You may have a winning care management product, but to make money from that product, you have to know how to close the sale. GCMs rarely see themselves as salespeople. This is a fatal error. First, you must understand that your intangible services are indeed intangible products. You can’t touch or feel them so you don’t sell them like cars or dryers.

Next, you yourself will have to sell your geriatric care management services. To do this you need a sales plan to sell to a client/customerwho cannot see or feel cannot see or feel what they are buying. A major step is to identify who makes the decision to buy your menu of geriatric care management services. Care Management after 40 years is still not a product like cough medicine or a walker. With older adults over age 85, the buying decision is generally made by the adult children or the third party (trust officer, etc.). Many times young older adults (65–85 years of age) make their own buying decisions.

You then need to identify what criteria the person making the buying decision uses to evaluate whether to purchase your geriatric care management service. For example, you have to figure out whether the decision to purchase your care management product is made by the adult child based on price, features, availability or understanding the benefits.

How will you give your client/ customer or the third party who will refer you to the adult child (like an elder law attorney or an Assisted Living Director )  get enough information to say yes? Does this buying decision require personal contact or can it be done in intake over the phone or both? Should you use a sell sheet when you get a sales appointment with a third party like an Assisted Living Director?  Do you need an elevator speech about the features of your care management products? Must you have a list of benefits that you use to explain what the client and family will derive from using your care management services – or most of all, learn how to close a sale? Or maybe all of the above. Knowing all this makes you a care management salesperson. It will have to go in your business plan plus- be good enough to get your customers who sign your contract and give you a deposit.

Join me in my new FREE Webinar
Learn to Market Like Your Business Depended on it!
When: May 15 2019
2PM-3:30PM PST
Learn

1. How to make the sale of your ” Intangible GCM Service” that the potential buyer cannot touch or feel
2. How to make the sale in the inquiry call -with a complementary consultation
   How to ” Identify needs using client” challange questions” to find the problem you need to solve to make the sale
3. How to present your offer by selling solutions to the problem with a mini care plan
4. How to manage objections if the caller has concerns about price or product
5. Understand how to close the sale with non-aggressive closing questions to have your contract signed, get a deposit, and grow your business with a new client

Sign Up Now 

Loneliness in seniors is at an epidemic level in the US. We live in an age where we can communicate with family across the country and around the globe with a few clicks of a mouse or taps on a smartphone screen. However, despite advances in communications technology and the increasing connectedness it brings, seniors are not always connected to their community and end up isolated and lonely.

One of the biggest issues for seniors is that their social circles begin to shrink as we get older. Friends, significant others, and family members move or pass away. Even those who still live close by may be inaccessible due to limited mobility, triggered many times once a senior can no longer drive safely. Age-related changes in one’s physical condition, such as hearing loss and low vision, can make it so difficult to communicate that it doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore- the result loneliness and isolation. According to an AARP study, 19% of older adults in the United States suffer from loneliness; 8% of older adults often feel lonely, and 11% feel lonely at least some of the time.

In the UK, only 17% of older people are in contact with family, friends, and neighbors less than once a week, and 11% in contact less than once a month.

Lifespan, a 35-year-old care management program in Santa Cruz, California, has just begun a quality of life program called “Well Being”. to address loneliness and isolation. Their service is designed to bring joy back to elderly clients, many of whom are isolated or living alone.

They serve lonely elders at any stage of their lives- from mentally clear to levels of dementia. Lifespan  employs  personal assistants trained in quality of life activities ,to engage elders in intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual quality of life activities after the care manager does a quality of life assessment and creates a quality of life action plan outlining what activities would bring back joy and activities they love and can do again with the personal assistant help.

ALCA members have lately been discussing how to sell the benefits of a GCM to assisted living. Care managers are perfect professionals to help assisted living residents when they have just moved in and are unhappy with the move when they are not participating in activities and withdrawing from friends and in general when they are nor thriving in the resident community.

But marketing care management to ALF’s takes some particular marketing tactics 

Although it might seem counterintuitive, consumers rarely want to buy things for the sake of buying them – they want what they purchase to solve their problems.

To borrow from the example of an umbrella, a feature of this particular umbrella might be its unbreakable spokes or wind-resistant construction – the benefit of which is staying dry even in strong winds that might break lesser umbrellas. The benefit of staying dry in strong winds that break other umbrella – make the sale.

Clients who purchase home care or care management want to buy benefits – what your product or service can do for them.

Let’s take a third-party. Care Managers often market to Assisted Living. They want to hear how your agency is going to help the Assisted Living site. Of course, you can describe your agency features, price, training of staff, gold stand service. However, benefits are what makes the sale and keeps the Assisted Living dry not flooded by rain.

So here are some benefits you can offer to Assisted Living when you are seeking referrals and you have a service  for residents that involves Quality Of Life   

The problem: Assisted Living does not want residents to move out most facilities are strictly non-medical and do not have one to one companion and geriatric care management services. Your agency can solve that problem.

YOUR AGENCIES BENEFITS

• The assisted living and retirement community population sometimes have clients with needs that cannot be met with their nonmedical, non-one-on-one support services, (usually just an activities director)
• You will help facility with residents who are not adjusting to the facility or considering moving by engaging them in activities that will enhance the quality of their life, so they remain in the facility
• You will help residents not engaging in activities to participate in activities program outside activities and socialization program through a quality of life assessment & companion, so they do not want to move out of the facility
• You will engage with new residents who are just adjusting to the facility and their move to engage in socialization and activity program. You can help them make friends & engage in outside activities through a quality of life assessment and companion, so they do not consider moving out
• You will place Concierge Companion who will engage the client & accompany the resident to the outside or facility activities so the resident so can return to that joy. You will make monthly monitoring visits to make sure Companion are meeting all the client’s needs and keep in touch with the family and facility with frequent e-mail or telephone updates plus sending a monthly report.

So, selling the benefits to the third party, who will refer your agency to families of residents who are struggling, is a much more potent selling point that features of your agency. 

My Geriatric Care Management Operations Manual has the perfect products for an assisted living, called “Concierge Companion” with step by step procedures to deliver the service for struggling residents in an ALF. Find out more