey?” to “What questions do I want my prospects to ask?” An example, I learned the number one thing that doctor’s offices can do to prevent vulnerable seniors from falling.  I would love to share it with you!

Another way to grab attention from our contacts and prospects is to Surprise them

We are surprised when we didn’t expect anything. It makes us stop for a moment and sit up and take notice.   As I said earlier, our brains are dialed into changes in our surroundings. They can be anything from how you communicate to what you communicate. 

You want them to have this response, they stop and think and then they say to a co-worker after they read an email from you, “Hey, did you know that……”?  Or they jump on the internet and immediately start reading about a stat that you just shared with them.  Maybe they go home from work and say to their spouse or children, “Guess what I learned today?” Now, you will probably get them to read your next email too!

One of the reps that we work with, sent a letter to all the doctors’ offices that she was prospecting at invited them to tea.  The Sales rep got a free zoom account, and she made an invitation and sent it snail mail with a teabag in the envelope.  She invited 10 different offices and 50% of them showed up to talk about the top 3 daily frustrations about working in a doctor’s office!  She has now moved 4 of those prospects into referring contacts.

Mystery

A mystery is a story that makes no sense.  It’s when we’re presented with a “Huh?” Mysteries exist wherever there are questions without obvious answers.  Why do 30% of people using an inhaler use it improperly?  Why don’t patients like our new project?

Mysteries are powerful. They invite the client to solve the “huh?” with you.  Mysteries create a need for closure. We (our contacts and prospects included) do not like to leave things open.  We will “hang around” for the answer to get closure.  Creating mysteries for prospects and clients will lure them into discussions and on a journey. By creating mysteries prospects will stick with you until they get the information you hold. 

For example:

Voice Mail Script

Hi Betty,

You don’t know me yet, but I wanted to share with you what Dr. Smith’s office is doing down the street from your practice to make his patients safer at home.  Call me at [xxx.xxx.xxxx] or email me at [email@email.com] and share with me a few days and times that you can speak to me for just about 5 mins.  Can’t wait to share…..

To get more prospects to call you back and to get a better return from cold calling, you have to create intrigue. You have to be unexpected. The way to be unexpected is to leverage curiosity, intrigue, or a knowledge gap and surprise.

The “Surprise Call”

Surprises break up a pattern. Prospects and current contacts get sales calls every day.  They are the same old, boring, cold calls from everyone. There is little to no difference from one cold call to the next.

Example of an expected cold call:

Hello, my name is Cheesy Sales Guy. I’m calling for just 5 minutes of your time. I’d like to talk to you about our Piggly, wiggly. It’s helped many of our customers save money, improve efficiency, and create happier employees.

If you would please give me a call back at (555) 555-1212.

I look forward to talking to you. Thanks!

I’ve gotten more of these calls than I can count. I tune them outright from the get-go. There is nothing here to make me want to give up my valuable time to call back. The ones that don’t get tuned out, surprise me. They break my expected pattern of a cold call.

Like most of us, our prospects and contacts have learned to tune out these messages too. To avoid getting tuned out, surprise your prospects, break their pattern, be different.

Use humor, a few off the wall, and surprising facts about your product or service. Share some unique and unknown facts about your clients’ industry. Make a silly promise, be humble by acknowledging you know you’re an annoying cold call, do whatever you can do to break the cold call pattern your prospects are already used to. If you can’t break your prospect’s pattern, you won’t get their attention. They will simply hit the delete button and poof your message goes into the cyber a bias.

Create surprise, avoid being gimmicky, keep your message germane to your prospects and contacts. I’ve found, the best way to get prospects to call you back is to know something they don’t about their industry, their business, the products they use, and more. When we know something our prospects don’t, we create a knowledge gap.

A knowledge gap creates curiosity. Curiosity creates intrigue.

Our job as salespeople is to sell products and services that improve the existing condition of our prospects and current contacts.  If we are unable to improve their situation, we have nothing to sell. For us to demonstrate we can improve a prospect’s work environment requires knowledge and information about the industry, the market, their business, and their competitor’s business.

If you want a prospect or current contacts to take your cold call, find the gap in their knowledge by knowing things they don’t. Do research on what matters now to hospitals, SNF’s, ALF communities, and doctors’ offices.  

Look for obscure information that could positively affect your prospects such as learning about MIPS, merit bases incentive payments for physicians. Do the research for them. Become a treasure trove of data and information for your referral sources.  They will love you for it!  They will be loyal to you!  You will move your prospects into new referring accounts!

Cheryl Peltekis, RN “The Solutionist”

PS: Need more help with your conversion to “remote” marketing. Check out our High Performance Inside Sales Program or sign up with Mike to see any of our programs in action: https://calendly.com/mike-home-care-sales