Referral Marketing: Can a CRM Really Supercharge Your Referral Program?

When your incoming referrals come from multiple sources, it’s easy to drop the ball when juggling those new leads. How quickly do they need care? What kind of home care are they interested in? How qualified are they? Do they even live in your service area? Did anyone follow up with them? Did your team respond to that last phone call?

Plus, who sent you that lead, and will you be able to thank them later?

A customer relationship management platform (shorthand: CRM) is one of the best tools available for organizing and managing the client leads that come into your sales funnel. A well-built platform and established referral program can also help you cultivate a good relationship with your referral sources.

Here’s what you need to know.

Why use a CRM?

So, why should home care agencies invest in a CRM for their home care referral programs?

• Never lose track of a lead. When your sales team manages a new lead, a good CRM means that lead can’t get lost. No leaky pipes.
• Identify the best strategies. Thorough data tracking lets you root out the best sales scripts, contact methods, and even follow-up times to close more sales.
• Identify your top referral sources. Get a high-level look at your referrers and who’s sending you the most qualified leads.
• Build better relationships with your referrers. Keeping that pipeline full depends on building and maintaining a good relationship with your sources.

How to use a CRM to run your home care referral program

A solid CRM can manage all of your marketing campaigns—from PPC to SEO to social media and beyond. Plus, it’s the best way to manage both ends of a referral pipeline.

Formalize a referral program

You can use your CRM to design a referral program that taps your current client contacts as well as your professional network.

• Run an email drip campaign that encourages your current clients to send you leads—and makes it easy for them to do so.
• Track activities of your campaign recipients in real time so you can see who’s opening your emails, engaging with the content, and referring new leads.
• Personalize your outreach to referrers and incentivize their participation in the program.
• Thank your referrers for their help and show them the progress they’ve enabled.

Qualify referrals to sort them by position in the market

As new leads come into your sales funnel, your CRM can help you qualify them as quickly as possible—where are they in their search? Are they a warm lead, a hot lead, or cold already? Hot leads get priority, followed by warm leads. Cold leads weren’t likely to convert in the first place.

Nurture your home care referral leads

One of the best features of marketing automation is the ability to systematically and meticulously manage the customer journey. Leads need to be nurtured with consistent touchpoints designed to build rapport and move them closer to sale, and a CRM makes that easy.

• Track movement through the customer journey to identify and prevent leaks in your pipeline.
• Identify the touchpoints, messages, and communication methods most likely to convert leads to sales.
• Establish a consistent strategy for nurturing your leads to optimize conversions.
• Maintain consistent contact with both leads and your referral sources.

Make it a team effort

With a CRM, your team can seamlessly share the responsibility of converting leads to clients. All marketing and outreach activities are tracked and all communications are recorded in a single place so that the ball can’t be dropped and no leads get lost.

Your team can pass clients between stages of the sales process, from follow-up to evaluation to contract signature. If someone is out of the office or leaves your agency, no problem—your contacts and the position in your home care sales funnel are centrally recorded.

Learn from your setbacks and successes to optimize home care referral programs

Your CRM is a powerful tool for marketing analysis. By tracking the movement of referred clients, you can learn what’s working—and what’s not—so you can spot opportunities for improvement. Use your data to identify the characteristics of ideal clients so you can build a more accurate customer profile.

Identify your best referral sources

Using a CRM to manage your home care referrals lets you identify the most lucrative referral sources, whether it’s residential care facilities, current clients, local healthcare providers, or even other home health agencies.

Pinpoint common characteristics of your best sources so you can cultivate new ones likely to fill your pipeline. Having a sales funnel full of warm referrals depends on healthy relationships with your network.

More referrals, more sales

A reliable CRM is the best way to run referral programs, work with your sources, and ultimately move home care referrals seamlessly through the sales funnel. At Home Care Marketing Pros, our CareFunnels platform can help you gather, nurture, and track your leads from referral to contract signature—just schedule your demo to see how it works.

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