By: Bradley Lawton, director of product strategy and portfolio management

For home health and hospice providers, a large part of marketing involves nurturing relationships with Referral sources. These partnerships need to be reported on and understood, ideally using digital tools like a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), to provide your team with a solid database that can be easily transitioned to new account managers. With such high turnover on the marketing side of home health and hospice, simplified onboarding can make that process much less burdensome.

Improving marketing efforts means also improving productivity among your team, growing your business, and creating streamlined workflows that can make often burdensome jobs more enjoyable. Here, we discuss five ways to improve home health and hospice marketing performance.

1. Use a CRM system such as ReferralConnect.

A CRM system can help ensure that your Referral Sources are nurtured by providing key insights into the relationship on what’s working and what’s not. Integrated CRMs can provide data and reporting, challenge your team to identify the key referral decision makers at their respective accounts, and identify new referral sources without account managers.

With ReferralConnect, integrated processes assign commissions, calculate conversion ratios, and create rich account histories—ultimately helping your staff create deeper, lasting connections with these partners.

2. Ride along with your staff.

By physically joining your staff in the field by riding along with them, you can witness first-hand if your marketers are delivering the agency message and values properly. You will also get a deeper understanding of the relationship your marketers have with their accounts. Consider this approach an opportunity to get up close and personal with how your agency ranks with your referral sources.

Tips for ride alongs:

• Discuss the admission history and referral decision maker of the account to be visited.
• Acknowledge your marketer and interact with the decision maker.
• Provide constructive criticism of what went well and what needs to improve.

3. Analyze your data.

While manual systems can provide data, it often requires duplicate entry. With the right CRM, you have access to a wealth of information that can be exported for ad-hoc analysis. ReferralConnect allows data to be exported into a pivot table, with a range of analysis options:

• Conversion ratio by team, by account, or by payor
• Non-admits by team or by referral source
• Non-admits by diagnosis
• Top 10 referral sources

4. Measure what’s important.

Understanding your non-admits is important. Whether it’s not having the skills for certain diagnoses or the provider is unaware of your capabilities, losing a referral or an admit is like losing a sales opportunity—which is why it’s critical to gather data about these losses in order to fully comprehend what works and what doesn’t.

Measure items that you know will impact behavior like calls per day, conversion ratios, or referrals by account.

5. Run your meetings from your CRM system.

Marketers are often asked to document activities in a CRM system, but are also tasked with providing supplemental call reports outside of the CRM system. This creates confusion and low adoption, which is why you should challenge your team to talk about their high value accounts. Here are a few conversation starters:

• What is the conversion ratio and average cost per referral?
• Who is the referral decision maker?
• What is the average acuity of a referral?
• Who is your major competitor?
• How do you present the value statement?

Simply put, your CRM system should be your source of truth. If not, you’ll have adoption issues, time wasted on manual processes, and continued high turnover.

Are you ready to improve marketing performance? Schedule a demo with MatrixCare to see for yourself how analyzing data and leveraging a CRM as your single source of truth can boost productivity and strengthen referral partnerships.

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