What’s up everybody? It’s Steve the hurricane here, and for today’s episode of a Drink with the Hurricane, we are going to be discussing tour etiquette. What do you say? What do you do and how do you successfully pull it off for successful marketing campaigns?
So recently, I had the privilege of being able to go out with one of my clients in another part of the country and do tours at several different assisted livings and skilled nursing homes in that area. And what I love about saying that is I have been teaching people how to do tours properly since 2012 when I first started this company, and yet here it is 2024, 12 years later, and everything that I taught, then I applied and it still worked and got the results that we were after. And the reason for it is to truly understand what it is that we are there to accomplish when we’re on a tour.
When we have a tour, we are there to accomplish one objective, and that objective is to lay the foundation or really potentially lay a foundation for us to start a strategic partnership. There is no other purpose for this. You go on the tour, you wanna qualify the account, you qualify the account to determine what is their potential to refer me. If their potential is great to refer me, then you know that you want to come back to this account again and again and again. Well, what’s going to allow me to come to this account again and again and again? The only thing that’s going to allow me to be able to do that so I can develop a true working referring relationship would be if I was to try and set up a strategic partnership. This is what I call power partnering.
Where on these tours you are laying the foundation discussing all the different things that you can do with them as a strategic power partner and referral sources like that. At the end of the day, you have to think to yourself, what is it that the person who’s giving me the tour needs? Usually they have a business, they’re trying to grow their patient census, whatever the business is, and you have to think about the things that they do to grow their census. A lot of these places have events and gatherings. A lot of these places get referrals from other places, other entities in the healthcare continuum just like you do. A lot of these places have activities departments, and we could sponsor an activity. A lot of these places, they are concerned about the outcomes of their patients or their residents, and by working with us, this is when they refer us, we can keep them in the loop of the care that we are providing to offer a superior outcome for the referral partner. These are all things and points that you must convey when you’re on your tour.
Now, I’m gonna also throw something out there, the behavior of the individual on the tour. If I were to do these tours and walk into a community nervous and, and gun shy, like, hi, I, I, I’m here and I, I’d like to tour your building and, and I wanna learn about what you do and, and I might be able to send you a referral. They’re gonna look at me like, where did you come from? Who are you? What are you doing here? They’re, they’re gonna automatically be suspicious because it doesn’t sound genuine.
On the flip side, when you understand what I just said and explained to you, this is why when I go on tours, even in this day and age, even though I haven’t been on my own personal tours in over a decade, it still works. It’s because I come in confidently. When I was on these tours recently with my clients in Arkansas, I specifically walked in and said, I’m a consultant. I work with this company here For the last two or three years, we did a whole bunch of overhauling operationally to be able to provide a superior service in the home care space in this area. As a result, the company has grown and our outcomes are significantly better than what they were before we started working together. Now we are at a point where we are trying to form strategic alliances with businesses like yourself so that we can do some mutually beneficial things because obviously we want you to refer us, but if you don’t have patients to send us, you can’t refer us. We wanna work with you and make sure that you have plenty of patients that you could send our way and together we’re all gonna be able to grow our patient census. How does that sound to you? Now, think about what I just said there. I was confident. I knew exactly what we were trying to accomplish, and logically it makes sense. We wanna partner with you potentially that’s a takeaway. We wanna partner with you potentially to do some things that are gonna grow both of our businesses.
Now, if I’m speaking to an administrator, if I’m speaking to an admissions coordinator or a marketing business development professional, which one of those three positions doesn’t want that, right? They all want that. And so what that does is that basically buys us time where they think, well, that this sounds good. What did you have in mind? And then that’s when I can start to sprinkle all of what I just said. Collaborating on events, sponsoring an activity, improving your patient outcomes. All of those things happen all throughout the tour. Now, you might have gone on a tour before and a tour lasted you 10 to 15 minutes. I can assure you, when you’re doing the tour, the way I’m discussing it here, your tours are gonna last 45 minutes an hour, sometimes even 90 minutes.
When I was in Arkansas doing these tours, I did three tours and two power partner visits, a total of five different meetings on one single day. Each tour lasted approximately an hour. The best, most successful tour of the three lasted 90 minutes. It was so long that I was actually late getting to the fourth appointment of the day. We made it work out, but that’s because I brought value. When I walked out of the tour, I had an in-service on the calendar. I had an event on the calendar to collaborate with to invite social workers from the hospitals to this assisted living. We had an activity scheduled for two months later on the calendar and it set the business development professional up that I was working with, with two months of follow up and meetings and planning where he now is developing a relationship that’s beneficial to the assisted living and to his company. And who do you think they’re referring for? Home care. My client. That’s what it takes to be a strategic partnership. That’s the end goal. Let’s work together. Let’s do things that will grow both of our businesses and during that process, yeah, when you have somebody that needs my help, will you send them to me? Of course, all things being equal in any aspect of life and business people refer who they know, like, and trust. If I’m working with you as a strategic partnership, they know like, and trust me, they are going to affirm me and that is how it’s done. My friends, now, as we close here, I always talk about the next step. You want to grow, you want more, like, this is really great information. Steve, how can I work with you? The best thing you can do is go to my home, my website, home care evolution.com and register for the next Home Care Evolution Bootcamp. These events have completely changed the landscape of the home care industry, and it’s time you got to one so that you can blow away the competition.