We've brought together a team of educators and home care experts to answer the burning questions that you and every home care owner will ask at some point.
Gabrielle Pumpian Chief Development Officer at Cheer Home Care; 3-time home care marketer
Marissa Snook President/CEO of corecubed care marketing
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Debbie Miller Former pharma sales rep who built a $10M home care company and founded 52 Weeks Marketing
Debbie Miller Former pharma sales rep who built a $10M home care company and founded 52 Weeks Marketing
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Gregg Mazza Founded a home care agency, almost ran out of capital after two years, figured things out and scaled past $5M
Erica Horner Home care sales consultant & project manager at corecubed
Erica Horner Home care sales consultant & project manager at corecubed
Brett Ringold Vice President of A Long-Term Companion & HCAOA board member
Jeremy Fuller Managing Director of Grow Home Care Marketing; website, SEO, and digital marketing expert
Here’s an overview of some of the different areas you should think about—as well as telltale signals that each area might be what’s holding you back.
Note from Connor at Careswitch: This piece draws heavily from a recent interview on our podcast, Home Care U, with three-time home care marketer Gabrielle Pumpian who currently works as Chief Development Officer at Cheer Home Care in California. You can listen to the full episode here; we’ll also link a list of related resources at the end of this article. While this was written by our team, we've credited her as the author because her knowledge formed much of the subject matter.
Before we get started: working through the different areas of the referral marketing/sales process requires us to hit some points that might sound painfully obvious. Give the obvious-sounding ones some earnest thought anyway—struggling sales processes often come back to fundamentals.
It’s easy to sink a referral marketing program simply by wasting too much time on accounts that aren’t ideal anyway.
By the end of your first conversation with any given referral partner, do you actually know how often they refer home care clients?
A few other tips for proper qualification:
Signals this may be your problem:
Some marketers will be rolling their eyes at the obviousness of this—somebody else is reading this right now and thinking that it feels unrealistic.
It’s possible that getting your foot in the door with a particular account might at some point require an unscheduled drop-in for whatever reason, but you’re almost always going to be have a more productive meeting if you’re respecting their time (and owning the value of your own time and presence) by scheduling ahead.
Frequently unscheduled drop-ins can erode your credibility, strain your relationships with partners, and waste your time.
Signals this may be your problem:
One of the most critical determinants of success or failure in home care marketing is whether or not you:
1) have a clear differentiator
2) clearly understand its value to your potential referral sources, and
3) know how to articulate its value to them effectively
This not only fuels your initial talking points with potential referral partners, but also determines the types of counter-questions you should ask if they’re already working with other agencies or otherwise don’t seem interested in partnering.
As Gabrielle thoughtfully points out in the previously mentioned interview, questions like “It makes sense that you prefer referring clients to XYZ agency since they charge less than many agencies. Since lower-cost agencies tend to turn over caregivers much faster, do you know if they have a way to keep the churn from impacting clients’ experiences?” can quickly open the door for you to help them consider benefits you can offer they hadn’t previously considered.
Examples of factors that might be a differentiator to referral sources:
Note: It’s very possible that this question results in some organization-level soul-searching. Newer agencies often secure their first few clients on the strength of personal relationships but struggle to scale because they haven’t deliberately identified areas to invest in organizationally to produce concrete business differentiators.
Signals this may be your problem:
Nothing gives you stronger fuel for productive future interactions with referral partners and nothing kills referral relationships faster than your agency’s follow-up.
Some questions to ask:
Many types of referral partners have specifics on how they want communication, documentation, and follow-up to happen. Referencing geriatric care managers as an example of this, Gabrielle told me:
“They’re very specific with how they like communication to happen. They often like to have copies of the care plan, develop a care plan with our staff, have certain protocols for how they need to be communicated with throughout a case, and want care plans emailed to them monthly. . . It’s very important to understand these things if you want to keep your credibility with them.”
Jesse Walters, CEO of Hillendale Home Care in the San Francisco Bay Area, addresses the communication/follow-up challenge by pairing both a marketer and a client care manager on any given referral account, giving them co-ownership for the relationship, and treating it as a book of business to which both employees have performance-based compensation tied.
Signals this may be your problem:
As Gabrielle told our team, stay out of the dreaded Friend Zone—a situation in which you have a great relationship with a partner but aren’t getting any referrals from them.
At some point, it becomes time to have the break-up conversation, where you make it clear that the relationship isn’t something you can justify continuing to put time and effort into unless it’s a reciprocal relationship that is producing referrals.
And because humans hate feeling like we’re bugging each other, at the end of the day it’s all too easy to focus so much on building relationships that you fail to keep the goal of receiving referrals at the front and center of your efforts.
Signals this may be your problem:
If you’ve gotten this far, maximizing the value you’re getting from referrals partners is obviously important to you. Here are some other resources we’ve got on the topic: