Home Care U - How to Convert More Online Leads to Clients (A Place For Mom Pt. 2)

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Online lead sites can be expensive, and it's no use getting leads if you aren't converting them. Since these leads are typically sold to multiple agencies at once, it's a race to contact them first and it's all too easy for them to fall between the cracks. We're bringing on the experts from A Place For Mom to talk about the best ways you can convert more leads to clients.Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Hey, welcome to Home Care U, a podcast made by the team at Care Switch. Nobody went to school to learn how to run a home care agency, so we're bringing the education to you. Join our live audience by going to careswitch.com slash homecareu or listen on your own time wherever you get your podcasts. Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koontz of CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome everyone to Home Care U.

We're going to go ahead and get started. I am Miriam Allred, head of partnerships at CareSwitch, also a host of our podcast. It's great to be with you all again this week. I co-host with Connor Koontz, our head of growth, and it's always fun for he and I to popcorn back and forth and join everyone for Home Care U, U for University. So this is a live recorded session and we will produce this session as a podcast after this event. So it is being recorded and we will send it in the form of a podcast and you can listen to Home Care U wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Google.

It's out there on the interweb. So just search for it and you'll be able to find it. So without further ado, we have Lori Eberle from A Place for Mom joining us today. This is session two with A Place for Mom. Last week we had Jordan Kant on and today we're going to continue the conversation that we started last week and dive into how to convert more online leads to clients. This is a pretty hot topic. A lot of you are identifying and searching out and receiving online leads. How you're going about converting them and your success is another question. And so we want to provide you and arm you with some insights on how to convert more online leads today. So that's the topic for today's session. Before we get into the weeds, I want to introduce Lori briefly. She is a veteran in home care. She's been around the block. She's been here for nearly 25 years. She was a marketing director for an assisted living facility.

Then she actually owned and operated a home care franchise for nearly 20 years. And she's been a consultant. And now she oversees all the strategic initiatives at A Place for Moms. So she has been in your shoes. And she can walk the walk and talk the talk. And so we're really excited to have you here, Lori. Why don't you give us just a little bit more color on your background? Why you came to home care? And I'd also be curious to know why you're still in it. What motivates you and fuels your passion today? So yes, I did

do a brief stint in assisted living for about two years early in my career. And that was just a natural segue to home care. This was back in 1999. So quite a long time ago, when home care wasn't really much of an option. There weren't a lot of home care options at that time. But I was dealing with so many families on a day to day basis that I felt their struggle having to move out of their home. And I just didn't feel like it was the right thing for them. And I just wished there was a solution to help them stay at home. And it was at that time that I had started looking into options to help people stay at home. At that time, there were a few franchise networks that existed. I looked into all of them, ultimately settled on the Comfort Keepers Network, which is who I was a part of.

Did that for just under 20 years. I sold my franchises in 2019, just before the pandemic. So I dodged that bullet. I did not have a crystal ball, but that was just worked out in my favor. But always loved the industry. I just, after doing it for 20 years, I was a little burnt out of, it's a 24-7 business. You never feel like you can get away from it. And I was just at a point where it's a 24-7 business. You never feel like you can get away from it. And I was just at a point where there was somebody interested in buying it. I was ready to view things from a different perspective, sold the business, and then went into consulting for a couple of years, helping other home care owners to grow their business. And then the A Place for Mom opportunity just kind of fell in my lap.

About two years ago, A Place for Mom was looking into expanding their presence in home care. Historically, they have focused on assisted living, independent living placement, but they were looking at expanding into home care and they brought me on really in more of a subject matter expert role. They needed somebody who really knew how do home care providers think? What do we need to do to speak to home care providers? How do we really build our home care platform to be what home care providers are looking for? So that has been my role for the last two years. And a big part of what I do is build out resources that help providers to be successful with online lead programs. And a lot of the tools we've created, a lot of the things we're going to talk about today are things that you can use in all aspects of sales, not just for online leads, but being able to get that home visit and get that client are things that are really important to me. And I love helping providers understand the best way to do that. Awesome. Well, you're just the guest to join us today and to cover this topic.

I think of you personally as like this modest powerhouse, you know, you're getting out there in the industry, you're on podcasts and events. And I think you, you have this really rich experience and it's, you know, like multi-pronged, you know, you've done it all, you've seen a lot of things. And so I think you're a powerhouse in this department. And so I'm excited to pick your brain and go deep with you today. So let's start with some, if this is a word, demystification. You know, there's a lot of misconceptions about online leads. And so I want to start with some of the biggest misconceptions and some of the biggest mistakes

that people make in their thinking about online leads. So let's start there. So obviously, online leads can come in many different forms. So people dabble with Google paid ads. They dabble with having form fills on their website where people fill out information. Services like A Place for Mom are just another source of online lead, which is more of a targeted lead because people, families are reaching out directly to us looking for options, and then we are connecting them with agencies. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions with a service like ours is that the leads that we send to an agency

are going to be guaranteed clients. Like these are people who are ready to buy the services and it's going to be an easy sale. That's probably the number one misconception is that they're not, that as a provider, you're not going to have to put as much work or as much effort into closing that sale. And that's not true. A lot of the families that we do talk to are still in the early stages. We are definitely pre-qualifying them to make sure they are actually looking for home care services, but they're at all different stages of their journey. So once we forward that lead to an agency, there is still some work that's required. You're still going to have to make sure you sell them on what you can do for them and

then make sure you're continuing to follow up until they're ready to actually use your services. So you have to be willing to put in the effort for it to be successful. It's not going to be an easy sale all the time. Sometimes it will be, but for the most part, you're going to have to work those leads. Yeah. I'm glad you're mentioning this as kind of a disclaimer. I think it is a really common misconception. And if you're on this call and you're thinking you feel that way, or you've thought that, you know, know that you're not alone, it is really common. Any other misconceptions or things you want to demystify? I think just going a lot in that same

thought process, because people are expecting these people to be ready to start care right now, the follow-up process that we see is very brief. So providers will reach out one or two times and then they'll call us and say, that lead wasn't any good. We never got them on the phone. Well, how many times did you try to reach out? Well, we've called them twice or we called them for like two or three days and it wasn't a good lead. We want our money back. So just knowing that it's going to require five, six, maybe even seven types of outreach. And we're going to talk a little bit about that as we talk today. But you can't give up after one or two two tries you're going to have to continue to stay in front of these families yeah that's another really good point you know this isn't for the faint of heart and one to two touch points most likely isn't enough and it takes work you know once you get the referral you can celebrate have like a mini celebration but it's like okay now all the work kicks in to really convert them and get them to start services. So we're going to get into that, you know, today we're going to talk about what that process needs to look like. So before we get into that, another thing that I want to ask you,

you have been in the industry, like we mentioned, you know, for over 20 years. And so you have seen what was successful 20 years ago and the wave of technology that we've seen over the last 20 years. And so you have seen what was successful 20 years ago and the wave of technology that we've seen over the last 20 years and what that looks like today. So I'm just curious from your perspective, when it comes to converting online leads, what has changed? What's evolved in your time in home care and what was working then and what's working now and what does that process and evolution look like? When I think back 20 years ago, things were so different. We didn't have online leads back then. Google was just a baby back at that point in time. We were still using things like phone book advertisements, newspaper advertisements. Everything was dependent upon a phone, your office phone. We weren't as

available. Things were pretty much nine to five, Monday through Friday. People called during office hours. Technology has changed the way all of us do business. And people, just because technology has all these resources at their fingertips 24 hours a day, people expect on-demand responses. So online, they can submit a request to you at 11 o'clock at night or three o'clock in the morning. As crazy as that sounds, sometimes you just have to have, whether it's an automated response, something, you have to respond at that moment. I'm not saying you have to be awake answering the phone at three o'clock in the morning, but there has to be an automated response so that they are acknowledged at the time that they have a need.

And that same line of thought, because they're expecting an on-demand response, no matter what time of the day you get that lead, you have to be equipped to respond to it. So even if it's Saturday afternoon at three o'clock, you probably need to pick up the phone and call them. You can't wait until Monday morning. People are just, they have a different mindset now. They want instant gratification. And that's the biggest thing I've seen change. We can't, we can't still do business Monday through Friday, nine to five. People aren't okay with that anymore. They're expecting answers seven days a week.

You hit the nail on the head with the phrase instant gratification, that is like the baseline expectation these days. And as an employer, as a provider, that's a huge expectation to manage. But I think you threw in some ideas there of like automated responses. People are going to fill out requests on your website or on Google in the middle of the night. And that's unrealistic to staff that or support that. But there's processes that you need to put in place to satisfy that instant gratification. And so that has changed drastically. The other thing I wanna call out is, I think a lot has changed in the last five years,

pre-pandemic to pandemic to now. I think a lot of agencies, a lot of businesses were still operating, not with the phone bug per se, but like door to door and in office pre-pandemic. And that flipped everything on its head. And we all had to adapt to this technology, to this modern Zoom world in just the last five years. So anything you want to share on just the changes in the last few years? Yeah. And that was something I definitely saw. Obviously, I had already sold my business by this time, but I was still doing consulting during that time. And people were really struggling because they couldn't go to the networking events. They

couldn't have their boots on the ground salesperson, but they still needed leads coming in. They couldn't just stop selling. Their business still had to go on. And I think it was during that time that people really started looking for online options. Like how do I get, you know, I'm going to put money into Google paid ads or I'm gonna put money into an online lead generation service. And they started dabbling in online leads more than they ever had before

because it was really the only option that they had. Unfortunately, people were getting into the online world, but they weren't prepared for it. They really didn't know what to expect from it. All they knew was relationship selling for so many years. That's what we were all accustomed to is word of mouth. And word of mouth, as we all know, those leads close at a much higher conversion rate than an online lead does. So you can't go to online leads and expect that you're going to get the same

success or the same results as your word of mouth referrals. It's a totally different advertising venue. So I think that one of the things we're trying to accomplish now, especially through the resources we're doing at A Place for Mom, is helping providers understand what should I expect? What's a good close rate? I'm reaching out to all these people. They're not responding. What am I doing wrong? Helping providers realize that it's not that the lead is bad. We have determined that this person does need care, but there's a process that's going to have to be required to get them to the point of sale. So we've done the vetting, but now it's the agency that's going to

have to do that follow-up work to actually get that prospect to become a client. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I want to call out is it's just like a mindset shift. You know, you and I talked previously about it's a reallocation of budget. You know, the cost of a salesperson is one thing. The cost of online leads is another thing to generate those leads and then convert those leads. And we'll get to this, but a lot of the process is actually very similar. It's just kind of this mindset shift and some tweaks to make sure you're getting solid conversion rates. Yeah. A salesperson. And I want to kind of, it's a little bit of a tangent, but it's something that's always interesting to me is I think that because with online leads, you know exactly what you're paying for them. Like, you know exactly what your cost is and you know, it's very easy to track whether that lead became a client. So people are very

aware of what they're spending versus what they're getting in return. And it's very common for people to call and say, you know, I purchased, I got 10 leads this month and I spent over $500 and I only got one client out of it. And they feel like that's not good. It's not, it's not worth my investment. But if you think back to the way we used to do things, if you spent $500 a month on your yellow pages ad, you aren't sitting there every month and counting how many clients did I actually get from that yellow pages ad to know if this ad was worth it. We just kept spending money on all these different things without knowing whether we were getting results from it. And I think that by the design of how

online works, you know immediately whether you got a result and you're just a lot more aware of it. And it just had, people just need to realize that spending $500 to get one client is actually pretty good when you look at what the average cost of getting a new client is. But we tend to be so focused on all of the leads that didn't become clients rather than looking at what the revenue we generated from that one that did become a client was. So it is definitely a change in mindset. Yeah, I love this. The way I think of it is like this new level of sophistication, you know, all of the tracking and the metrics can be daunting. But once you know your inquiry to conversion rate, once you know the lifetime value of a client and the cost, you know, the

CAC or the cost per client acquisition, it's like once you know all of these things, you will be able to make way more informed decisions. And like you said, you know, $500 for one new client seems so stark, but put that into like perspective across the board. And with all your KPIs in place, the lifetime value of a client, you know, could be $3,000 or $15,000 and you know, $500 is just a fraction. And so to me, it's just this new level of sophistication and home care that we have to adapt and get used to, but put all of these processes and metrics in place. And then it will make the world of a difference. And I, and I tout this a lot, but it's the difference between a $3 million agency and a $10 million agency. You can get to that $10 million mark if you put these processes and these metrics in place, because you will refine and fine tune all your processes and your decision making,

and it will lead to success. Yeah. And to that point, we use a couple of different metrics points. Obviously, we use the data from the Home Care Pulse benchmarking study, which I believe the most recent one showed the average lifetime value of a client at about sixteen thousand dollars it goes up a little bit every year internally at a place for mom we know that our average client that we refer that becomes a client is spending about three thousand dollars a month and they're staying for just over a year so our average lifetime value of a client is actually a little bit higher it's a little over thirty thousand dollars and if you think about it if you had to buy 10 leads this month and spend 500 and some dollars,

and you got one client that brought you $30,000 in revenue, that's kind of a no-brainer. But you can't focus on the ones that didn't convert. You have to focus on the results from the ones that did. And that's a big mind shift for a lot of people. I'm glad you called out the numbers. I don't have the report up in front of me and I normally do, but I think that's right. It's usually 15 or 16,000 per client. But knowing that your rates are significantly higher, that $30,000 mark for $500, the ratio is just uncanny. You can't deny what that means at the end of the day. So I'm glad we've set all of this context. I think this is really useful before we dive in here. So what I want to spend the next, you know, 15 to 20 minutes on is just dissecting the process. So like I mentioned, you know, it's a little celebration when you get this online lead and that's great. It's a great place to start, but that's really

where the work kicks in. So I want to kind of just turn you loose and let's just go through this process and in as much detail as possible, and I'll kind of jump in and stop you, but let's just hound, you know, what a really strong conversion process looks like. Sure. So we're going to focus primarily on when you receive a lead via like a form. So whether somebody goes on your website and fills out a form, or we send you a lead alert from Place for Mom, somebody who's looking for services. Most people are getting those via email. If you're not set up to get those alerts via text, you absolutely need to turn that on because most of us are going to see a text message before we're going to see an email. So that's my first recommendation is make sure you're getting all of your online lead alerts

via a text message. And if you are not the only, well, actually, even if you are the only person in your office, those alerts should be going to more than one person. Because if you are a smaller office, I totally understand that there's going to be times when you're doing orientation or you're doing an in-home visit. Somebody's got to respond to that lead alert when it comes in. So always have a backup person available and make sure somebody else in your office is also getting the alert. If you have multiple people getting the alerts, you need to have some type of a schedule so that people know Amy's not available right now. So if we get a lead alert, you know, Carla has to respond to it. So

you have to have a process to make sure somebody's responding within minutes and minutes are so crucial. There are all kinds of metrics out there that you'll find. But for every 30 minutes you wait to respond to a lead, your chances of closing that lead diminish. So within five minutes is the sweet spot. You wait more than five minutes, and it's very possible somebody else has already contacted that person, and you've lowered your chances of

successfully gaining that client. So get your alerts via text message, respond quickly, have the alerts sent to multiple people. Another thing that I always recommend is if it's possible, and this actually talks to your incoming calls. So perhaps you got the lead, you've called them, you've left a message, and now they're going to try to call you back. I think it's a best practice to have a dedicated phone number just for leads. Some people have dedicated phone numbers for applicants, but having a dedicated phone number for people who are interested in your services, that way when that line rings, you know this is a call that needs to be more important

than anything else. And somebody's got to take that call. People do not want to leave a message and wait for you to call them back. It goes back to that instant gratification that we talked about earlier. If they leave a voicemail, I promise you they're hanging up and calling three other places and somebody is going to answer the phone. So you don't want these types of calls going to voicemail. Even if they're returning your call, you don't want it to go to voicemail. A couple of things that we have learned is that when you are responding to one of these lead alerts, whether it's your own website or our leads that we're sending you. Yes, you want to call them first. That's the first first response should always be to pick up the phone and call. If they don't answer, which be prepared, they're not, a lot of people aren't going to answer. Don't be inclined to leave a message right away. So what we have learned internally is to practice

the art of the double dial. So you call somebody, they don't answer, you immediately hang up and you call the same number right away again. We are all screening our phone calls, but if somebody calls me two times in a row or three times in a row, I think they must know me and this must be important. I better answer it and see what they want. It sounds a little tricky or a little bit of a game, but we do that internally at a place for mom in our own call center.

And it has helped us to increase our connection rate exponentially by doing that double dial. After you have left a message, if you still can't get a connection, always follow up with a text message. And the text message just needs to be very brief saying I'm reaching out in response to your inquiry. When would be a good time to reach you? This is another thing that we have found internally is that when we started responding to people with text messages, our connection rate increased. People are more responsive to a text message than a voicemail or a phone call. So if you're not

using text to follow up with leads, you need to be using text to follow up with leads. And one call out on that, this may be obvious, but I'll just state it on your form, specify a mobile number. We're dealing with an older generation and they probably still have landlines. So specify a mobile number because for this purpose, the text purpose, if you have, if you don't have mobiles, you won't be able to text, but yeah, just wanted to call that out. And I also, another call out that's important is if you're getting a lease from us, we have done the legal protection of confirming that they're willing to accept text messages. But if it's something that you're doing through your own website, you do need to make sure that

you have like a disclaimer that they're opting in to receive text messages from you because you don't want to just solicit people with text messages without having their approval. So be mindful of that for sure. Email is not as popular now as it used to be. That's another change that has happened over time. People are much less likely to look at email than text message. But I do still encourage you to follow up with an email if you have not been able to connect with them. The one thing I caution providers to do, I see this happen a lot, is they've called, they've texted, they aren't getting a response. So they send an email that just tells the person way too much information. You don't want to oversell yourself in the email because then they have no reason to call you. So my suggestion is

that when you do follow up with an email, it just needs to be a teaser email with some type of call to action. Don't send them a link to all of your brochures and all of your material. You want them to have to call you and talk to you and have a conversation with you. So don't give it all away in the email. Just tease them. I'm glad you're touching on this because I wanted to drill here. Yeah. What to include in the text and the email, because I think we can do, we can give away too much and then they don't need to call. So you've referenced the email, you know, just quick teaser, pique their interest, give them a reason to call you. Same thing in the text or what do you advise people include in that text?

I mean, I feel like in the text, especially if it's your very first text message, it's just as simple as, hey, I got your information from our website or from a place for mom. I do recommend that you say something personalized that shows that you actually read it. So if they say, you know, my mom is having surgery tomorrow in your text, you should say, I got your message that you need services because your mom's about to have surgery. Say something brief that shows you actually read what their need was and then just say, when's a good time to connect with you? That is easy as that. In the email, again, you want to always reference specifically what the

need is. And then, again, what's a good time to contact you? What's the best way to contact you? But those are just keep it simple. Keep it as simple as I saw what your need is. The other thing that you can also incorporate into a text message is, this is important to point out, you need to be mindful of what the need is. Because if somebody says, I'm looking for somebody to clean my house six months from now, your response is going to be different than I'm looking for somebody to stay with my mom 24 hours a day starting tomorrow. So you always have to kind of keep that in mind as well. But if somebody is telling you, I need something tomorrow, like I need care this weekend. In your text message,

it should say something like, hey, you know, I noticed you live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I, you know, I happen to live right down the street from you. Do you want me to stop by tomorrow after work? Like, just make yourself available so that they know, hey, this person is serious and they're ready to help me. And make it personalized, you know, speak to the need and speak to you as a human. You know, we all get so many automated emails and texts these days. And I think most of us can decipher when it's an automated text or an automated message. And it's very clear when it's not, you know, you can tell a personalized text or email pretty, pretty quickly. And so just these additional, you know, flavors or touches in the, in the email and in the text go a long way to,

to let them know, you know, this is a human on the other end. And I do have reason to call or contact them. When I talk to people, I often tell them like, think about a time that you've gone online and fill out a form for something, whether it was, you know, Zillow because you were looking for a house or cars.com because you were looking for a car. Maybe it was HomeAdvisor or Angie. We've all done it at some point. And then you started getting flooded with all these people that were calling you and texting you and emailing you. Think about the ones that stood out to you. Like, what made you respond to the person that you did respond to, but also ask yourself, how many people did you never respond to? Like how many times have you filled out a form and then you never responded to the person? We've all done that. But more importantly, focus on the ones

that you really were impressed by and think about what they did differently and try to incorporate some of those techniques into what you do. But also think about in that same experience, how many of those people actually consistently stayed in touch with you after the first day or two? Most of them don't. You hear from, they flood you that first day, they might flood you the second day, and then you never hear from them again. Don't be that person. You need to continue to stay in touch. Yeah. And I would just add before you hit send, ask yourself, would I respond to this? You know, that's kind of like an age old trick, but it's real, you just add before you hit send, ask yourself, would I respond to that? You know, that's kind of like an age old trick, but it's real, you know, before you hit send, reread it

and think, would I respond to this text if I got it myself? And that goes a really long way. Or have somebody else read it. Like that's another technique we often tell people is have somebody who knows nothing about what we do. Like somebody outside of the industry, read your message and say, does this make sense? Like if you've got this message, would you know what I was talking about? Keep templates, like keep a Word document or a Google Doc with templates that you can just kind of cut and paste or somebody in your office can cut and paste, but then personalize. Like it's the same basic information, but then you're just adding some type of customization. That way you don't have

to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Sounds like a good resource for us to collaborate on, a template of what these texts and emails should include. Because you're right. We're actually, we're doing a webinar on that actually in September with A Place for Mom where we're going to talk about templates and then provide people with templates. So we can definitely work on that for sure.

Awesome. Yeah, definitely let us know when those are available so we can point people to them. So let's keep going. We've kind of set the stage and, you know, we've talked about like the first email, phone call, text. What's next? So if you're still not successful with connecting with them, we want to make sure that you are continuing to stay in touch ongoing. And what does that mean? In my opinion, you should never stop reaching out to somebody unless they have explicitly told you to stop reaching out to them, or you have learned that they've passed away, or maybe they've moved into skilled nursing.

You can continue to stay in touch with people for a year, two years. I mean, there is no end that you need to stop. But if you're looking at wanting an actual cadence for what that follow-up should look like, what we recommend is that in that first one to two days, you want to have one to two communications per day and not always the same thing. So you don't want to be always calling or always texting. You need to mix it up a little bit. So maybe the first day you've called them, you followed up with a text message. So tomorrow you're going to send them an email. And then as you get later in the week, mix it up. Send a text one day, send an email one day, make a phone call one day. But every day for that first week or so, have some type of a touch point. You don't want to be a pest to the point that they block you, which is also good to have varied

methods because they aren't as likely to block you on all the methods, but mix it up a little bit. And then after you get past that first week, if you've still not connected with them, cut back to about two to three times per week. I would continue staying in touch two to three times per week for at least 30 days. And then once you get past the 30-day mark, you could cut back to probably once a week. But then once you're on that once a week schedule, stay on that schedule for as long as you can possibly maintain it. And this is where automation comes in to be very handy. If you're using a platform, which I believe I'm sure your platform does this as well, Miriam, but using a platform like your scheduling platform can automate those reminders or even automate those messages to go out so that you don't always have to be the one manually sending those messages. Technology is our friend. There are so many tools

to help you schedule it and automate it. Yeah. And it can kind of become like I said it and forget it. Once you set all this up and configure it, you know, to your business and to your needs, it's something that, you know, a salesperson or someone in the office can check in on regularly to make sure that it's working and functioning properly. But once you set it up, you know, it can kind of run itself. One question that I'm having are like channels. We've talked about phone calls. We've talked about texts. We've talked about emails. Are, you know, is social media an option on the table? Are there any other channels that people should consider as far as like communicating with people? So social media is definitely something that we underutilize in home care, in my opinion,

probably because we kind of feel like the audience that we're trying to capture isn't probably your active social media person, which is changing, of course. You would have to get them to follow you. But you can easily do that by in your first email, you can have all of your links to your social media pages and hope that they actually will click it and follow you. So that definitely is something if you have an active social media presence, you definitely want them following your social media pages. The other piece that I believe is underutilized is using an email nurturing like an online newsletter platform. So whether it's Constant Contact or any of the other, that's the one that I use. That's the one I'm familiar with.

But having an email platform where you have a monthly newsletter or some piece of information that you can send them and it just goes out. As soon as you get somebody's email address, you add them to your distribution list and every month they get your email newsletter. Some systems, depending on how sophisticated you are, it's best to send them tailored content that's tailored to what their needs are. But I know most of us in home care are not that sophisticated. So we're just going to be sending them our generic monthly newsletter. But the more frequently your name can pop into their mailbox and they see it, when they are ready to make a decision, you're the person they're going to call because you're the name that kept showing up. Whether they read the newsletter or not, they saw your name in their email every week or every month. And this is this is semi tangential.

But what to include in that newsletter? You know, there are a lot of home care agencies that are producing education or content. And for a lot of these these contacts, this is their first foray into home care. They don't know what to expect. They don't know what you do. They don't know what ADLs are. And so if you can provide them high quality education and resources and information, that's where the trust kicks in. And whether they need you next week or they need you in six months, you will be top of mind as an expert in the industry, someone that's been feeding them a lot of useful information.

And so you will be top of mind because of that trust that you built based off the education that you've provided. Yeah. And that can be tough. And I know that that's a time-consuming task, which again, I know I'm telling you guys a lot of ways to spend money and I realize that, but a lot of these services are very cost effective to subscribe to. There are companies out there that will provide you with content or even provide you with templates that you can populate your email template. And again, you set it and forget it. They provide the content every month. You just

add a little bit of customization and it's pretty easy to manage. So definitely if it's not something that you're already doing, you might want to look into that because there are other companies out there that will do that at a pretty low cost. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's definitely something worth looking into. And back to the mindset shift, these are dollars that are just being reallocated. And if it proves successful, you know, if a newsletter costs you X, but proves that it delivers Y, you know, it's, it's worth, worth the ROI. So it's just a mindset shift and worth testing and trying some of these things. So, um, beyond other channels, we've talked about cadence and frequency. You've also, you know, touched on speed, you know, to contact.

Are there any other areas that we should talk about when you're looking at kind of longer term follow up? You know, you kind of covered the first week and like what ongoing looks like. What else can we touch on? It's a little bit going a little bit off on a tangent, but one thing I want to make sure it kind of touches on all these things. If you haven't done this before, I would encourage all of you to mystery shop your competition in your market. And when I say mystery shop them, I'm not just saying to like call them and see how they handle intake calls.

That's what most of us do. We just call them and try to find out what they charge. Go to their website, fill out a contact form and see what happens. How quickly do they respond to your inquiry? Do you suddenly start getting emails from them every day? Find out what your competitors are doing because that's going to be very helpful to you, not only to see how responsive they are to know what you're competing against, but also seeing what type of materials they start sending you.'s that kind of helps you know where the bar stands in your market to know what you need to do to be competitive in your market and you'll learn a lot just by starting to subscribe to your competitors newsletters and social media pages and things like that so if you haven't done that

before i definitely recommend that you do that the disclaimer that i'll throw out with that is you're going to see some good examples is you're going to see some good examples and you're going to see some bad examples. And I think home care, this is a little bit of a hot take. We can be notorious for copying job applications, forms, websites, you know, use it as a guide, use it as insights and information, but know that what your competitors are doing may not be the best thing for you to do. So I completely agree. You know, when you will find, you know, when you go out and do your market research, there are probably some really large, sophisticated agencies in your area, and you probably know who they are, or you should know

who they are. They most likely have, you know, larger businesses and more resources. And so they've thought through and like dedicated time to all of this. So go out and find some good examples, but I just, the disclaimer is, you know, you're going to find the good, the bad, the ugly out there, and don't be tempted to go and copy what someone else is doing, but use it as insights to fuel, you know, we can do this better, or we have the resources to do this, or we can provide that newsletter and we're going to do this differently. So, it all with kind of a grain of salt, but go out and build something better and establish yourself as a leader in your marketplace. But also, again, it shows you, I think, to this discussion, it shows you more importantly, how responsive are they? So if you

submit an online form at seven o'clock through their website, when did they call you back? When did they email you? When did they text you? Some of them never will. And that's good for you to know, because if you have a competitor who you know doesn't respond, that's good for you to know that. But if you find out that the minute you submit a form, three of your competitors are reaching out to you because they're on it and you know that you don't respond that quickly, that's probably why you're not winning all the business in your market. So these are just good metrics to know what you're up against. Yeah, absolutely. So I just want to kind of pause here. If anyone in the audience has questions on what we've covered so far or thoughts or questions on, you know, all of this follow-up, let us know so we can address

that. What I want to spend the next few minutes talking about are like benchmarks and conversion rates. A lot of people that are getting started in this territory don't know what to expect. You know, what are my benchmarks? What should I be tracking and what are good rates? So let's talk about benchmarks holistically. What are some of those benchmarks that you recommend and what should people be watching really closely? Yeah. So if you're not already doing so, you absolutely need to be keeping track each week or each month of how many inquiries do you get at your location at a given month? And that includes your phone calls, your emails, your web forms, all of your inquiries altogether. And out of those inquiries, what percent of them are you actually successfully connecting with?

And how many home visits are you actually getting from it? And I believe the current benchmark is somewhere in the industry. It's somewhere around 40, I think 40 to 45%, I believe, is what your typical conversion rate is from an inquiry to a home visit. Online is much lower than that because that 40% conversion rate includes all sources. Word of mouth converts at a much higher rate. Online converts at a much lower rate. The average is falling in that 40% spot. Digital leads, things like Google searches, those tend to convert, I believe, around 4%. They're really on the lower end. What we're finding at A Place for Mom with our online leads

is that the conversion rate sweet spot is around 10%. We absolutely have providers that are converting much higher than that, closer to 40%. And we have providers that are not converting anything. But again, it all comes back to what their process is and what they're doing differently across those locations. But if you are doing an online campaign with A Place for Mom, we would expect you to be converting at about 10%. That's the benchmark we have that we would want our providers to be reaching. And if you're not, we do have a customer success team that their whole role is to dig in and find out, tell us about your process. Let's share some best practices. These are some tips we think you should implement to help improve that conversion rate. Awesome. Yeah, I think this is a really good foundation for any agency to put in place.

How many inquiries, how many assessments, how many are converting and starting services? If you're not tracking those three things, that is the place to start. Taking that one step further, track that per source, track that per online leads, track that per social media, track that per your website. Start to dissect all of those channels and identify these rates or these benchmarks per source. And that's where like the magic starts to happen. You can start to adjust your budget

and be more efficient with your time and money based off what's working for you. And it's different for every single agency. Some agencies that you all work with, you know, they're having a you all work with, you know, they're having a ton of success with online lead gen, but for another agency, word of mouth or, you know, their current clientele are providing all of their referrals and that's like their source. So know that there's no one right way, but the way to find the right way for your agency is to track all these metrics and track per source and then do

the refining based off of that information. Right. And that's an interesting point because that's one thing that we hear so often. There are people who call us and tell us, we get almost all of our business comes from your leads. We love this. We built our business on this. And then on the same day, you can get a call from somebody who says, I've spent hundreds of dollars and I've got nothing. These leads are horrible. And well, they're the same leads. Why is one agency having wild success with it and another agency is not? And it all comes down to the difference in their processes. And it's hard for people to swallow that sometimes because nobody wants to think that they're not doing it correct. And I know we've had that

struggle when our customer support team wants to really dig in. We get that animosity of, you know, I'm the owner. I'm the expert. I know how to do this. You can't tell me how to do it. Please know we're just, we're trying to help you. We want to share tips that are working for other people. We're not just trying to save you from canceling our services. We really want to help you. So just try to be open to thinking outside the box. Because I know, trust me, I was in the business for 20 years. I had tunnel vision. It was hard for me to expand my horizon and realize there are other ways of going about

doing this. And I need to be open to that. So just keep an open mind. And every owner and administrative team has different strengths. You know, some, some home care owners come with a sales and marketing background and they know marketing and they know lead gen and they know how to do this and it's, it's their strength. And so naturally they're going to be better at it. Some owners come with a more clinical background and have been nurses and, you know, come from that perspective and they lack the sales and marketing, both of those two people can be really successful home care owners. And it's up to you

to identify what are my strengths and weaknesses? What am I good at? You know, am I good at online lead gen? Maybe, maybe not. And it's, it's you making those decisions at the end of the day of what what's right for you and what works for you and what, you know, you're best at or what you need support on. Yeah, I did wanna, one thing we didn't talk about with those benchmarks though is this came up on the conversation last week with my colleague, Jordan. One issue with online leads,

you've all experienced it if you've worked with online leads is that it is hard to connect with them. So you'll get a handful of leads from your website or from a place for mom and you can't get them to ever answer the phone or respond to your text message. So one of the questions that came up last week was, what's a good benchmark for what type of success rate should we have? And we didn't have the answer last week, but we have it this week.

Out of all of your leads that you're getting online, you want to shoot for a benchmark success rate of connecting with about 60% to 65% of them. So it's a pretty high percentage, but if you put all of these different tactics in place, doing the different types of outreach, different times of day, different days of the week, and you stay consistent, you should eventually connect with 60 to 65% of the leads that you receive. So again, using simple math, if you get 10 and four of them, you can never get a hold of. That's to be expected. You're not doing anything wrong. That's just the way the numbers fall in

this type of environment. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because this is what I wanted to go like one layer deeper on is we talked about like inquiry assessment conversion. You know, that is like the bare minimum that you need to track. But I would argue, you know, there's a few other layers in there. We talked about speed to contact. You're talking about making that first contact. We talked about like cadence. If you want to get really technical and if you have a salesperson or like a team of people that are following up with these leads, there are even more metrics that you can like slice and dice

and add in there to keep your team honest. You know, what is your speed to contact? Maybe today it's 48 hours, but you need to get that to 60 minutes, you know, or, you know, the cadence, maybe right now your team is, you know, maybe doing three touch points in the first week, but like you're recommending seven to 14 touch points in the first week. Those are other metrics that you can put in place and start to identify, you know, your gaps and then also hold you and your team accountable of, you know, let's speed up our time to contact or let's speed up or increase that cadence in the first seven days. Those are things that will make the difference here. And you can put metrics in place to hold your team accountable. And if you're a larger agency

where there's multiple people in your office that handle these types of things, I know I talked about mystery shopping the competition, but I'm also a huge advocate of mystery shopping yourself. So finding out how responsive your team actually is to your leads, hearing how they handle an intake call, seeing how quick they respond to online leads. As an owner myself, that was always very eye opening to see. Like I thought my team was great, but then whenever I would actually do some quality assurance, I was always a little disappointed in what I was finding. So don't just assume that they're all doing what they say that they're doing. Yeah, that's a great reminder. I was going to suggest that you as the owner, say you have a team managing it, you as the owner go through the process or have your HR or payroll person go

through this process. Someone that has kind of like an outside perspective and will come into it with like a fresh set of eyes will be really useful because you're right. And maybe you put a process in place two years ago and you think it's going great and it is going pretty great, but it's always good to fact check, review things, you know, make sure everyone's accountable to these metrics. So a lot of good information. Can we talk a little bit about, I think you mentioned this though, like a lot of people ask, you know, what are the typical conversion rates with a place for mom? I think you mentioned that, but can you just reiterate, you know, what you're seeing with a lot of your

users? I know it varies and there's a range, but what's maybe typical for someone that just gets started with you? You know, I'm sure what they expect in the first six months is different than if they've been with you for two years, but kind of what's the gamut of expectation from your end? It's interesting because our metrics have changed a lot over the last two years because of things we put in place. We're actually finding that our newer agencies that have come on board with us in the last year, we're seeing better success with them primarily because we implemented an onboarding. So when you become a customer with us, we put you through onboarding to know these are best practices and these are the things you should expect. And they do seem to be more successful because they're going through that training

as opposed to customers who have been for us for 10 years and they've just always done it the way they've always done it. I mean, numbers are all over the place and we always want to make sure we also share everything that we capture is self-reported. So there are a lot of providers who don't ever bother to go into their portal and tell us, you know, that lead you sent us actually became a client. So we have a lot of unknowns. We only know that based on what we see from providers who are reporting their results, that we're seeing about a 9.5% average conversion rate. I'm not seeing a difference from, new owners to seasoned owners. It's more about when they came into our network and how much training they had up front, because a lot of the training pieces are new to a place for mom.

We've only started doing that in the last, really in the last year. So. Yeah, that's great to know. I think people are just curious, you know, when they're entertaining these new options, you know, what that looks like. And the training goes such a long way, you know, the onboarding and the training and training your team. This that we've talked about, it's kind of a lot of new concepts. And if you don't have any of this in place, it can be really intimidated, intimidating to get started and to get all this configured. But if you have someone that's an expert that can tell you what to do and help you put it all in place, you know, that, that could be in the matter of a couple of weeks versus months or, or longer to really put this in place. So I think the training is a huge value add. And, and like we said, 10% may sound low to some people, but imagine if that one client equals $30,000, you know, it's, it's all perspective. I mean, that's the thing. Sometimes I say, it's kind of like, you know, taking a gamble. like it just takes one to be your jackpot. I mean, and you just, you never know which one it's going to be. The one thing I will say, we didn't talk about this and I want to make sure we do talk about it is because we see higher conversion

rates on this. One thing that a place where mom does have that solves a lot of these problems is that we have the ability to do a direct transfer. So like if we have a family on the phone looking for care, yes, it's common nature for us to email or text the alert to you. But with about 40% of our families, they're choosing to be patched directly to an agency and we can make a live transfer to the agency and eliminate the need to do all of that email, text, phone call follow-up, we can connect them to you in real time. What we see though is that, and this probably won't

surprise you, but 30% of those calls are not answered when we try to connect them to the agency. And another 10% of those calls are answered, but the person answering the phone isn't the right person. So it's a, the agencies who have the higher conversion rates are agencies who are again, always on. And when we do those hot transfers, they answer the phone and they have the right person answering the phone. So those are things that can also help with your conversion rate. If you're using our service is that you are getting those hot transfers. You have the ability to customize the time of day that you want to get them. So it's not like you'll get a call at

eight o'clock if you know you can't take calls at eight o'clock. You tell us when you'll accept those calls. But if you're set up to take those calls, you need to make sure you answer them and that the right person answers them. And we find that the agency that gets that transfer call is typically more likely to close that sale than the one that gets the text alert or the email alert. I'm glad you're touching on this. I'm seeing Jordan's comment. I hope he's still on here and just heard your response to that because he asked, maybe that's what you saw. And he asked, do you still provide online lead transfer? And it sounds like you do. And you've just answered that. So that's great. That was maybe one of my aha moments from this episode.

Actually, earlier on when you mentioned having a specific phone number for inquiries. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that. I don't feel like I hear of that very frequently to be honest. And so if you're like me and that was like a, that's like an obvious thing to do. I think that goes a long way. Cause like you said, even with the online lead transfer, if that phone rings, everyone or whoever the department that owns it, you drop everything and you answer that phone because you know how important that phone call is. So I just wanted to call that out. That was my aha moment, how important that one simple thing can be inside of your business today. Yeah. And even I always tell people if it's, I know with sophisticated phone systems today, you can do anything, but having it in a, whether it's a cell phone or a

virtual line that can be forwarded to anybody that way, somebody is always answering it no matter, you know, if it's your on-call person or you can constantly change where that number is being routed is that somebody is always answering that line. And again, it's something that's very simple to do with all the virtual phone systems today. And this is why we're covering this. It's like these small, simple tweaks or refinements or processes, you know, they're not that difficult to implement, but they can mean like the world of a difference if done right. And they're really not expensive. I know, I feel like I've said so many things that are just an additional cost, but I'm mentioning services that might cost like $9.99 a month.

Like they're not expensive add-ons. They're very affordable. Exactly. I mean, $9.99, not $999. Yeah, $9.99, not very much at all. Let's spend the last couple of minutes talking about a place for mom. You know, you've shared different insights. Jordan did last week and you've done today.

But I think people are curious, you know, how you generate the inquiries. How do you sift through them? How do you decide who they go to? Like, can you just kind of spend a couple minutes talking through your process and, you know, what people can expect? Yeah. And I think it's also important, depending on how long you've been in the industry, just understanding kind of the evolution that in the last two years, A Place

for Mom really has put a lot of effort into expanding that home care presence to the extent that we actually have a dedicated home care team now. So our home care team just works with families who are looking for home care. It's not like families are coming into us looking for assisted living and we're sending them to home care and assisted living. It's literally two separate teams of people working. We have a team that works with assisted living potential clients and a team that works with home care clients. And this home care team has continued to grow over the last two years. Again, we built that customer success team as well to help providers to make sure that you're successful with the program. As far as how the leads come into us, there's a multitude of ways.

One, you know, obviously, if you if you watch regular TV at all, a place for mom advertises on TV all the time. I see the commercials so frequently. So there is the TV advertising budget. There's definitely search engine marketing budget so that we show up in online search. A lot of people don't realize that we also have healthcare account executives in some markets that work with hospital discharge planners or skilled nursing social workers to help coordinate discharges. And they refer those through the A Place for Mom funnel. The other thing is A Place for Mom operates, I think it's 10 to 12 separate affiliate websites.

So beyond just A Place for Mom, we have agingcare.com. We have Senior Advisor. We have Veteran Aid. We have multiple other websites that also bring leads in. So it's not just the A Place for Mom umbrella. There are multiple other umbrellas. And it's actually interesting. Aging care is, if you've never been to the aging care website, it's really designed as being a forum for family caregivers to ask questions about what they're struggling with caring for their older

parent. And actually the majority of our home care leads come in through that aging care site. And people are typically surprised to hear that. But most of it is through online leads through one of these websites, aging care being the dominant one. As a provider, you get a directory listing, so you can actually highlight, like feature what makes you different in that directory listing. So people can see what your services are about. When our care advisor gets that online form, they reach out within about two minutes time to talk to the family, find out what the needs are, find out, make sure that they are able to pay privately. So we are weeding out people who are on Medicaid or expecting Medicare to pay for it, educating them about how home care is paid for.

And then we will send that information to up to four different home care agencies. It's never more than four. In most markets, it's actually only about two or three, depending on how many providers we have in the market. At the same time that we're sending that family's information to you as a provider, that family is receiving an email with a link to your provider directory so that they can read about you. And we're also providing them with a list of FAQs, like things to ask you once they get you on the phone so that they come into it educated with what to expect and what to talk to you about. There's a link to like a, I think it's like a 20 question check sheet of things to ask a home care provider, things like are you licensed if you're in a licensure state? What's the plan of care look like? Just trying to educate them so that they can have a valuable conversation whenever they call you.

And then once we hand that lead off to you as a provider, it's yours to do what you want with it for as long as you want. My throat's getting dry. Not used to talking this much. I always tell people, even if you connect with a lead and they tell you, oh, I've already hired somebody, don't give up because you all know in home care, anything can go wrong. Two weeks from now, they might not be satisfied with their caregiver. Anything could have gone wrong. So don't write them off just because they told you that they've

hired another agency or they've hired a private caregiver. You should still stay in touch with them. Awesome. That was a lot of good information. Yes. Take a drink. I learned a few things in there and actually I hit your site. I don't know, this was a couple of weeks ago and I didn't realize that you were filtering in a bunch of different like websites to your referrals. So, um, that's really useful. You know, I think there's just things like that, that people don't know about you or know enough about you. So thank you for sharing all of that. Um, I just want to close by saying, you know, reach out to a place for mom, no matter what stage in business you are, you know, we've got on the call today, a variety of newer owners in their first year or two or three years of business. It's never too early or too late to entertain these conversations,

to research some of this information and back to the point of find what's right for your business. You know, it might be online lead gen, it may not, but you know, you don't know until you try and put forth a really strong effort. So let's go ahead and close here. Lori, thank you so much for joining us. You and Jordan have been stalwart guests. We've learned a lot of great information from you and your team, and I'm sure this won't

be the last of us working together. There's a lot of collaboration and resources and things that we can provide to our network. So thank you so much for just being this wealth of knowledge and being so willing to share so much information today. Absolutely. Thank you. So we'll cap here and we'll see everyone back same day, same time next week. We've got some really awesome upcoming guests. The next two weeks will be two really large home care providers that have been successful in their markets and we're going to interview them so thanks everyone take care and we'll see you later that's a wrap this podcast was made by the team at care switch the first ai powered management software for home care agencies if you want to automate away the menial of your day-to-day with ai so that you and your team can focus on giving great care, check us out at

careswitch.com.