Does your agency’s leadership, sales and marketing staff have a firm grasp on how to convert online leads into new clients? Are you tracking the performance and calculating the ROI of your digital marketing? How is your sales cadence for online leads the same or different than how you approach leads from other marketing channels? Do you regularly monitor and manage your online reputation in consumer reviews?

There are some very important trends in the home care industry to which you need to pay attention. Agencies who recognize and plan for these dramatic changes in the way we do business will prosper over the coming years. Those who try to cling to the past may not survive.

We’re speaking about some demographic changes that are already impacting the way our industry markets and sells our services. In the coming years, these changes will completely change the way we do business. This is because future consumers will select care for their parents much differently than how consumers have done so in the past.

The biggest reason is a shift in the normal behavior of those that are searching for care. We all know that the ultimate decisions to hire a home care agency are made up most often by the adult children of seniors, often an adult daughter. As the younger Baby Boomers have become the ones searching for care for their parents, they are displaying a different set of habits and approaches. Let’s face it, the adult daughters of today are very different than the adult daughters of a generation ago.

But if you think they are different now, just wait! They are going to be very different in the coming years as the Gen Xers and the Millennials start caring for their parents. The way we market to and sell these younger generations, people who have grown up using the Internet, will need to be totally different than how we have done it in the past.

In the past, successful agencies primarily spent time and money on developing relationships in their area with other professionals who work with seniors. These relationships generally took a lot of time and effort to develop. But once established, the referrals that resulted were practically clients, requiring very little skill and effort to convert them to active clients billing hours every week.

But now, many are going online and shopping for homecare before being referred, and even after being referred. Online leads are inexpensive and easy to acquire, but much tougher to sell. They require a very specific strategy; one that is very different than the strategy you use with professional referrals. Do you have both strategies in place in your agency? Or are you making the mistake of handling all leads the same?

In a new series of training videos for Caring’s home care agency partners, renowned sales trainer Peter Droubay takes you step-by-step through the keys to unlock home care sales success. Each video covers a specific, highly-relevant home care agency sales and marketing topic, and provides detailed insights and tips for helping your agency optimize its success with online leads.

Peter DroubayPeter has decades of sales and home care experience, was among the featured experts in the Home Care Pulse 2020 Growth Summit, and is sharing this new sales training free of charge to Caring partners. You’ll just need an access password to view the video, which can be provided to you by your agency’s account executive at Caring.com. (Contact sales_homecare@caring.com if you’re unsure of the contact info for your account rep. You can also contact that email to get signed up to access a partnership with Caring.)

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