A CRM Purpose Built for Your Home Health or Hospice Organization

It can be overwhelming for your post-acute organization to identify the best practices and tools to increase sales performance and productivity. Home Care Sales co-owners and industry leaders, Cheryl Peltekis and Melanie Stover, share their insight on how PAC organizations like yours can break through industry noise and generate referrals by remaining better connected with your referral partners through the utilization of a CRM.

The Challenge

More qualified accounts equal more opportunity. But managing more accounts presents a new challenge- maintaining all the account information. The traditional notebook or “Bible” cannot manage 100 accounts worth of information and runs the risk of valuable information getting lost. From the perspective of a sales manager, you have an entire team to manage, and activities such as tracking processes and the messages your reps are sharing can be overwhelming. To upgrade your sales process, you need to provide your team with an efficient strategy and streamlined sales pitch, so they are not wasting time trying to create their own processes.

Solution: A CRM Customized for Your Needs

Your team needs a CRM for your home health or hospice that is customized to support your sales process, tactics, data, and EHR integration. An effective CRM should provide you with a high-performance sales process and a roadmap to referrals, as well as data for proving the success of accounts. From a manager’s perspective, a CRM documents where a rep is in the sales process and provides visibility. From a reporting perspective, data removes all the emotions from account management and qualifies an account to prevent unproductive use of a sales rep’s time, energy, and money spent on partners that will never refer a single patient. We will deep dive into the benefits of a CRM, including:

• Improved Territory Planning
• Alignment of Messaging
• Efficient Reviews & Planning

Improved Territory Planning

Spreadsheets and sales plans can be laborious and inefficient. Strategic referral targeting requires market data to assist with account ranking that will dictate the amount of time spent with those targets. The best way to prioritize your account targeting is by ranking them on historical number of admissions from highest to the lowest. The top 25% of your accounts are A accounts. The next 25 is your B, followed by C and lastly D. Once the A accounts have been established, it’s time to schedule them into a cadence to ensure you’re visiting them weekly. The second you’re not visiting them, your competition is. For B accounts, you need to better qualify them by asking questions about their referral patterns and what they value in a PAC partner. With market data, you can view referral sources history and evaluate if these partners have potential to send more patients than they are currently sending.

It’s critical that your team is identifying new potential accounts every week. Reps lose roughly 20% of their referring accounts each year for a variety of reasons, including customer service failure, mergers and acquisitions, or a competitor taking referral volume. Unless you are consistently qualifying new account types, you will not be able to keep the pipeline full. Reps should aim to visit 50 to 100 accounts a week, especially if some of those touchpoints can be completed remotely by email or phone.

Alignment on Messaging

To provide direction and alignment for your team, a recommendation is a weekly theme of your agency’s offerings. The theme can be scheduled into your CRM, so when your sales reps wake up on Monday morning and view the calendar topic and talking points, they are prepared to hit the ground running. Talking points surrounding the theme will ensure your reps feel confident in their messaging. You should never let an account or referral slip through your fingers because you’re not prepared to have a meaningful discussion. Within a CRM, a correlating flyer can also be linked with the talking points as a reminder of additional resources they can bring with them to add value.

By aligning on messaging, your sales reps will be viewed as thought leaders by educating partners on a high-value patient type that you care for. Managers have peace of mind about the sales teams’ messaging and sales reps feel equipped with talking points they can utilize. By becoming a thought leader, your reps may also be offered additional opportunities, such as quarterly hospital presentations. By giving your sales team the messaging tools that they need to succeed, you create successful sales gurus who feel confident entering a sales call as true patient advocates and post-acute care experts.

Efficient Reviews & Planning

Structure brings growth when you have a plan in place. For on-going reviews of your sales team, a CRM provides visibility into your rep’s schedule and targets. With access to your entire teams’ activities, managers can view the notes from visits to save research time prior to one-on-one meetings.  Another efficient way to stay on track is a quarterly business review, involving a review of tactics from the previous quarter, a plan for the next quarter, and how that plan will apply to your accounts. By writing, sharing, and measuring goals, you provide education and empowerment for your staff, as well as accountability. The combination of market data and CRM solidifies a full sales plan, from identifying referral targets to creating a prioritized target list and schedule.

If your team utilizes a CRM with EHR integration, your sales reps have visibility when a referral comes through and can plan a lateral call to the referral partner. This information is invaluable for building a stronger relationship with your partners. It may also bring to light a referring physician that you are not currently visiting and should begin to.

Conclusion

Although new technology can be daunting, the amount of time and effort saved by an effective CRM is invaluable. By documenting activities immediately, your sales reps avoid forgetting critical information that took place with referral partners. A CRM, like Marketscape, with a mobile-first app and voice dictation makes logging notes easy on the go and is purpose-built for post-acute care’s unique workflows.

Interested in learning how Trella’s market insights and CRM can improve your agency’s sales processes? Request a demo now.

For more information on Home Care Sales, you can request a demo with their team as well.