Every business owner has a unique way of running their business. Some focus their attention on customer service and culture, others have highly regarded onboarding programs and premium room selection for their patients. However you choose to do it, you set key performance indicators that are important to your business and review them every quarter.
But now, something is broken.
After years of successfully keeping your KPIs steady and going up, you analyze your numbers at the end of the quarter and find that something is broken. There has been a subtle deterioration in the quality of leads. You try to figure out what is going on. Leads are taking longer to close and close ratio isn’t where it should be. What’s changed? You run internal reports, and everything comes back negative for any major changes. A week goes by, and you still don’t see where the problem is.
You just can’t see it.
Joseph, a client of mine that is an Administrator for an Assisted Living facility, came to me just last week to discuss this problem. He was too hard-pressed to keep digging into the mechanics of the problem he was facing. But he knew he needed a solution quickly, or bigger problems would start to arise.
You get someone else to take a look.
As his strategic consultant, it was my job to find what he could not see, and find it fast. Starting all the way at the beginning, 6ixth Sense Solutions audited every aspect of their lead generation methodologies.
Bringing in an outside perspective is often the best way to uncover what no one else sees. Unlike your employees, we are not in your day-to-day operations. When we get asked to run a report, everything gets checked and questioned thoroughly. As the Health Care Administrator, you are merely too deeply rooted in the business, and your brain will naturally tend to skip over details that end up being the solution to your problem.
A pair of fresh eyes did wonders.
After one meeting and analyzing their business processes we found what broke. It turns out it was a simple misspelling of the forwarding email. Talk about a “DER” moment!
But that was not all we found. Some other serious deficiencies came above water during the audit. Since the company expanded very quickly in recent years, the business owner had not invested in a more robust, industry-specific CRM to keep up with his growing business. Capturing his lead source was done in a very inefficient way. Which, to my calculations, was costing them much more in overhead than investing in a more robust platform. Especially since the industry-specific platform could have a big benefit on the ROI being made with generating prospects.
Fixing what you did not see was broken.
As a hard-working leader, it is never easy to admit something is wrong. However, almost always, the opportunity cost of keeping things the way they are is still higher that hiring someone to take a look. Businesses end up benefiting from being proactive rather than reactive.
As for the client, we are now in the process of reviewing CRM systems that are robust and also industry-specific to Residential Care Communities for the Elderly. There are many great ones out there, a couple to consider is PipeDrive– which is robust and applicable for the healthcare industry and “You’ve Got Leads” which is a subsidiary of A Place for Mom and industry specific. Revamping this lead generation process will not only ensure future issues will be spotted before they are an issue, but they will also be able to manage everything related to leads and communication with leads with the whole team more efficiently.
About the Author
Keith Freeman, MBA
A dynamic thinker with a great sense of humor, Keith Freeman, MBA, is a Strategic Consultant offering unique solutions to transform healthcare organizations such as hospitals, hospice/palliative, home health and home care, RCFE/assisted living and skilled nursing facilities and professional healthcare staffing services that support them.