The New Sales Strategy Needed to Succeed in Home Care and Hospice Today
There’s been a significant shift in the key decision makers for brand selection and/or preferred providers for home health and hospice services. Who makes these decisions now, and how does it affect your sales strategy? That’s what we discuss in this month’s feature.
In the past, hospital administrators had no vested interest in what happened to patients once they left their facilities. Thanks to new Medicare readmission penalties, however, hospitals’ bottom lines are now at risk if certain benchmarks on patient readmissions within the first 30 days after discharge aren’t achieved. Furthermore, the creation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), as well as pilot programs in post-acute bundling, have only served to reinforce the message that hospitals will become financially engaged in the entire episode of patient care. As a result, recommending the “right” home health agencies or hospices to serve their patients has become a much more important issue for hospitals today. So hospital management will now make this decision, no longer leaving it up to the discharge planners.
The Days of “Muffin Marketing” Are Gone
As the sales targets of home care agencies and hospice shift from the discharge planner to the C-suite, you’ll find selling at this level is a whole new ballgame. The days of pitching your services to a clinician over a muffin or donut are over.
Here are four primary reasons why selling at this level is different:
- Gaining access to top hospital management versus discharge planners is more difficult. Although getting past the receptionist in a doctor’s office or onto the hospital floors may have been difficult, you usually could garner a brief impromptu meeting with a physician and/or discharge planner. Access to the C-level individuals, however, is much more restricted and involves more layers of organizational structure. Bureaucracy tightly controls the calendars of top hospital administrators, and tracking them down in the hallways of their institutions is usually impossible.
- There are more people involved in the decision-making process. Because the hospital’s finances are at risk, the number of individuals potentially impacted by this brand decision is greater than in the clinical sales process. More people means more messaging and communicating to have your message heard and understood.
- Additional sets of agendas and different motivations now impact the decision. There are more people involved, which means there will also be more points of view, since each person could be affected differently by the decision. The chief financial officer may consider only the agency with the lowest readmission rate, for example, while the case management director may be primarily concerned about an agency’s responsiveness. Compared to a physician or discharge planner, top hospital administrators typically are:
- More concerned about business issues because they aren’t involved with patient care on a day-to-day basis.
- More analytic about their decisions and want proof or numbers to validate a proposed course of action.
- More focused about the impact on the entire organization – not on individual patients, as a clinical person might be.
- Making a choice and implementing the final decision takes more time. Because of the magnitude of the potential impact on the organization and an increase in the number of parties involved, the decision may take longer than in clinical sales. In clinical sales, if the referral sources were swayed by your presentation, they could react by sending you a referral for their next patient. Implementing a C-level decision may take more time, since it often involves working through a number of people to affect frontline change – which also requires more messaging and communication.
Information Is Power in C-Suite Sales
It’s often said that information is power. And that’s very true in the case of C-suite sales. When it comes to selling to the C-suite, learn as much as you can about how their organization behaves and performs. This is particularly true since you are likely to have less access to the key decision makers and, therefore, less opportunity to learn about their agendas and motivation. You’ll also find that the ability to quantify your proof is a necessary ingredient in any C-level presentation. This audience responds to numbers.
That’s where Healthcare Market Resources can help. We can provide you with your local market’s home care and hospice statistics – all the vital information you need to develop an effective sales strategy to target top hospital management. With our Medicare Hospital Discharges by DRG Report, for example, you can find out how many patients by diagnosis-related group (DRG) a hospital discharged to home healthcare, community/self care, or a medical facility. Additionally, our Medicare Hospital Inpatient Deaths and Hospice Referrals by DRG Report shows how many patients by DRG die in a hospital or are discharged to hospice or other settings. Email us or give us a call at 215-657-7373 today to learn more.