Page 17 - HMEB Business, February 2017

And the amazing thing is that incremental sales can take a product category that might not be all that stellar from a funding standpoint, and turn it into something that can drive meaningful income because of all the related items attached to it.
“A walker is a terrible reimbursed item,” Greatorex says. “Why anyone would want to be in that would be questionable, except we feel that, there again, it’s a $650 incremental sales waiting to happen.”
Getting Started With Incremental Sales
The key for getting started in incremental sales is to quite literally start.
“I would start with two categories at the most, and learn with those,” Greatorex says. “... It’s picking a list of the most highly utilized, best-quality, highly rated consumer products, and making it part of your company culture available — always — to every new customer and also capture some of your existing customers, especially if you have face-to-face contact with them.”
Wells adds that providers should double-check their assumptions by talking to their patients.
“Ask your customers what they buy monthly that they have to pay out of pocket for,” she explains. “Or if you are drop shipping through a third party, ask them to guide you on ancillary product offerings that are also handled by your distribution center.”
Greatorex notes that VGM has developed a program that catalogs the items related to various HCPCS codes that providers want to stock and sell incrementally. Then it will help train customer service staff that might not be comfortable with selling cash products, or see some kind of stigma attached to selling.
“We’ll help with a script until [staff] become comfort- able with [selling],” he explains. “And really all it takes to become comfortable with it, is to do it and become successful. Anyone can become a sales person, because all it takes is knowing that the product will make their life better, and your passion will come out however you personally show it. It just takes a little while for some people to show that.”
And getting the customer service team to understand that selling something shouldn’t be stigmatized (because doing so helps those patients get something that can help them) is critical, because the real revenue-driving oppor- tunities during those points of personal connection.
“You will be most effective in getting a high percentage of consumers to buy with a face-to-face,” Greatorex explains. “If you only make a brochure and include it in your billing statement mailings, you’re really only looking at, in the best-case scenario, a 3 to 5 percent success rate with that. If you’re doing incremental sales on a face-to- face basis, I bet your success rate will go up to 25 percent.”
And once providers and their staff start to get their sea legs with incremental sales, they can start to get out in front of their clients by anticipating what they need, Wells adds. They can become solutions providers.
“The single most important tactic to driving incre- mental sales is to offer more to your customer than what they just came to get from your store,” she explains, adding that they should include this agenda in their marketing efforts. “Share daily deals online, cross-sell in your customer newsletter and add box stuffers to your shipments so that customers can see what else you have that they might want or need.”
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
The bottom line is that retail sales are a business imperative for providers now, and incremental sales offers them a way to address that imperative.
“It introduces you to retail, and opens your eyes to all kinds of possibilities,” Greatorex says. “We’re in a consumer-driven healthcare model now, it’s not clinically or third-party driven anymore. The consumer is driving the train, and if you don’t develop a way to comfortably and effectively promote cash business, you might it difficult to grow your business or keep viable.” n
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