Coach's Blog » Create a Marriage With Your Clients, Not a Casual Relationship

Create a Marriage With Your Clients, Not a Casual Relationship

In last week’s Blog, I talked about the importance of having a nurturing marketing and sales system in your agency to build a fence around your patients, clients and referral sources. This week I want to give you one of the best nurture marketing tools to skyrocket your referrals month after month.

One of the greatest assets you have is your customer list, which consists of existing and previous clients and patients and medical referral sources. The direct marketing big thumb rule is: a list loses 10% of its value each month absent contact, so after 10 months of not contacting your list its value is essentially zero! That is how fast your relationship with clients, prospects and referral sources can go away. Now sure, most of you are marketing to your "A" or "Top Tier" accounts weekly or at least once per month, but what about all your other accounts and post discharge clients and patients who you are not "nurturing" or making contact with every month? What kind of a relationship are you building with them, or better yet how much of that relationship are you losing because you are not staying in contact with them month after month?

But even that frightening statistic fails to accurately depict the total cost of customer neglect. There is vulnerability to the seduction by your competitors and ultimately loss of referrals you could have gotten if you were thought about more constantly. In home care, we have been notoriously cheap and negligent about nurture marketing and the understanding of the return on investment from staying in touch with our LIST! We often only contact our list out of desperation solely and crassly looking for referrals. Ideally you want your clients and referral sources not only referring to you when you are directly calling on them, but also thinking of your agency when you aren’t physically there. You want your clients and referral sources to have such a strong relationship with you that they refer to you rather than go elsewhere (even when it’s more convenient to go elsewhere), and even feel guilty about casually dividing allegiance. In short, we don’t want to have a casual relationship with our customer, clients and referral sources, we want a marriage.

Our agency discovered this the hard way. We believed that we provided the best quality service in town so we felt like we didn’t need to really do anything else, that our clients, patients and referral sources would keep coming back to us month after month. The problem was that one of our main competitors in town was sending out interesting, educational, and professionally designed newsletters every month to our clients, customers and referral sources and was developing a relationship with them while we were resting on our laurels and whatever relationship we thought we had developed months prior. Our competitors were now top of mind for our clients and referral sources and we ultimately lost a ton of potential referrals to the COMPETITION! Don’t let this happen to you. We ultimately built a better mousetrap and brought most of our referrals back but not without truly understanding the importance of building a Five-Star relationship with our customers and referral sources.

The Five-Star Relationship consists of the following:

1. Frequency
2. Consistency
3. Constancy
4. Creativity
5. Quality

Very quickly, one by one…

Frequency means often, every week or every month, but make sure it is often. Consistency means that some component of the weekly or monthly touches needs to arrive as expected and anticipated on a regular schedule. Constancy means without interruption, lapse or gap. Creativity means entertaining and interesting and Quality means including information, education and quality of presentation.

One very easy and inexpensive way of nurturing your list and developing a Five-Star Relationship is through a monthly newsletter. If you are not sending out a monthly newsletter, you are leaving thousands of dollars and tons of potential referrals on the table each and every month. Why is a newsletter so powerful? It is congruent with the nurture marketing principles and the Five-Star Relationship components listed above. It develops and strengthens your relationship with your existing and past clients. It keeps your agency’s name and the services you do at the top of your clients’ consciousness. It gives you the opportunity to continually educate your clients and referral sources month after month. It also gives you the perfect platform to recognize clients and referral sources who refer to you. This technique will boost the number of referrals you get because when one referral source trusts you enough to refer to you (as evidenced by their feature in your newsletter), others will follow suit.

Sending out a monthly newsletter is not an option – it’s a necessity – if you want to grow your referrals and profits and take your agency to the next level. But, if you decide to do it, you must follow the five principles outlined above. Most agencies fail at getting a monthly newsletter off the ground because… it takes too much time, money or resources!

Not anymore…..You can have it all done for you!

Rather than get into all the details, I would like to give you a FREE GIFT to help you get started on your own custom monthly newsletter. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll be on your way to skyrocketing your referrals month after month, quick and easy!

Click the link below and once you get there, click the "Get Started" button. Once you’re on the sign-up page, fill out the short information form. Type "freegift" into the Promotion Code window and you’ll be on your way to having your own custom, professional newsletter that is specific to your agency – home health, hospice or private duty – in just a few minutes!

Click this link to get your FREE GIFT. Remember to use Promo Code: freegift.

Stay tuned for next week’s Blog where I reveal another nurture marketing strategy to keep your clients, prospects and referral sources coming back again and again.

If you would like more information on this topic and other proven and innovative strategies, join my online member’s only coaching site at www.MyHomeCareSalesCoach.com. To sign up for a free 30-minute Coaching Call with a TAG Home Care Sales Coach Click Here. Call or click to receive your FREE product sample package, Click Here.

Working to grow your referrals,

Adam
a.k.a. - Home Care Referral-Man

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