Page 13 - HME Business, May 2019

Problem Solvers
Next-Level Referral Management
By Leila McNeill
Providers need to ditch the old spreadsheet and tap into the tools offered by HME software to manage their referral partnerships.
Marketing to referrals has changed. A simple “build it and they will come” mentality is not a viable approach to recruit and
retain referral sources. Referrals are the driving force for an HME business, so providers need an effective management system that tracks their referral sources closely and measures a specific source’s contribution to the business. With this information, providers can make strategic decisions about where to focus their resources and what kind of work needs to be done to court new referral sources, all of which impact the provider’s revenue.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain such detailed and consistent visibility into the business’ referral partnerships through a manual system of paper folders and spreadsheets. Rather, providers can take advantage of HME software solutions to create a centralized, automated referral management system for their business. With a centralized and automated system, providers can track trends in their referral sources, iden-
tify competition, improve referral partnership
and, ultimately, sustain a profitable business.
Tracking Referral Trends
Customer relationship management (CRM) in HME software is an essential tool for any HME provider. Particularly on the referral
end of the things, CRM solutions lend HME providers visibility into the dynamic of their referral relationships and shows how those rela- tionships contribute to the business. Ty Bello, president and founder of Team@Work, says that CRM is “the most important piece for sales efforts into the referral community. It allows
us to measure metrics that are paramount
and critical to increasing referrals and also to managing our referrals in the community.”
HMEs that manually manage referral rela-
tionships are missing these key metrics. “If they
do it manually, which many of us have been
doing for well over a quarter a century, they
don’t have a very good system of reporting what
those metrics are,” Bello explains. “Therefore, they can’t identify leading and lagging indicators, which they otherwise with a software system would be able to quickly identify to look at potential gaps, loss of clients, increase of clients. And that would change the dynamic of how we would call on that referral source, based on whether they’re increasing or decreasing.”
Being able to pinpoint individual referral sources and quantify the business received from them is key to effective management of referral relationships — after all, referrals kickstart the sales process. Once a provider drills into their data, they might find that a particular partnership with a referral source is not as strong as they thought it was.
Jason Dillon, sales manager at PlayMaker Health says he often receives feedback from providers who assumed that they were receiving most, if not all, of a referral source’s business. But once they had a look at their data, the reality
was very different, sometimes discovering that they were receiving only a quarter of the referral source’s business while the rest went to competitors. For this reason, “It’s really valuable for someone to understand what percentage of the business they are seeing from a provider,” Dillon notes.
As Dillon further explains, “Providers and suppliers often run into a situa- tion where at the surface level it may feel like they have a really good relation- ship with a particular individual, but when you peel back the first layer, you can quickly understand that business is being sent down the way to other providers and competition.”
That data, Bello says, “shows us a better picture of what referral sources actually do. Instead of wondering about their potential, we will now get a clear indication of their actual, which then changes the way we call on them.”
Bello offers an example of how this information can influence how providers manage their contact with referral
sources. “Before the data, I had a gentleman who had the potential of calling on 290 referral sources in his territory. Two-hundred and ninety before the data! Once we got the data and analyzed and scrubbed it, we were able to effectively lower that to 90.” In other words, having hard data lets providers streamline their referral management and make it more effi- cient, targeted and effectual.
More than telling a provider how much of a referral source’s business they are getting, the data can also tell them where referrals are being sent, if not to them. This knowledge, in combination with the percentage of the business a provider receives from a referral source, gives providers the opportunity to act more strategically.
“Providers and suppliers often run into a situation where at the service level it may feel like they have a really good relationship with
a particular individual, but when you peel back the first layer, you can quickly understand that business is being sent down the way to other providers and competition. ”
— Jason Dillon, PlayMaker Health
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
hme-business.com | May 2019 | HMEBusiness 13
Bello explains. “And if I’ve done my job,
and I know the competitors’ weaknesses, then I’m going to capitalize on the weakness because those are my opportunities to win that referral from that provider. Those two things go hand in hand for me.”
Providers can also strategically begin to expand their referral source connec- tions by bolstering existing relationships and recruiting new ones. Once providers see the actual percentage of business that they receive from a referral source, Bello explains that they now have the opportunity to earn more of that business. “With the data, we’re able to see again what we’re currently getting
to what they’re actually referring out. So there’s a growth opportunity built in right there. Let’s develop a plan of getting more of that business. Some busi- nesses are getting 10 to 25 percent of the business, so that means there’s 75 percent more out there.”
“Now I have the advantage of knowing the competition that’s there,” and I know the competitors’ strengths,