Senior Care Marketing Must Do #27

Monday 8am: Read this newsletter

Monday 8:30am: Find your glasses

If you have ever struggled with the question "Why won't they refer to me even after they said they would?", this tip is for you.

A couple of months ago, a family friend stayed with us in our guest room as she was moving cross country. Being it was such a big move, her Mom was accompanying her on the road trip to Phoenix, AZ. We had a nice time visiting with them before they left early the next morning.

Flash forward to a month later when my wife walked into my office holding a pair of reading glasses and asked "Are these yours? I found them under the bed in the guest room". And while I'm the king of reading glasses, with a pair in almost every room of the house, these particular glasses weren't familiar to me. I guessed (correctly) that they belonged to our friend's Mom. My wife said:

"I'll send Lisa a message and ask her if they belong to her Mom. This way, we can return them if they do".

And then......crickets.

For the next week, every time I saw the glasses sitting up on the counter in our kitchen, I asked my wife "What did Lisa say?". Every time I asked that, my wife would say "Ohh! I meant to message her, and I got distracted doing something else. I'm going to message her RIGHT NOW!". Then, a day later we'd repeat the conversation until it almost became our little joke.

Now, my wife did have a lot of other important things to do. She's a personal trainer and triathlon coach and works on her client's training plans during the week. She takes care of me, our son, our dogs, our house, and herself. She works out, spends time with friends, and a hundred other things. So you understand....every time she said she was going to message Lisa "right now", she meant it....but her current habits were too strong to allow it. Her deeply ingrained habits kept her doing the things she knew needed to be done, in spite of what she said she was going to do differently.

So, how does this apply to selling homecare, home health, hospice, etc?

You build relationships with people. You sell them on the strengths of your agency, you ask them for the opportunity to serve patients (you do ask, right?)....and they say "Yes, I will refer that patient to you". And then.....nothing happens. What's wrong? Are they lying to you? Are they crazy?

No.....they simply don't have a HABIT of referring to you, so in effect, they cannot do it.....despite their best intentions.

I start off every sales seminar with our goals for the training. After the introduction I let people know our goal is to do this:

1. Break BAD referral habits

2. Build GOOD referral habits

And then, we go on to teach just that. Our entire Momentum Selling Strategy is designed around this one key goal....build good, solid referral habits with your key referral sources. When you do they will say "yes", mean "yes", and actually refer to you on a regular basis. Every month, every week, sometimes even more often than that....because that's what their habits tell them to do. THIS is the power of what we teach to home care industry sales professionals.

If you'd like to bring our Momentum Selling seminar into your office, contact me today to talk about Fall dates. Most times, the training pays for itself in the first few days of your sales team being back in the field selling.

What happened the glasses? I'm glad you asked.

Lisa's Mom did in fact confirm they were hers. She said they were an inexpensive pair and not worth mailing to her, so she said to just keep them. So....guess who has another pair of reading glasses in the arsenal right now? This guy! Thanks to my wife, Lisa, and her Mom for making this dream come true. :-)

I'll be speaking at the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice's summer conference on August 28th in Grapevine, TX. My session "Unleash The Motivational Speaker In You!" will be presented from 2pm-3:30pm. If you are attending the conference, please come to my session for some great tips on becoming a more impactful leader, or simply to motivate yourself to higher levels of performance! If you'd like to meet before or after my session to discuss your sales team's training needs, please email me to set up an appointment.

I'll be back in Texas on September 13th for our Senior Care Closing Workshop in Mesquite, TX. I'll teach you everything you need to know to convert more sales calls into actual sales. Register for the Dallas Workshop today!

Have a great week...and Good Selling!

Michael Giudicissi