What selling style works best in home care & hospice sales? 

One of the biggest challenges facing leaders in home health care, hospice, and private duty home care is recruiting and selecting sales professionals who can hit the ground running and generate referrals that convert to admissions.  We have seen a particularly high incidence of companies hiring sales reps who fail to get results and are fired or quit after 90 days on the job.

At Caregiver Quality Assurance® we are continually looking for information and data that will help you do a better job of hiring the right sales people.  To get some insights, we often go outside the home care industry to see what we can learn from other companies.  Here’s one example:

A leading retailer of western apparel wanted to improve the productivity of its sales associates across its 8 store locations.  The company worked with a provider of pre-employment assessments to administer a basic skills test and a behavioral styles inventory to its existing sales force. The company then conducted a validation study comparing test scores to performance data provided by company management.  The study showed significant correlations between test performance and productivity as measured by average sales per hour data compiled by company management.

The study found that sales associates who scored high on the extroversion scale had higher sales per hour than those with lower extroversion scores.

“Top-scorers on the extroversion scale averaged $106.35 sales per hour, which represented 28% higher productivity than was achieved by the lowest-scoring group, which averaged only $83.27 sales per hour.”

What Do You Look for in a Home Care Sales Person?

From our experience and research, it’s clear that the most effective predictor of success in sales is behavioral styles.  When the candidate has a natural style that is a good fit for the job, the likelihood that they will be successful goes up dramatically.  And the category of behavior that is most highly correlated to a good fit for the sales job is the extroversion scale.  

With the Caregiver Quality Assurance® pre-employment assessment, we measure behavioral styles and the extroversion scale is bench-marked against the sales job.  As you can see in the graphic on the right, the green bar represents the job benchmark and it is all the way to the right at the Outgoing/Talker end of the scale.  The red bars on the left represent the Reserved/Listener end of the scale.

To get a sense of how well you would do in sales, you can take a complimentary sales assessment to see where your extroversion score ranks on the scale.  Once you see where you fit, you’ll see the value of using a tool like this to help you in the selection of your next sales professional.

To get your FREE CQA Sales Assessment demonstration, call Diane West at 502-339-2132 or go to www.caregiverquality.com.