Sales Notebook
Move into Action
By now most of you have stored away your holiday trimmings and placed those boxes on the closet shelf. You might have made lots of plans for 2010, hoped for health and happiness for your family and friends and sent wishes to people you only correspond with once a year. But now that the wishes and greetings have all been delivered, the time for action is before you. Are you going to do anything from that list of promises you made to yourself and to your business?
Think about all those times you said to colleagues, "Let's do lunch," realizing you were just making small talk. It is action, planning and strategizing that makes all the difference. Telling staff that one day you would like to have lunch with them alone is a great idea, but will it actually ever happen?
It is now time for a new way of doing business, keeping up with your referral sources, handling the key operations of your company more effectively and focusing on building sales and increasing revenues. We are past the time for good wishes, tentative thoughts about getting together for lunch or considering revising the way we work our territories.
It's time for an action plan, and I want to provide you some guidance before 2010 is looked back upon as a year of what you could have done instead of what great things you accomplished.
Take a look at these five business areas as you move ahead. Your need for increased revenues demands that you review:
- The billing system
Consider not only the reports and information it generates but how you use all that it offers. Billing and reimbursement programs should provide tools for every aspect of your business, and though many do, too few HME managers optimize the value of their software in analyzing business.
- The delivery system
Take a careful look at how the order travels from the initial phone call, insurance authorization, product removal from the warehouse shelf, staging the delivery before it goes on the truck to final arrival in the patient's home. Realize that if something can go wrong in the process, it will.
- The sales system
Go over how all sales are tracked, referral sources are monitored and how you are able to review the work of the sales representative. The more you know about how sales are generated and what activities are in place to ensure you are building revenues, the more likely you are to make sure the right behaviors are continually in place.
