Coach's Blog » Nurture Marketing and Black Bamboo

Nurture Marketing and Black Bamboo

“Customer relationships are like marriages; they starve without consistent, heart-felt communication.”
- Dan Zadra

Imagine if you could put an “iron cage” around your clients, patients and prospects and keep them coming back to your agency over and over again! You can, but first you need to start thinking of yourself as a farmer and integrate nurture marketing into your sales and marketing process.

The word “nurture” stems from the Babylonian word “nutra,” which means to nourish. Home care agencies that adopt this fundamental tenet into their sales and marketing program develop stronger, longer lasting relationships with their customers and essentially have them come back again and again. Agencies that don’t adopt this philosophy simply lose their clients and patients to agencies that do and then blame the competition for stealing their customers. Just ask yourself, “How much nurturing do I give my customers and is it enough for them to want to choose my agency over a competitor’s when a need arises?”

Nurturing relates to the idea of building greater customer loyalty through regular communication. There is a great parallel to cultivating a farmer’s field and successfully selling or marketing to your clients and patients. Your clients, like a farmer’s field, need to be nourished and protected to ensure the greatest harvest possible.

As some of you know, I spent several years studying and working in Mainland China. During one of my field trips out into the countryside I had the opportunity to discover the incredible magic of Black Bamboo. Black Bamboo is a type of bamboo that grows in Mainland China and happens to be one of the strongest natural substances in the world. It is so strong that the Chinese use it as scaffolding for building some of the largest and tallest buildings in China. In order to grow Black Bamboo, Chinese farmers must first till the field and then carefully sow the seeds one at a time ever so carefully below the earth – not too deep and not too shallow. The seeds are watered every week and mixed with slurry made of dung.

This process carries on for almost five years…Yes, five years without a single bamboo shoot to harvest. But after carefully nurturing the seeds week after week for almost five years something remarkable happens….the bamboo shoots through the ground and grows 60 feet in 30 days. So, the question is, when did the growth of the bamboo really occur? Did it occur over the five-year period or did it occur during the short 30-day period? The answer is that it occurred over the five-year period. If the farmers hadn’t nurtured the seeds during this period, the seeds would never have sprouted and there would not have been anything to harvest. Home care is similar in comparison to harvesting bamboo in many ways because we often have clients and prospects that may not need our services at this point in time but then suddenly a need arises and all the nurturing that you have been providing that client or prospect pays off because you have been there all along. They call or choose your agency because they think of you first.

Mae West said it best, “Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money, honey.” Nurturing your clients and prospects needs to be a consistent and relentless process that connects you with them to increase top of mind awareness, increase trust and respect, and reinforce your agency’s message and competitive advantages.

Nurturing your clients through a systematic process and being consistent with it is easier said than done, especially in home care. But, if you truly want to become a successful farmer with fields always ready to harvest from the seeds that you have sown, you must have a nurturing process in place that allows you to consistently connect with your clients and prospects. I would recommend that you start with providing your clients and prospects a monthly newsletter, birthday card, holiday card, discount “loyalty card” and other value-added information and recognition items to increase their level of trust with you. To truly develop a strong relationship and bond with your clients and prospects and put that “iron cage” around them so they come back to you again and again, you must first make some deposits into their account.

To discover how you can put an “iron cage” around your clients and prospects with a quick and easy, and completely turn-key, customer loyalty program, call into the TAG sales room at 1-866-232-6477 and my sales associates will be happy to help you or simply go to www.HealthMattersProgram.com.

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.

Please visit my blog next week to discover a specific tried-and-proven strategy to stay connected with your clients and referrals and differentiate your agency from the competition. Send me your requests for blog topics .

Working to grow your referrals,

Adam

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

Name
Email
Comments
Verification Code	Reload Image