If you’re involved in home care sales, you’ve likely heard a lot about how to get past the gatekeeper, how to perfect your elevator sales pitch, and how to share the benefits of partnering with your home care agency. But in home care sales, there’s often a great divide between fostering a strong relationship with a potential referral source and having business referred from that relationship. It’s important to uncover ways to stay connected appropriately. Let’s take a look at some home care referral relationship dos and don’ts:
DO:
- Remain in touch with the referral source in ways that are mutually beneficial.
- Share articles of interest and include your comments and thoughts.
- Email your company newsletters to solidify how your agency is an expert in the home care industry.
- Offer an in-service to the referral source on an important training topic that is related to his or her area of expertise.
DON’T:
- Don’t waste the person’s time just to get some face-to-face interaction.
- Don’t just drop off brochures. Provide only new, helpful, educational information.
- Don’t try to win the referral source over with gifts, brownies, tchotchkes, and other gimmicks.
- Don’t make in-person meetings only about personal, idle conversation. It is important to genuinely engage with them on a personal level, but if all of your meetings revolve around the kids, football scores, and vacations, the reason for your interaction disappears.
Building, nurturing and growing new relationships with referral sources requires a clear strategy, along with a healthy dose of patience and effective persistence. To see how your agency measures up, click here to download our free Sales Self-Assessment to better gauge your level of sales knowledge and effectiveness. Then contact the home care marketing experts at MOST to learn how we can help your agency create meaningful relationships with referral sources, and provide them with the helpful information that will ensure you’re top of mind!
