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Every business gets stuck from time to time.

We fantasize about running a home care, home health, and/or hospice organization with incredible managers who barely need our input. We envision an upward path to greatness with an infinite abundance of money.

But, there are setbacks, hurdles, and areas of quicksand along our journey. How we begin and build momentum may work for a season, but change and complexity materialize, throwing challenges at us from every direction.

The bigger we grow the harder it is to dodge the bullets.

Growing pains are a normal part of running a business. Who knew there were so many ways to get bogged down by people, process, financial, and marketing issues?

If your growth trajectory is stalling, welcome to the 99% club. Stuck happens.

The key to success is to get unstuck as quickly as possible.

 

Melanie and I have over 50 years of experience in growing companies that have encountered many of the same hurdles you are facing right now.

 

The first lesson is to learn how to handle the winters.

I learned this way of looking at disappointments from Jim Rohn. After winter, comes spring. Don’t wish for fewer problems wish for more wisdom and more skills to handle the winters.

 

The second lesson, learn how to handle the springs (opportunity).

How often does the spring follow the winter? Always. Opportunity follows disappointments. Take advantage of opportunities, quickly! They are brief, so you don’t have much time.

 

The third lesson, learn how to protect what you have earned.

Someone is always ready to take your market share, so you need to learn to prevent them from taking it. All good will be attacked! Every company will be a target, and not to think so in naive. All business values must be maintained!

 

The fourth major lesson in life to learn is how to take full responsibility for what happens to you!

When you do well or fail do it with maturity. You are in full control of your future. Your future is determined by what you do today.

 

If you are ready to stop blaming others and ready to learn how to upgrade yourself, you have a limited amount of days to join us. We are almost full. I’m sorry if you missed this opportunity. Other members are now earning Millions more! This could be you! www.homecaresales.com/innercircle

It is not what happens that determines the quality of your life. It’s what you do that changes your outcome. Get unstuck!

You deserve an upgrade! Look at the last 5 years, your gonna repeat them if you don’t change. You can change starting right now! Join the inner circle. This year reach down inside of you and come up with some more remarkable gifts! I challenge you! If where you are right now in your life change it!

Email me directly, and I can assist you with answering your questions, Cheryl@homecaresales.com.

Friends, for the last 29 years I have been working in post-acute care. For the last 9 years, I have worked in helping post-acute care providers such as home care, home health, and hospice organizations grow their census.

One account type that I most often hear presents a challenge for agencies to get referrals from, is local hospitals. 

Yes, local hospitals have their own companies that provide post-acute services and they often refer directly to their organizations.  

 

However, I also know that these organizations also refer to other providers.  Now, the reasons they refer to other providers are vast:

• • Patient at hospital lives across State Lines
  • Out Of Service Area of Home Health Staff
  • Lack of Staff
  • Insurance is not accepted by Home Health (or pays too little so they farm out those patients)
  • The discipline needed not available in patients’ location
  • Patient request for another agency
  • Patient already on services with another provider
  • The patient had the hospital’s home health several times in the past and the patient is non-compliant.  The hospital’s home health farms the patient out.
  • The patient was on a home health service from the community and the patient requested to have that agency when discharged.

Getting into a hospital is a big deal because of the sheer volume of referrals for post-acute care providers.

Here are four ways that I can share with you how to become one of the hospital’s agencies of choice.

Build a business plan to go after the doctors that have patients who are admitted to the hospital you want to work with

Most hospital websites have a physician listing. Start qualifying each of these doctor’s offices and make sure they have the willingness and the ability to refer to you.

Then start calling on them and get their patients on your companies services. Now, when one of these patients gets admitted to the hospital you can go visit the patient. Stop by the nurse’s station and ask them to page the discharge planner for your patient.

You will be able to introduce your company and ask questions to see what challenges they have with referring patients and how you can help. You can also add a form to your admission packet that the patient requests you when they need services.

Start making sales calls to the hospital’s ER physicians, social workers (if they have one), and to the discharge planners.

By following the High Performance Sales Process and using the Roadmap to Referrals to have a purpose for your sales calls, you’ll be able to unlock these referral sources. This is the best tool to expand someone’s knowledge of who to refer and help them get a patient to instantly pop into their mind when you use our Trigger Questions™.

Buddy up with someone else that is also calling on the discharge planners and is already getting referrals from them.

Consider partners like DME, IV infusion pharmacies, Oxygen suppliers, and Wound care companies. If possible find someone who will take you for 4-8 weeks straight. Then you should have the ability to access these accounts without your buddy. In exchange, you take that salesperson into your top account(s). I would suggest you do this for maybe 4 accounts each. You both walk away with 4 new referral sources!

Note: This next tactic is so often done and yet it is my favorite one. It has given me the highest return. 

Go directly to the hospital’s owned home health provider.

Their agency can never handle all the volume so they have to refer to community providers. Now, as I mentioned earlier, they want to give you and other community agencies all the bad patients. You know the ones if you went through our orientation program. 

• • • High-cost Medicare patients
    • The patients who make their outcome reports look terrible
    • Frequently non-compliant patients
    • Non-medicare, the worst insurance payers

If you can still make a profit with the lesser payers, you stand to gain an immense amount of business. You can also teach them, that you could take that costly patient but you need to stay balanced with healthy payers so you can serve everyone.  Share with them that you need a Medicare patient to go with the worst payer.

If you’re a smart rep with an owner who knows their cost, then go and call on their intake department. Approach them by asking them questions to uncover who you can refer to them because you can not serve a patient type. For example, you can send them patients with insurance that you don’t/can’t accept.

Ask who they need help with, what area, discipline, or payer. The good thing about getting in with a hospital is whenever new insurance is coming into town, that insurance company asks the hospital what post-acute care providers they should also offer contracts to. This is how my company got contracts with every payer in my market.  

If you want your sales representatives to be able to break into hospital systems we are here to help you. 

Melanie and I have found a way to coach representatives for rates much less than we charged in the past. We have found a way to shorten the time that it takes for reps to succeed. Let us manage your team today. 

Want to learn more? Click on the link to get on Mike’s calendar, and in under 30 minutes, you will be able to get started!  

Keep Helping, Keep Serving,

Cheryl Pelekis, RN “The Solutionist”

 

PS: Want to see this lesson in video format? Check it out below:

 

Today I ran into Dr. Joe while I was out Christmas shopping. For those of you that are fateful blog readers, you may recall his story.

He and his partner, Dr. Kirkland, are both top referring physicians. I have been using the Roadmap to Referrals while maintaining this account over the last several years. This past year, I taught them something else to do with my flyers.

Several of our flyers are patient stories. The marketing tools ask, Have you seen Sam? Then the leaflet shows a picture of Sam, and his journey, on how he became our patient and the benefits he and his family received.

Sample:

 

“I had gotten so many great patients to care for from Dr. Jones that I asked him, “why you refer patients to home care? “

I was shocked by his answer. “

 

He shared with me that his great aunt, Cecelia, lived with him when he was a boy. She was a widow, and her youngest nephew, Mark (Dr. Jones Dad), volunteered to let her move into his home when the Parkinson’s disease took a toll on her ability to live alone. 

Dr. Jones said he remembered how much work it was for his mom to care for his aunt’s needs. She needed quite a bit of care over the 15 years that she lived with his parents, and they had to transfer her, toilet her, bathe her, feed her, clean all of her clothing and manage just about everything, like medications and doctors appointments. All of it!

He shared that one day, his aunt fell, and she ended up in the hospital for a few days. When she was discharged, they ordered home health. That home health agency’s nurse told them that she had a friend from a home care agency and that someone would come over to see how they might help make taking care of his aunt Cecelia a little easier. 

The next day Cecelia had a visit from the home care agency.

They found out that she qualified for the VA Benefit because her husband was in the military. They could get a home care aide to assist with personal care for 4 hours a day, five days a week.   

This changed the whole mood of the home. Now his mom had time to go to the hair salon, and because she felt better about herself and had a break every day for a few hours, she improved her self-care. 

Having a caregiver allowed the whole family to benefit.  Meals were once again being cooked, and the entire house felt better.

 On the way out of Dr. Jones’s office, we ran into his partner, Dr. Kirkland. He introduced me, and said to Dr. Kirkland, “did you tell Cheryl about your Aunt Cecilia?” I got a perplexed look on my face. 

I thought it was Dr. Jones’s aunt. Dr. Kirkland proceeded to tell me the same story that Dr. Jones shared with me. 

In the end, Dr. Jones said with a smile, “Aunt Cecelia is his great aunt, not mine.” He continued, “When I am trying to convince my patients to let home health or home care in, I always tell this story as if it’s my own because it becomes more believable.”

I told him, “whatever it takes to improve patients’ lives!”

I hope we can all find more Dr. Jones and Dr. Kirkland’s!

 

There are patients like Cecelia all over the country who need help to stay at home. Some families take on this responsibility and don’t realize how a patient could deteriorate over the years. It is hard to take care of a loved one for a few days, let alone 15 years.

Thank God for home care services. Thank God that the home health nurse had a friend who did home care.

Too many patients would go without care. Now imagine you could quickly help your doctors’ offices to find their Cecelia’s?  Well, we have your solution.

Our 52 week Road Map to Referrals does just that.

For 2022, we are upgrading the patient vignette forms. We are teaching our sales reps to encourage the doctors to provide them to the patient at the time of referral to our agency.

We also ask the hospital case manager to share them with their patients. Expanding the awareness of care we provide using the power of stories helps patients accept and receive our care in their homes.

 

Don’t miss our holiday specials either! You can find them on our Facebook page here.

Want to learn more?

Email Mike@homecaresales.com and see a demo of the road map to referrals in action. Each month I get to coach your sales rep and roleplay the sales messages of the week.

This program is our top-performing sales product, and on average, home health and hospice agencies have experienced a 30% growth rate!

 

Keep Helping, Keep Serving,

Cheryl Pelekis, RN “The Solutionist”

As the calendar year draws to a rapid end, many of us are eager to have 2021 be in the rearview mirror. The fourth quarter is the time of the year that sales teams start to plan for the upcoming year.

Like most sales executives, you are focused on using the precious few selling days between now and year-end. Unfortunately, you are also tasked with creating your 2022 business development plans. Hopefully, this guide will help you make it with a little more ease.

The most important thing to know before anything else gets done is what you will be responsible for next year.

What is your mandate?

What are you accountable for accomplishing?

Are your bonuses structured for 2022?

What will make your boss pat you on the back and proclaim you are a rock star?

 

First things first, nail down the goals of your VP, CEO, CFO, COO (whatever the title you report to), so you understand what they expect from you!

• • What growth goals have been set for the company?

  • What part of the growth goals are you and your team are responsible for?

  • What services will be emphasized?

  • What markets will be targeted?

  • What major sales initiatives will be started in 2002?

 

Ideally, there is a well-structured plan or system for setting and hitting the company’s goals. A strong plan provides you with the direction to build action steps to hit 2022 goals. Once you have the goals set, you need to think about the overall framework for planning.

Start building your Strategy!

 

Strategy is all about how. It is how you are going to achieve those goals that are primarily dictated by your leadership. They could include things like:

• • Key Accounts to target

  • Growth percentages

  • Growing Gross Margins by seeking certain client / Patient types that have higher reimbursement

  • Improving public image by doing more community events

  • New products / program launch

 

Structure:  Structure follows Strategy. Structure describes the pieces related to how your sales resources will be organized, distributed, layered, and compensated.

• • Territory management and expansion

  • Inside sales development

  • Sales Budget

  • New and expansion business (Hunters/Farmers)

 

Sales:  This is where you want your most valuable resources, your clinical team, to benefit from the new business coming in the door.

This is the time of year to have your sales reps have a virtual meeting with the caregivers providing services in their market space and discuss what doctors do they want more patients from? What is the best facility for them to work with?

When you support growth where the clinical teams what to do business it is a win-win for everyone. You can also suggest that the sales executives take the clinicians out to meet the accounts! These meetings can be remarkably successful.

• • Training needs for 2022: consider new product training

  • Resources for 2022 such as promo items, marketing materials

  • Compensation and Quota setting for 2022

  • Reward and Recognition for 2022

 

People:  Your organization will succeed or fail based on the strength of your people. You need to plan on recruiting and retaining exceptional clinical talent. To hit growth projections, you need additional clinical team members to grow!

• • Recruitment Process Improvement Program

  • Retention Program and Committee

  • Allocation for the budget to include additional recruiting

  • Orientation programs that produce highly qualified staff

  • Ongoing personal development, training, and coaching

 

Process:  Process is at the heart of getting things done. A good process removes friction! Process is not a bad word.  Process makes getting to your goals easier.

As you start to think about next year, start looking around your organization and ask, are the current processes making things easier or more difficult? Could we make changes that would save us time? What needs an upgrade?

Stop and take the time to evaluate your existing processes and determine if they are going to help you achieve your goals or create another problem that needs to be fixed? Could you onboard 40 new employees a week? If you can’t answer that with a resounding YES, then you need to fix your onboarding system. (see our recruiting and retention program here)

Build Your Roadmap To Hitting Your Goals

# Step One:

Start by listing each category, Strategy, Structure, People, and Process. Under each category list the appropriate measures that apply in your organization.

# Step Two:

Scan down the list of measures and identify what components are currently out of alignment with your 2022 goals.  They are the ones you need to allocate more of your time to get them in alignment or you will set yourself up for failure.

# Step Three:

Now it is time to assess each of the problem areas based on some key metrics.

 

• • Complexity: Challenges are associated with timing, resources scarcity, or cultural barrier from within the organization’s leadership. Use a ranking system 1 – 10 where 1 is an easy fix, and 10 will require specific efforts and buy-in from all levels of the organization.

• • Impact: This refers to the positive effect this initiative would have on attaining your goals if time and energy were invested.  Here you are trying to assess how much benefit you would gain by focusing on this process issue. Again use 1-10 scale where 1 means focusing here would barely move the needle and 10 means it would significantly impact your year.

# Step Four:

This is the most challenging part of the planning. Since we all know there is never enough time or money to do everything we want, it’s time to prioritize all of your potential initiatives. Start at the top of your list and assign each potential initiative a letter grade of A, B, or C.

An “A” means this initiative is critical to your success, and you will unlikely reach your goal if this is not addressed.

A “B” means important but not essential, and “C” refers to something that, in all likelihood, will have to wait for another year.

 

Be careful here – the usual tendency is to rate most or every this as an “A”.

 

Unfortunately, you need to be brutally honest with yourself here. You may need to go back over the list a couple of times, but you should aim for an even distribution of As, Bx, and Cs.

 

I made you a quick spreadsheet that you can download and make your own. Download 2022 Business Development Guide Here!

# Step Five:

 Create the Plan: Goal #1

Initiative 1:
TACTICS	LEAD/SUPPORT	TIMELINE	SUCCESS MEASURE
Initiative 2:
TACTICS	LEAD/SUPPORT	TIMELINE	SUCCESS MEASURE

 

Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing how and what, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.

It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking Strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the Strategy. Synchronizing those people and their various disciplines and aligning rewards to outcomes.

It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy. In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it!

Be successful in 2022! Have a plan and execute it!  If you find that your plan includes having a sales team, don’t forget that we can be your sales manager!

Want to learn more email Mike@homecaresales.com or reach out to me directly at Cheryl@homecaresales.com.  We are here for you!

 

Keep Helping, Keep Serving,

Cheryl Pelekis, RN “The Solutionist”