With 2023 almost here, sales leaders and their teams may still be behind in achieving their goals for 2022. So how can they ensure they finish out 2022 strong and begin 2023 with the right steps in place to achieve critical milestones?
Having the right marketing strategies involve ensuring your team has the right tools they need, a metric-driven referral targeting strategy, as well as market data to connect efficiently and effectively with the right referrals.
Reviewing Your 2022 Post-Acute Marketing Strategies
It’s almost the end of 2022, which means it’s crucial for you and your team to start reviewing the strategies that were implemented at the beginning of the year. Now is the time to analyze what worked throughout the year and what didn’t, so you can either adjust your current strategies or optimize what has worked to start 2023 strong.
Unfortunately, some strategies may not live up to expectations due to unforeseen challenges out of your control.
Salesforce Turnover
One challenge that has been affecting the post-acute care market is salesforce turnover. If you are experiencing constant or significant salesforce turnover – it may be harder to implement your strategies due to hiring new reps, getting them onboarded, and re-building relationships with referral sources.
In turn, salesforce turnover can create several obstacles that can cause strategies to pivot even further.
Referral Source Frustration
When salesforce turnover happens, referral sources may feel frustrated every time they have to start over with a new rep. They may have questions in their mind about your organization and if they should follow your previous rep. It’s important to reassure and introduce the new sales rep to the referral sources immediately. Making it worse, when reps leave and there is a vacancy in that market, it gives your competitors the opportunity to swoop in and steal shares on referrals.
Losing Valuable Information
In addition to referral source frustration, another challenge is losing valuable information about your referral sources. Such as:
- Why they choose to refer to your agency?
- What care metrics do they use to measure performance?
- What was the previous meeting cadence?
While these challenges seem troubling and stressful at first, always tracking historical information, such as account updates that can be documented in a CRM, and account insights as it relates to performance, can help alleviate the impact of salesforce turnover.
This information helps sales leaders maintain relationships while there is a rep vacancy, and it helps guide new reps who will be learning about their new accounts – while ensuring customers feel heard and comforted with your organization throughout the transition.
Bringing More Than Coffee and Donuts to the Table
Sales reps were hindered in 2020 – due to Covid-19 – from showing up with coffee and donuts hoping to connect with the right referral sources for your organization. Now in 2022 – your sales reps must stand out amongst their competitors, analyze your current data and insights, and determine quality over quantity when it comes to meeting with potential referral sources.
Two questions you must ask your sales reps:
- Are you putting the referral first, asking them questions, and identifying what they need from you as a referral partner?
- Are you showing your value along with the coffee and donuts?
Your reps must earn referral sources’ trust before they will start advocating for your agency and select your organization as a preferred referral partner. It is essential for reps to build a meaningful relationship with trust and validation than to rely on pure gifts to earn their patient referrals. If your reps don’t have the right data and insights, not only on competitors, but on your own organization, how can they create meaningful connections?
No two referrals are the same. It’s important for your team to remember their referral sources have different needs and concerns. This means that there must be a different strategy in place for each one to achieve referral loyalty, trust, and satisfaction.
Best marketing strategies to apply in 2023
Once you and your team have re-evaluated your 2022 marketing strategies, it’s time to see where you can reassess the goals and plan for 2023. It’s crucial to start planning and implementing your goals NOW so that you can see what needs tweaking before the start of the new year.
Below are two strategies you may want to think about utilizing to help achieve success in 2023:
Account Strategy
One strategy to implement with your team is analyzing referral sources with the four-quadrant market assessment tool. This is a simple – but effective – way to evaluate potential referral sources your team is currently targeting.
The X-axis signifies the opportunity or volume of patients the referrals have, and the Y-axis indicates the market share relating to the number of referrals your organization is currently receiving
from those sources.
Once the chart is created, the next step is determining where each referral source fits in one of the four quadrants based on referral potential.
The four quadrants are based on:
- Quadrant 1 – high opportunity, high share
- Quadrant 2 – low opportunity, high share
- Quadrant 3 – low opportunity, low share
- Quadrant 4 – high opportunity, low share
Once the accounts are plotted, your team can focus on a strategy for each referral target based on their level of opportunity and market share. This will result in a strategy focused on growing your business and increasing ROI with the “right” referral sources.
High-Quality Market Data
As mentioned previously, reps can target and meet with referral sources all day, but are they connecting with high-value referrals?
The number one strategy for finding the right referral sources is utilizing high-quality market data. With the right data in hand, your sales reps can see which targets are currently referring patients to post-acute care organizations, the amount of market share you are receiving, and which referrals your competitors are partnered with.
With high-quality market data, your reps can feel empowered knowing they have the right information at their fingertips to help them make impactful connections with high-target referral sources.
How a mobile CRM can improve your marketing strategies
High-quality market data is great for identifying referral sources in your market; in addition, pairing a mobile Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool alongside your market data is a
great strategy to use when tackling your 2023 goals and growing your customer base.
According to Agile CRM: On average, 65 percent of salespeople who adopt mobile CRM meet their sales quotas. Only 22 percent of salespeople who don’t leverage mobile CRM meet their quotas.
With those stats in mind, we’ve compiled a few ways a mobile CRM can empower reps:
- Easy access to their prior meeting notes to add to the ongoing conversation with referrals
- Ready-to-go metrics to further support their talk track, including competitive intelligence
- Ability to log meeting notes and schedule any follow-up meetings or events
With a mobile CRM, you can be rest assured your sales team will complete the necessary tasks and stay up to date with documentation, emails, and cold calls while on the road.
Feel confident in your marketing strategy for 2023
It’s essential for your organization to review your 2022 goals and plan for 2023 now!
Having a mobile CRM and high-quality market data can aid with finding the right referral sources, reviewing your account strategies, and reevaluating where your sales reps need to focus.
A goal without a plan is merely a wish, you and your team need to determine what the plan is for your goals and act on it!
Want to learn more?
Interested in learning how Trella’s market insights and CRM can improve your agency’s sales processes? Request a demo now.
