Navigating the Home Care Sales Process: A Step-by-Step Guide
The questions to ask and actions to take when bringing new clients into your home care agency
Your agency's home care sales team is the powerhouse of business growth. Not only will they attract new clients to your agency, they’ll also play a key role in retention and bring back important information on competitors and new service opportunities.
The experience of winning new clients can be both gratifying and disappointing, and usually swings between the two. The best you can do is enter the market with thoughtful preparation, a strategy to move qualified leads through your sales funnel, and an attitude of service. Here’s how.
1. Market prep
Before you go to market with your home care services. Make a plan. Research and reflect on your agency’s place in the market and what you do best. The most precisely you can identify your goals, the better. Ask yourself:
- Where is our expertise and what are our most successful services?
- What are our competitors doing? What messaging do they use?
- What about our messaging? How will we differentiate ourselves while accurately representing our strengths?
- What questions and concerns do we expect to get from potential clients? Cost? Trustworthiness? How might we address this in our messaging?
- At what point will I need to bring on new staff to support incoming clients?
2. Lead generation
Lead generation is making contact with potential clients, collecting their contact information, and adding them to your sales funnel.
Before you enter the lead generation phase, home care agencies should also consider the practical aspects of a sales push: marketing materials. This can include print resources like one-sheets and collateral, pamphlets, and print ads in local media. Your plan should also include digital resources, like content optimized for search engines, digital ad campaigns (including display, social media, and search ads), video, organic social, landing pages, digital one-sheets, white papers, etc.
Lead generation is the first stage in the home care sales process where marketing automation becomes a must. A good platform will manage leads so they don’t get lost or left behind in the sales process.
Your lead generation strategies might include:
- Driving users who click on ads to a landing page where they can learn more about home care services and provide their contact information.
- A social media strategy that uses educational content to encourage potential clients to reach out with questions.
- Referrals and word-of-mouth by your current clients is one of the strongest endorsements you can ask for. Incentivize your current clients to spread the word on your behalf by offering discounts and services trials in exchange for qualified leads.
- Local events and open houses where you can meet potential clients in a comfortable setting. Those who are totally new to home care may want the opportunity to meet caregivers and staff in person and have their questions asked face-to-face.
3. Lead nurturing
Once you’ve added potential clients to your funnel, it’s time to address their unique needs with regular communication. Your lead nurture campaigns might include newsletters (either periodically or via drip campaigns), follow-up calls or text messages, open houses, or informational interviews.
Marketing automation is especially valuable at this stage because it can do a lot of the lead nurturing for you with scheduled outreach, campaign triggers, and messaging suggestions. Good platforms can also show you who’s most engaged with your campaigns and who’s at risk of dropping out—so you can pull them back in.
Home care sales must strike a careful balance of staying top-of-mind for leads while avoiding overloading them with outreach. There’s no quicker way to turn off a potential client than with relentless contact.
4. Closing the sale
You made it! You’re confident that one of your leads is ready to officially become a client. How do you make sure you get a signature on that contract? Healthcare is a very personal business, and pushing too hard to close the sale can make the experience feel cold and transactional.
To close the sale:
- Focus on meeting their needs, not selling your services. Clients don’t care about your roster of services, they just want to know what you can do for them and their family. By focusing on ways the agency can solve their problems, you show leads that you value their needs, not your sales quota.
- Give them real figures on cost and ways to pay for services, including insurance coverage and payment plans.
- Talk about timelines and schedules and what meets their needs.
- Introduce them to their caregiver team so they can ask questions of the people who will be in their home providing care
What about rejection?
Rejection never feels good. Especially after investing so much time and energy into nurturing a lead throughout the sales process, it can feel frustrating for them to back out.
When this happens, ask if they’re willing to share what changed their mind, not to rebound and close the sale right there, but to understand their needs. If you can correct a misconception or address a concern they have, make that correction softly.
If you’re consistently hearing “no” from your leads, it may be time to rethink your sales process. Take the feedback you get—both good and bad—and route it back into your sales efforts to improve.
5. Client retention
Home care sales doesn’t stop at contract signing. Clients have to be retained, and your business development team should play a vital role.
In fact, your whole team bears some responsibility for retention: Your home care sales team, in conjunction with client services, ensures clients know the services available to them and are happy with the care and communication they receive. The caregivers are on the front line, providing the exceptional care clients come to rely on. And agency leadership ensures that care and customer service is forward-thinking and consistent across the business.
Communication is a fundamental part of retention, and your plan should include regular touchpoints, including:
- Making sure they know who to contact with specific questions and concerns about things like scheduling, billing, insurance, record-keeping, care plans, complaints, etc. Give them multiple ways to reach out so they can pick what works best for them.
- Having someone from the client services or care coordination team reach out at regular intervals to check in on whether they’re happy with the care they’re receiving.
Ready to give your home care sales process a boost?
Whether it's help with lead generation or automation that helps you keep a pulse on how clients are doing, Home Care Marketing Pros offers digital marketing solutions designed to complement your sales strategy and help you grow your agency.
Book a call to learn more!
