Sales leaders, understandably, want to get the most out of their sales team by ensuring their reps are engaging in meaningful activities to drive referral growth. However, they often struggle with having the data at hand to track and measure their team’s performance and ROI.
The question at hand is, how can you motivate your sales team if you don’t have a clear understanding of their efforts toward creating meaningful relationships with referral sources?
Effective tools, like a CRM, will help your team improve processes, increase productivity, and achieve their goals.
Accelerate your sales team’s productivity
Do you have a hard time accurately forecasting sales? Are your sales reps struggling to reach their goals? Or, are you having issues with productivity and inefficiencies with your sales team?
Accelerating your team’s productivity starts with collecting information about your target accounts to best understand what is driving referrals at an account level. This information is stored in a Customer Relationship Management platform – a.k.a. CRM.
Utilizing a CRM helps create process efficiencies for your sales team by storing referral source data and analytics in one place, allowing your reps to be unified on priorities, while providing the insights you need to improve your team’s performance.
A CRM can help sales leaders improve productivity by allowing sales teams to:
1. Create daily and weekly targets and activity structure
“Are your reps creating an activity structure to ensure they stay on track with their goals?”
An account management feature inside a CRM helps sales teams prioritize accounts and establish a weekly and daily activity structure. This allows your reps to stay organized and on track – thus ensuring they are staying productive and engaging the appropriate amount of time with referral sources in your market.
2. Track completed vs non-completed sales rep activity
“Are my reps efficiently managing their territory and completing the activities needed to be successful?”
Once priorities have been established on the best referral sources to target, the next steps is creating a structure to measure performance.
With the ability to track ‘completed’ versus ‘non-completed’ activities inside a CRM – you will not only be able to track the relationship between completed rep activities and agency growth – but get ahead of the conversation if the rep needs a little guidance in managing their territory.
As their leader, you’ll be able to help with coaching early and often to best guide your reps and point them in the right direction as they build high-value relationships.
3. Ensuring the appropriate visit frequency based on the account relationship
“Are your sales reps scheduling the right frequency of activities to stay top-of-mind?”
Connecting with the right referral source is a great first step, but you also want to ensure your reps have established the right meeting cadence with their referral sources.
A CRM can schedule weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly meetings/reminders based on the referral’s relationship to help your sales reps stay top-of-mind with high-value referral sources with a appropriate amount of visits. This feature benefits both the referral partner and sales rep so they can schedule meetings based on the referral partners requested cadence that fits the needs of the relationship.
4. Drive accountability and growth with sales rep rank reports
“Are your sales reps staying motivated and creating urgency to drive growth into the pipeline?”
It’s essential to ensure your sales reps don’t lose the motivation and desire needed to cultivate long-lasting relationships with new referrals.
As a sales leader, you can utilize a CRM to track certain individual metrics such as:
• Monthly revenue brought in by rep
• Time spent by sales reps prospecting
• The number of new referral sources
• How many referrals have churned or are lost
• Growth of referral accounts
Not only does this help your sales reps improve individually, but increases the competitiveness of your sales reps and drives more referral sources into the pipeline.
5. View real-time ROI tracking for new and current referral sources
“Are you able to see the real cost of creating and cultivating your referral sources relationships?”
It’s great catching the attention of high-value referral sources, but is the ROI worth the time, effort, and potential cost?
As a sales leader, utilizing the dashboards and metrics inside a CRM can help you determine which accounts might be worth spending extra time and resources to further enhance the relationship.
A CRM can help your team by providing detailed reports of time invested to gain each referral, per sales rep, thus ensuring your team sees the actual value the organization is getting from each physician.
Using a CRM to stay ahead of sales force turnover
Is your organization being impacted by one of the biggest challenges affecting the post-acute care market?
Sales force turnover can create large gaps in your sales team and can bring growth to a screeching halt. It also leaves territories and referral sources uncovered, causes referral partners to question if they are still a priority to your organization, and leaves a big opportunity for competitors to steal market share.
If your team is being affected by turnover, a great tool to help mitigate the impact is a CRM. With up-to-date documentation and accessible information, it can aid new sales reps who are taking over open territories quickly jump into the new role. The new sales reps can leverage the data and sit down with referral partners to understand their needs while still maintaining their trust as their top referral destination.
Sales force turnover may be inevitable, but it doesn’t have to impact your sales team when they have the right tools at hand.
Pairing the right tools with your CRM 
Did you know?
According to findstack.com,“74 percent of companies say a CRM technology gives them better access to customer data.”
Utilizing a CRM on its own is good practice, but integrating the CRM into your end-to-end workflow can create additional efficiencies and boost ROI.
Integrations can enhance a CRM and empower your sales reps to make more meaningful connections with referral sources.
EHR integration
Does your sales team have the capability to clinically connect with patient data and receive in-depth insights into referrals?
With a CRM that integrates with your EHR, sales reps can access your patient data inside the CRM and have the clinical information to better understand patient referral trends within an account.
With these insights, your reps will have the ability to:
• Measure referral and admission totals
• Attribute referrals to marketing tactics
• See the bigger picture with greater visibility
Your reps will not only have the data, but also the insights to have deeper and meaningful conversations with referral sources to solidify why your agency is the top referral source destination for patients.
Market data
The EHR integration helps you see a micro-level view, but to bring it all together, you want to pair this with market data to gain a macro-level view of your opportunities.
Utilizing a CRM integrated with high-quality market data can help your reps strategize on how to best present to top referral sources with metrics such as readmission rates, utilization rates, and how they compare to competitors in the market.
Jamie Pedder, Director of Community Relationships at Alive Hospice, discussed how useful the integration of market data and a CRM has helped his team:
“As a long-term customer of Trella and user of both the market insights and CRM solution, the integration of these two solutions is a game changer for us. The ability to view market insights within the CRM will allow more efficient planning, strategy, and execution for our team.”
Physician talk track
Having your EHR and market data in a CRM is a game changer, but what if your CRM could also guide your reps on what to say to referral partners?
When a CRM incorporates market data integration, like Trella’s Marketscape solution, your team gains access to conversation starters and talk tracks, easily accessible from their mobile while on the go.
With this integration, your team can quickly identify the right referral sources and the compelling metrics to present to gain their trust, saving sales reps time with not only prospecting but also preparation and research.
How to stay ahead of the competition and achieve your sales goals
We understand the importance of having the right tools to guide your sales team’s processes and improve productivity.
Having market insights and data implemented within a CRM not only allows your reps to stay on track with tasks and goals, but also helps your organization improve its position in the market and stay ahead of the competition.
Want to learn more about Trella Health’s purpose-built CRM?
Request a demo with our sales team today!
