For today’s episode with A Drink With “The Hurricane”, I’m talking about supporting your marketing representatives. This is going to be the first of a three-part series on how to do so.
The first thing we’re gonna talk about, there’s three things I’m gonna talk about with ya.
1. Mindset
2. PDI
3. Ongoing Support
There are a lot of business owners out there, I’m gonna say at least 50% of the people who inquire for my company’s services who have a marketing rep, where the owner wants nothing to do with marketing. They say “I don’t like marketing”, “I’m hiring a marketer to do the marketing”, “I’m above marketing”, “I don’t want anything to do with it.
Your marketing representative is an employee of your company. Now when you look at your business, everyday if you’re an operator owner, you see your scheduler. Everyday, you see your recruiter. Everyday, if you have a clinical person, you see that clinical person. If you have a receptionist, everyday, you see your receptionist.
The marketing representative is truly the only position that’s a full-time roll in your company, of an employee, not a caregiver ’cause a caregiver is an employee too, but a different type of caregiver, a different type of employee, that your only full-time employed salary you should not see every single day.
So why would you not want to be involved with this person? Plus, if you look at the Home Care Pulse Report statistics, marketing representatives are among the highest-paid employee in your organization. Schedulers and recruiters do not make as much money as marketing representatives make, because their job is harder, and not harder in that it’s easy to schedule, it’s easy to staff, no.
It’s physically harder in that the marketing rep, should be getting up and going out and spending seven, eight hours every single day marketing, pounding the pavement, driving into accounts, doing launches, going to networking events, and trying to grow your business. It is wrong to have a mindset of I want nothing to do with marketing.
Even if you outsource it to us with our coaching program. If you’re with me on the classes, you know in those classes that I do, when I’m training you and teaching you, I always say you have to go out with your rep. You have to support your rep and if you don’t do it, you will not be successful because they need the support. They need help.
From mindset objective, you should be going lunch and learn. You should be going to networking events with your marketing reps, you should be leading the charge especially a new marketing rep who doesn’t know your business yet, I don’t care if they sold home care before, they don’t know your home care business yet. How can you expect this person who doesn’t know your business, to go out and represent you the way you need them to.
One of the things that I highly recommend when you first hire a marketing rep, as far as the mindset goes, understand that this is a six month commitment, that’s the first thing, I’m not gonna hire this person and just let them go if they don’t get referrals in a month or two, because that’s not realistic. On average, it takes eight to 12 visits in a referral source before you start getting referrals anyway.
So if you let go of somebody in a month or two who didn’t bring in referrals, you didn’t even give them enough time to get into an account. If this was once a week that’s two to three months, just to get referrals to one account, and that’s if they’re able to get past the gatekeeper and see those key contacts. So you have to understand, it’s a minimum of a six month commitment.
Now in that six months, I tell my owners, when it’s a brand new rep, you should go out marketing with your rep one day a week for the first three to six months. It doesn’t have to be the full day, but it has to be one time a week you go marketing with them to make sure they’re saying the right things. You are there to answer questions that come up that they don’t know the answers to yet.
Make sure that they properly know what they’re doing, and then ongoing long-term, I tell all of my clients, and my ones that do this are very successful, twice a month, just two times a month, you should go out with your marketing rep, because if it’s a four week month, and they’re working full-time, that’s 20 days you’re only going out with them two times, that’s 10% of the working days of the month that you’re gonna spend with them, because you’re in your office running your business.
Now I get it, you have a lot of things to do. I understand that you may not enjoy marketing, you may not even know how to market. This is the whole reason why Hurricane Marketing Enterprises exists. You may not know this, but since I started my company, we have helped home care companies around the world, increase their revenues by more than a billion dollars. This is what we do and we are here to serve you!
If you like this content, then you will love our FREE course Initiate Master Your Home Care Business.
