Miriam Allred (00:09)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the lab. Thank you for tuning in. If you're not subscribed, please hit follow wherever you're listening and it's great to be back with you. Today we are going to be talking about sales, activities, metrics, referral sources, bell cows, where reps are succeeding and failing, where leaders are failing or succeeding with reps. And today I am joined by Sean O'Reilly, the COO and CTO at 52 Weeks Marketing. Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Reiley (00:10)
Thank

Thank you for having me. Much appreciated.

Miriam Allred (00:40)
I'm excited to get you out in front of this audience. just said to you, you're a little bit behind the scenes at 52 weeks marketing, but you're also a powerhouse and dynamo just like Debbie and the rest of the team. And so this is maybe your debut on the show. So happy to have you. Today's your day. Introduce yourself for those that don't know you talk a little bit about your background and home care and what led you to where you are.

Sean Reiley (00:53)
They don't let me out of the cage much. They don't.

Certainly. ⁓ I've been in IT pretty much my entire career. My entire family is either a clinician of some sort. either a nurse or a doc. And I'm talking like four docs, four nurses. So I kind of have that history. Went into consulting in IT early in the 90s. And from there, I got into doing startups.

So I've been involved in stratified areas from medication management to staffing, nurse staffing in particular, because there's a load balance aspect to that, to infectious surveillance, right? We just had COVID, to HIPAA secure communications, all within the vertical of healthcare. So that's my background, whether it's been consulting or on the technical side and coming up with solutions. So I've done quite a few startups, some good, we did well.

some not so good, you know, where that investment didn't pan out. That said.

I've been in home care for quite some time and for those that don't know Debbie is my spouse and I obviously live this dream of home care every day not just for 52 weeks I also manage other organizations across the country and three the Midwest the the West and the East Coast as well on top of our own organization here in Nashville so I have interplay and all these so I live the dream every day

I've done many, many assessments. I've been out in the field too. I've had that pleasure. So I tried to build technology on the basis of real world experience versus a use case list and then trying to go without having real context and understanding of solutions. And that's always kind of been my mantra and anything I've done is get my hands dirty and understand it.

I'm a developer by trade, when you have your own business, you gotta learn to sell, which means you pay other people to teach you how to sell. So we try to espouse those best practices, whether it's Miller Hyman or you might, some people remember giving the pickle. That was kind of a pretty popular thing, but there's quite a few different ⁓ tools ⁓ and systems out there that you can learn or adopt and make your own.

Miriam Allred (03:29)
Great, great introduction. I'm going to just hit you with some questions like hot and fast right here out of the gate. You know so much about sales and you're working with so many agencies. You've said you're to the point where you're helping them.

higher sales rep. like you're on the ground floor as much as anybody else listening to this. so I'm just going to like get right into it with a few questions, including one that might feel a little bit odd, but I wanted to hit you with it directly because a lot of providers are using external CRMs at this point. know the EMRs, know the operating systems and they all have kind of a light version of CRMs. so a lot of home care providers

want and desire more and so they seek out home care specific CRMs. Many providers are frustrated and even confused as to why WellSky specifically does not integrate with most of the CRMs in the space. And I've heard it literally probably five times in the past two weeks. And so I'm just going to hit you with it directly. Why isn't WellSky integrated with more of the CRMs?

Sean Reiley (04:30)
This is an opinion only. I've had some engagement with them. The people are nice. I actually had an engagement with them in my past when they were ClearCare My feeling is, and there's two philosophies in software, that there are some that are all inclusive. So in other words, Epic is a health care, an EMR that is everything. That's their philosophy. You don't need anything else other than us.

That's what Apple was in the 80s, but Microsoft was the opposite. They opened it up for everybody. So there are different philosophies. They chose more of a self-contained philosophy. However, there are, if you do work with them, my past experience has been that there's incredible expenses associated with it. And anybody who provides a solution for people, we have to take into account our audience, what they can afford, what's fair.

You know, and so they're buying tools and technology that can help them not make them go bankrupt. So unfortunately, some of those costs were just a little too egregious for at least in the CRM space for how we could help our clients because we want a product for them that, you know, isn't isn't overwhelming, helps them manage their business grow. But you can't you can't have a price point that's not realistic. And unfortunately, they're not the only vendor, but some of those vendors to to

to integrate to them, the costs become a little too much. So it's really a cost issue. To that end, we build our technology. I built around the concept of speed. If we can't integrate to them, then what can we do from a manual perspective? Because it's designed to integrate to all the other players. And if for some reason one of the vendors we don't interface to, not a problem.

because we made it so quick and easy in RCM. I'm literally talking 15, 20 seconds so that duplication of effort is really not, it's five minutes a week tops. It's not a big operation.

Miriam Allred (06:35)
Yeah, that's perfect. I just want providers to understand I'm on no one's team here, but I like to defend the CRMs in that it's, it's WellSky putting up motes that are cost prohibitive to the CRMs, but the home care providers are justified in their frustration and that.

Sean Reiley (06:40)
Yeah.

Well, just

to be fair to to WellSky, Miriam, there's a cost issue. They're not alone in that, right? This is anybody, anytime you want to to partner with another organization for this, that is always something you have to weigh. And there's time elements to it, too. So, you know, they're not necessarily alone in that. It's just their costs happen to be a little bit more than than what would benefit the client.

Miriam Allred (06:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally fair. Well, thank you for addressing that head on. Again, I just wanted to lead with that out of the gate because I know it's top of mind for a lot of people listening to this. let's keep moving and let's get right into metrics. So I want to start with metrics and then we're going to kind of like dissect everything behind the metrics. And so I've asked you to come with basically a sales scorecard. There are a lot of, just so you're aware, owners, operators listening to this that may still be doing a version of sales themselves, but likely have one to a handful of reps.

I want you to just lead with like your version of five to 10 metrics that should be on every sales rep scorecard. So I'll just let you take it away and just hit this straight on.

Sean Reiley (07:58)
Well, so metrics that should be on their scorecard. This is a challenging question for me because we based our system on something nobody else does in CRM. So we based it on actual data and probabilities. And from that, can just about guarantee, matter of fact, we have a benchmark. you want, I'll give you two of them. OK, now because we have probabilities and we've gamified these probabilities and essentially turned them into a score like baseball or football.

scoreboard's real easy to see. So you look at that KPI and go, wow. ⁓ For anybody who's not using our system and our methodology, I can tell you your marketer has to be out 30 plus visits a week, 40 plus activities a week. And then we have to get into what makes up, you know,

activities that directly generate referrals in 30 days and what doesn't. So two big benchmarks, visits and the activities associated with them. If I were to translate that into the number of activities, then that would be 40 plus. And should we get in maybe the foundation of what makes this up with that, with that benefit? So the foundation is we've tried to, we've analyzed email, phone calls, and you have to have really relevant data.

Miriam Allred (09:12)
Yeah, that would be great.

Sean Reiley (09:22)
And you have to validate it. We found from all the records we've amassed over a decade, it's almost two decades now of data that we were able to delineate five key activities that we can directly attribute to generating referral in 30 days. Now, unfortunately, it's very hard to start tracking beyond 30 days. So we had to go on a 30 day box. And that's usually what matters to people anyways. So there are five.

⁓ dropping off materials.

Networking events, face-to-faces, scheduled meetings, and group meetings. And I want to distinguish between those two because they're very different. A group meeting is three or more people. It is scheduled in advance, just like a scheduled meeting, but it has to do with a broader audience. It's standard law of large numbers. There are probabilities that we were able to define of generating a referral in 30 days.

our scoreboard around that. So it's actually based in reality, not in, think this sounds good, you know? It's like, no, no, no, I know it sounds good. We've tried to prove metrics such as email and phone calls directly generate referrals. I can tell you that's not the case. Here's why. All five of those activities I named are all in-person activities. You are physically going to a location. We have multiple

use cases where people have increased their phone calls 3x, started their day, phone calls, lots of phone calls, reduced their visits to these on-site facilities or events. And I'm talking dropping from 35, 38 down to 14.

their referrals also drop right off a cliff in concert with that every time. I have 40 specific scenarios I'm thinking of several high producers. We had a girl that was in 35 referrals third month using our system and our technology. Literally overnight, she just fell off a cliff because she reduced her visits went down to 14. And she went and just plummeted within too much. She was down to nine referrals a month.

That's after three months of being plus 25 referrals. ⁓

Miriam Allred (11:48)
So what's behind that? What

holds them in the office? I think of emails and phone calls, it's like they get complacent and comfortable back in the office. What's happening there?

Sean Reiley (12:01)
So there's my anecdotal experience, and then there's data and some of its organization. They just don't manage time, and time is quintessential. It's the one thing we can't get more of in this space, which is very different than other sales positions where you take clients out to dinner at night. You are not taking clients out to dinner. You're taking people golfing. You don't have those opportunities. You have literally

8 till 5 o'clock in most scenarios. And so they don't manage the time effectively. That's one. But here's my anecdotal. Lazy, sadly. For lack of better term, either it's fear of rejection, getting out there and being rejected. And so they pontificate. They don't actually attack it. They want to try to do the phone because it's less emotionally ⁓ affecting them. Or two,

It's, we go back to the lazy, they see it as a job, not as their own business, which is one of the things I try to espouse, is you want sales professionals to treat it like its own business. Because to some degree it is, right? They get commission, it's top-aligned revenue. If they're successful, they get more revenue. In this particular instance, you can't fix lazy if they won't get out there. Matter fact, we analyzed the data, looked at every failed marketer.

They're less than three and a half hours a day out in the field. It's actually three hours and 13 minutes is the average for a failed marketer. That's a marketer doing less than 15 referrals a month.

Miriam Allred (13:40)
And here I am going off script already, but you help agencies hire sales reps. You said it to me before the call. What one thing do you look for in these reps?

Sean Reiley (13:46)
We do.

No. There's a myriad of science things. As a matter of fact, we like to say the science will get you to 15 referrals, but the art is how you get to 70 referrals a month. And sadly, out of everything, once I get past the science, when we meet with them, I don't even know how to quantify this, but like I told you, joy. Frankly, there are.

You just see this spark, this joy, this happiness, this passion. And if you don't see that virtually, everybody who has that joy, and this is an art thing, this isn't a science thing, if I see it, every single one of those people has made it. And I don't know the exact number, but just last year alone, we probably helped people hire 200, 250, 250 marketers, give or take.

And our success ratio is much better. So for instance, when we work with a marketer that's been given to us versus when we hire significantly different tracks, much different. And that's not to say in all instances, but most home care owners, I think it's like 3 % have any background in sales and marketing. And so they don't know necessarily what they're hiring. And I don't think they know it, but this sales job is

the best kept secret in sales jobs because of the ability to build your own book of business. It's really wonderful for salespeople to not always have to start from scratch again when it comes to their income. And so when they can keep growing it, growing it and growing it, and the principles work the same and they stay on top of it, it's a compelling long-term career move, in my opinion.

Miriam Allred (15:25)
Mm-hmm.

You mentioned the art versus the science. On the science part, how much weight do you put on previous home care or healthcare experience? Do you give that any weight? How much weight do put on that?

Sean Reiley (15:40)
For instance,

I'll just

give you a little red flag. I wouldn't hire anybody from another home care organization because if they were so good, they wouldn't have left in the first place. The bulk of these organizations out there, the real money comes on the commission side from their success, from building that book of business. If they're successful, why would they leave you? Because most of those base salaries aren't even close to what the compensation is with the book of business on the commission side.

So I will very much steer clear. Might be a few compelling scenarios, such as there was one where an owner passed away. And literally in two months, the organization blew up operationally because they were the glue that held everything together. I think that's the only one I've come across where it made sense. And you actually had experience with that person in the field you knew.

They had primary accounts they developed that thought very highly of them. But in most instances, and that's by most, mean like 99%, I would never hire somebody who came from home care or immediately came from home care, I should say.

Miriam Allred (17:04)
Yeah, that's super, super interesting. I think it's a common

trap that especially small or early operators fall for is, I need to go find someone that has all these relationships in the community and I'll just offer them a bigger base than what they currently have. But they come with baggage too, you know, for better and for worse. And so I agree with you that like hiring for attitude and drive more than anything can outweigh

their previous relationships in the community. so just focusing really on attitude and personality and finding the right fit.

Sean Reiley (17:37)
You know, it's interesting. I had this discussion. Everyone wants to hire everybody from health care. And so I've done the experiment and we've trained a lot of people. I can tell you it is easier to train a sales person on health care than a health care person on sales. As a matter of fact, there's a predilection that a lot of people who convert over when they convert from health care over to this side, they still have a nine to five mentality.

And it's very hard to get them to understand that this is really like your business. If you got to work 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, that's what you do. So all the home care owners that are on here, they work as needed. And that need is usually seven days a week. We don't think in terms of nine to five. It's what do we have to do to get the job done? That's a mentality.

And it's very hard if you deal with a nine to five mentality to see them being really successful. I can tell you the marketers I work with, we do events at night. We schedule presentations at night in many cases. That's when you're going to get the biggest audience for a lot of these events. You can't have somebody who's thinking nine to five.

Miriam Allred (18:54)
Yeah, really, really

good point. I want to go back to the five activities. So you've dialed it in to five activities that drive all referrals. I want you to define each of them further because like you said, everyone might think these are a little bit different than what you actually define them as. So can we actually go through each, all five of them and you define them starting with the dropping off the materials and the face-to-face? Like I want you to hear what you would describe those as explicitly.

Sean Reiley (18:59)
Thank you.

So dropping off materials is, in essence, I dropped off either literature, education, something, and then that was denoted for a specific person. It's not going to, hey, here's some information on us, receptionist. This is what we have. No. I want it highlighted for director of nursing. I want it highlighted for the social worker. I want it hired for the ED. It's going directly to this person. So that's one.

So that's the drop off. I am dropping off materials specific for an individual at that organization. Two, networking. Now, networking is really a step to a step in most instances. In terms of probabilities, it is far and away the lowest probability of directly generating a referral in 30 days. However, it is a step to a step and valuable for, I would say invaluable for new marketers. However,

you'll find statistically your mature marketer who is, they don't even have to be elite, even average marketers, they're doing significantly less events. Matter of fact, your elite producers, less than 1 % of all their activities is a networking event.

Miriam Allred (20:34)
And you'd mean just purely showing up to a networking event, correct?

Sean Reiley (20:34)
purely

showing up to a networking net out of all the activities. If they do a hundred activities, it is literally 1 % of all the things they do out of every hundred. That's your lead producers. Okay. So it starts off at typically around 6 % for new marketers. And by the way, that's a red flag for hiring to Miriam. You see somebody who wants to be a professional networker.

That's not the business that's going to get you there, right? That's a step to a step, not the step.

Miriam Allred (21:11)
Okay, so then keep going. It's still important because it's the step two then what step?

Sean Reiley (21:17)
You know, it's a step to having a meeting. It might be co-marketing where you get introduced to some of their client relationships or their referral source relationships that are very strong. It might be, I met the director of nursing at this thing. We talked and then we scheduled a meeting two weeks from now or something I said that was engaging and she was willing to meet with me two weeks from now. And then I have that meeting. Statistically, it would be double dipping if you

you know, there's a little bit of that from a statistical perspective. So, but that meeting is where you're really going to flush out your opportunities and directly generate that referral where you get a name.

Miriam Allred (22:00)
Do you think this is where people are wasting time is on networking events? Because I see and hear a lot of owners and marketers going out to networking events and I think it's maybe misleading. It's like, I'm doing my job. I'm getting out in the community. But like you said, it's not actually like leading to referrals. It's valuable, but it could be a waste of time.

Sean Reiley (22:07)
Okay.

It's a waste of time if you don't have an objective and an intent with it, right? I'm going here to meet people and I'm not doing anything with it. I'm going there with the objective of I'm going to either co-market or I'm going to try to get into a facility through a relationship here that I haven't been able to get into. New marketers kind of need it just to get the lay of the land and they start meeting other sales people from other verticals within the kind of the home care space like your sniffs.

your rehabs, somebody who's doing some form of business development or outreach. And they'll get out there. And meeting is one thing. That's great. But what's the action? What's the action out of that? And the action needs to be, I either need to co-market with you. So we both co-market. You share where I can go. Maybe you introduce me via email or in person is preferable, where I now have the opportunity to be seen in the same light as you.

and then we're able to communicate with them directly and they see that we're working in concert. We call that an alliance and we're big fans of alliances as well, you know. So that is something that is out there.

Miriam Allred (23:36)
Okay, love it. Let's keep going. So next I think is face-to-face meetings. Is that number three?

Sean Reiley (23:41)
So

face-to-face, that's the most common focus that everybody has, right? And a face-to-face is an unscheduled visit. So for instance, the facility might know you like to come on Wednesdays or you like to come on Thursdays, but it's not scheduled. It's not like a calendar-based event. And if you don't go, you're not necessarily frowned on, but at the same time, it's not something that's scheduled where you have to be there. They're expecting you at a specific time.

at a specific place. That's the vast majority of what most marketers do. In fact, I often ask the question, which one do you think generates the most referrals in 30 days? The vast majority of people say face to faces. I'm going to tell you, no, that's not accurate. Believe it or not, you have to schedule meaningful moments. And that falls under a term we call consideration.

Anybody who's gone through contract training, the Harvard School of Business has a thing you can go through. There are other methods that are out there. But consideration is a psychological aspect of things. And so when people schedule, they are committing to something. It's already halfway down the pathway to yes. And that's why it's so partially meaningful to have scheduled type events be the focus of where you're going.

Miriam Allred (25:03)
So face-to-faces

are unscheduled and then number four is, what did you call them?

Sean Reiley (25:07)
⁓ Scheduled meeting, that's two or less people. And that can be, typically those are all internal type meetings with your referral source. if I were to go out to a SNF, that would be a meeting with the director of nursing where we scheduled it in advance, or it might be the director of nursing and the discharge director, or the social worker. So that would be, again, scheduled in advance, I meet with two people.

Miriam Allred (25:09)
meeting.

Sean Reiley (25:35)
that number gets to three and your probabilities start to change. So ⁓ we have a go ahead.

Miriam Allred (25:41)
And then that goes

into the group meeting. So group meeting is three or more people.

Sean Reiley (25:46)
Absolutely. So why is that powerful, right? If it's external, obviously a lot of large numbers comes into play. We do a group presentation. So let's say we schedule an event to discuss dementia and we discuss dementia church event, maybe it's an AL or IL, and we really raise awareness. We put effort into trying to generate an audience of families, ⁓ residents themselves, as well as

People may be on a waiting list to get in the AL and enlighten them into what they're really dealing with. Because for that specific thing, that's like a hidden disease, right? It's not obvious that people have dementia unless you spend time with them in many cases. That said, that's a large group of people. From that, when we track it, and we have a different benchmark for our own agency here in Nashville.

That benchmark is different. We considered a failed presentation if we don't walk out of there with a referral. We actually expect the referral right then instead of that 30 days. But it's great. It's great if you know you do these group meetings because it's also a litmus test. Hey, we just did a presentation out here. We didn't get anything from it. Now you got to track it. And that's where a lot of people fail. But we are very into data and determining, we doing things the right way?

or the wrong way for the data validates what we're doing. can't just be, I feel it's good. I feel like we're getting momentum. I've got to know that we got a result from that effort. And so we'll use that as the determination. I can tell you multiple scenarios where we rolled out a certain type of presentation. We were really pushing in the community. First three times, we didn't get a referral right then and there. And we just kept going back to the drawing board. Then next thing you know it.

we started getting. The next one after that, third time, we got six referrals right then and there. Six people ⁓ wanted an assessment right then and there.

Miriam Allred (27:49)
I love this, Sean. This might seem rudimentary to you because you're living and breathing this every day, but what I see and what I hear is there's just a lot of like sales activity. It's like they're out there in the field, you know, they're doing their thing. But there's not this level of specificity and science to what they're actually doing, let alone the probabilities and the data and like where all this like leads to. So that's why I wanted to have you define those five things, because I think a lot of people listening to this

they may be misconstruing networking events and face to faces versus scheduled. Like I think all of those are a little bit loose and undefined in a lot of these businesses. And so you defining them, that's a great place for people to start. On that note, people that come to you have, know, some are new, some have been in the space for a long time. People that come to you is what I just said accurate. They're just kind of like loosely tracking activity and don't have things very clearly defined. Like, is that what you're seeing?

Sean Reiley (28:47)
We're different, We have one of the largest agencies in the United States built from scratch. So it's quantified. So what we teach people, we used to build our own business. And we had to quantify, we had to understand why. When I deal with these people, we track down to the percentage of our inquiry calls are successful versus aren't. And then we set a benchmark.

I know what that benchmark is. We're reviewing our calls via RingCentral. What's going wrong? Are we not following the right flow that leads to an assessment, which leads to a client? That's an example of a metric. Very few people do. They don't track any metrics. Their metric is, how many referrals did you get? Or you were out there all day and you called me and therefore you were busy. I can't tell you how many times.

They thought their marketer was really doing a lot of great things. And I'm like, they went to 20 places this week. I can do seven places in two and a half hours. So you're telling me in one day I could, theoretically, could knock out 20 places in a day.

Now I'm not having very much success. doing a lot of drop-offs and it requires some geographic proximity. But the vast majority of these people have, they're afraid of sales because they don't have that sales experience and managing them. And that's why one of the things we advocate is get out there and do it yourself for a month or two. That way you have a baseline for what's really involved. And once you have that baseline, you can start making some of your own determinations. Whether you turn to us for a system and that kind of guidance and for a

CRM or anything like that. So that helps with that aspect of things.

Miriam Allred (30:34)
So can

you break down a top tier rep what their day looks like and then also what their week looks like?

Sean Reiley (30:42)
yeah.

So I can tell you, your elite marketers, about 30 % of what they do are scheduled meetings or group presentations. So if I see that they're doing that. Now there's root cause, right? They have more what we call bell cows.

That's a primary account. That's a count that's constantly giving your referrals every month. They at least give one a month Everybody has a different benchmark depending on their marketplace But on average it's at least we are getting one referral a month not 12 a year one per month Like a business we want continuous revenues that said

They're doing the bulk of what they do is meaningful. It's scheduled in advance. And it's designed to really be a partner with that organization. A lot of people I come across think their marketer's job is to go and talk to a referral source and say, give me a referral. I don't really see that as our business. Our business is solving referral sources problems, not just taking the referral from them. Could be a staffing. Could be a problem with the volatile census.

It could be a reimbursement issue and staffing, and there might be some benefits to working with a third party to where you can set up an arrangement to deal with that volatile census that allows them to maintain their profitability without having to turn away patients. There's all these opportunities out there.

Too many people, that's by the way, that's one of the criteria in looking at salespeople. Do they have the sophistry to be able to be strategic? Cuz if they're not, they're in the wrong game.

Miriam Allred (32:28)
So

how many referral sources are top performers focused on? how many are in their core focus and then how many are they managing total? So two different numbers there. How many are they focused on and then about how many total are they capable of managing?

Sean Reiley (32:46)
So

the number will go down. a newer marketer, an average marketer should be getting 40 to 50 places a week. The benchmark is absolutely nothing less than 30. If they're less than 30, they will not succeed. 100%. I can virtually guarantee it. OK. The next piece of it is your elite marketers, depending on how long they've been out there,

they're gonna be around 32 or 34. But you have to understand an elite marketer by my criteria and in our system is somebody who does 40 or more referrals.

they might have 20 primary accounts where they know 10 people at each of those accounts. So when they get out there, they're spending 45 minutes at each location. And they're dealing with the referrals themselves, the families, the follow-up, all the administrative concepts and components that are associated with the referral process.

So they'll spend a lot of time on that. their numbers go down. Now, instead of going to 45 or 50 places a week, they're now down to about 32, 34. And they'll bounce. Because they're also doing, remember, they're doing a lot of meaningful presentations, a lot of things that take preparation and take time. they're doing, so for instance, I advise people they should have at least four scheduled.

type meetings per week. Why? Strategically, I know the numbers say that's who's going to be successful. we found that every elite marketer has no less than seven bell cows or seven primary accounts. Not one, not one. No, no, no, no, not less than.

Miriam Allred (34:29)
Not more than seven primary accounts.

Not less than seven, okay. Because you said top performers are generating about 40 referrals a month. And I know this varies, but maybe 80 to 90 % of those are coming out of how many accounts? Like maybe 10 or 15 accounts?

Sean Reiley (34:48)
⁓ Never breaking it down like that. We just looked at the percentage overall that comes from those primary accounts So it's 60 % So we define a bell cow as somebody who feeds you on the basis on the unit of measure here is a month Okay, you need to get at least one a month every organization is going to be different so Organization in Nashville might define their primary account as somebody who gives them three referrals a month in our System and by our standards one never really stays one. Okay

And that has to do with how you target, who you target, and I can go in the weeds on that. So I'm going to stay away from that. But staying on track, it's seven bell cows, and they always make up, in all of our buckets, the high performers. It's more than 50 % of their referrals. In fact, it's one bucket, which we call high performers, it's 60.9 or something like that. And the other one is 62.3 for the elite performers.

Miriam Allred (35:46)
Okay.

Sean Reiley (35:46)
Either case,

they're both over 60 % of all their referrals come from those primary accounts. And that's they're so important.

Miriam Allred (35:52)
Okay. I love your usage of bellcows. I've heard you and Debbie use this phrase so many times

and I think it's funny, but I like it. ⁓ I think you've defined bellcow. You also use this verb, but I've heard you and Debbie use the words like crisis centers and I want you to define what that is. And in my mind, like bellcows and crisis centers kind of go hand in hand, but how do you guys define who the ideal sources really are?

Sean Reiley (36:17)
So I'm going to start off with a methodology. To have a system, you have to have a methodology, something that's repeatable. So one component of our methodology is reach. Who are you targeting? And how many people there are you reaching out to? Who you're targeting is absolutely critical. So we've broken down all of those.

types of places where they can generate a referral from your senior center to Alzheimer's Association, ALS, ILs, memory cares, to SNFs, rehabs, everything. The best way to define it, and our definition is a crisis organization, is one that has an admission and discharge process. They're essentially a clinical organization. If you go to a SNF, the patient gets admitted, they get discharged. That crisis

is when they get discharged. That's when the crisis kicks in. Now in your ALs, ILs, are residents. They live there. There's no discharge. Senior centers or physician offices, that's an appointment. Clinic, same thing, you're pop in. With those kinds of organizations, they don't generate as many referrals as your crisis organizations. We've determined we have an ungodly amount of data.

I want to say the number is around a million records the last time I looked at it. That's a lot of records, right, Miriam? Now I'm statistically valid. They generate 2x. All these crisis organizations that have an emission and discharge process, they generate 2x. 74 % is the exact number. In our system, they generate 74 % more referrals.

than your ALs, ILs, memory cares, adult daycare, physician offices, trust attorneys, senior centers. Yet there are way more of those than there are crisis organizations, believe it or not. So it's got to be your focus. If you're not focused on the right places, you're never going to get to that consistency of growth you're looking for in terms of the referrals. Once you hit 20, now you've got to target 30.

And so it can't be.

Miriam Allred (38:28)
And I said this to

you before, but the way that I interpret what you just said is, that's how I should break up my time if I'm a sales rep is 74 % of my time should be focused on crisis centers, knowing that more referrals and more high quality referrals come out of those places than the rest. Is that how you think about it and like dividing up time?

Sean Reiley (38:36)
Thank

I be a little even more focused on it, but it's pretty close to that. Yeah. When you target these places, we like to see that the bulk, so we're going to say it's just about that. As a matter of fact, it is just about 70%. We don't actually break it necessarily down by that number, but we specify that they have to have at least 30 that they're chasing in any given time. 30 out of their 40 or 50 visits.

at least 30, which is just about right. If they have 40, it's 75%. That is where your primary focus needs to be. Time is the one thing you can't get more of in this role, and the data supports it. You have to stay focused on the places that are going to help you build your business. And we want people to have a reach, frequency, and consistency that is totally myopic about adhering to those rules.

There's some very interesting data out there in metrics and studies on building trust and how often you have to go. but we've been able to determine exactly what that average is, the mean, the high, the low. And we want to ensure that people can get there as fast as possible. And I see a lot of people doing the wrong thing. They try to go after everything at once. And in the end, they

up with nothing.

Miriam Allred (40:16)
And that's a trap is like, the term that's coming to mind is like spray and pray. It's like, get out there in front of everyone, do as much as you possibly can, therefore it's all kind of fluffy and nothing comes of it.

Sean Reiley (40:29)
It's you know, what's really interesting is that we do have stories. Do I do we have time for me to share one tiny story? So we have a we have a saying mine your own field of diamonds. And the idea there is don't go off target. You'll find a lot of people get frustrated if they don't get an instantaneous result in this new world we have today. OK, ⁓ I've been there a couple of times and I'm going to tell you right now, statistically.

Miriam Allred (40:33)
Yeah, yes, please.

Sean Reiley (40:56)
You have to go there a lot more than just three times. It takes a while to build trust, just like building a friendship. And I have organizations, and there some markets, such as the DC area, which has six of the wealthiest 10 counties in the country are that DC area, and South Florida. I have people who are doing absolutely everything wrong.

but they just happen to be in the right place. They've been there for 10 years. They have brand awareness, and they're able to succeed in spite of the processes that they're going after. But that's very rare. It's only in those two markets they can pull that off every place else. You better have your processes established and follow them to a T, because if not, you're going to go down.

Miriam Allred (41:46)
So let's talk about the

timeline piece. How many visits and how much time does it take to get a bell cow? How many visits do you have to put in to then build a relationship like that?

Sean Reiley (41:59)
You

I've had owners call me and say I have enough capitalization to invest in a marketer for three months and I say to them don't invest in a marketer.

I tell them that outright, you need to get out there and market because right now for you to expect them to pay for themselves in two months isn't there. Third month, yeah. They can pay for themselves by the third month and they should. They should start paying for themselves by the third month. But statistically, we start out saying what are the KPIs you need to focus with? 30 visits and in our system it's 100 points from those visits. Everybody who does 30 visits, they average that.

for period of 87 days and 100 points, not one person has ever done less than 15 referrals. In fact, the average is 18.8. So we analyzed all marketers when they first came aboard and then how they transitioned. So I mean, it's interesting because I can actually almost go through what a good sales professional, true professional, what will happen with their referrals.

There are some aberrations. There are some people who just, by month three, they're in their 30s. I mean, and they're on their way to being elite. That's not because they have connections. It's because they worked incredibly hard. They listened, they learned, and they treated it like their own business. To me, that's the big difference.

But that said, that number is the only bull, I'm waiting for somebody to blow that number up. But to date, nobody has ever blown that number up. Nobody has ever done the 30 visits every single month, 100 points in our system, and by month three ⁓ said, I don't got any referrals. It's never happened. They've always gotten 15. And we used to just have the statistical analysis without the visits, but there was some aberration there.

And so when we did corollary analysis, we said, hey, wait a minute. We're noticing that everybody does 30 visits in this. They always succeed, always. Sadly, getting them to actually get out there.

It's spooky. I'm so, it's sad to see. I'm like, how hard is it to get out there? And if I was to make conjecture, it would be some are a fear of rejection because they're gonna be treated badly for a short period of time. People are gonna tell them no, and a lot of people can't handle that. That's one. Two.

Miriam Allred (44:09)
Yes.

Sean Reiley (44:28)
They're just lazy and they treat it like a job. They're going to go out there for a couple hours, come back in, all they care about is their base salary. That's not what you want as an employee and as a marketer.

Miriam Allred (44:38)
Did I pick up this right about like kind of like a sales rep break even is maybe 15 to 18 referrals a month. Is that something you were just kind of alluding to and is there kind of like a break even referral number that's tricky because the revenue of every referral is different but.

Sean Reiley (44:46)
Thanks

It is, you know what the averages are. From your background, I think you had slightly different numbers. For us, it's 12,800 annually. That's what a referral is worth. And so that's kind of the number we base things off of. And they're paying for themselves at eight, definitely. And the company actually can grow.

It can grow even exponentially if it's a small organization. Now you get to $5 million, $8 million, $10 million, or $15 million. You have to understand your attrition. You're going to lose 20 % of your client base. Well, at $10 million, that's $2 million you've got to replace every year. Your revenues are going to slide down. So the bigger the business, that demand becomes higher. That's point number one.

in directly answering your question, absolutely the average home care business is around a million five, give or take. They can absolutely grow their business. Theoretically, that's a million dollars a year at 15 referrals. Theoretically. And at a million dollars a year, you are more than paying for that marketer. I tell people, if they can't generate 400,000, you're losing money on them.

Miriam Allred (46:08)
Sean, this is really good. think this is what a lot of providers needed to hear. hope everyone listening to this is just like, wow, we are under measuring every part of our sales pipeline because I don't know too many people that are thinking about sales in this level of detail, let alone tracking all of this. we can talk a little bit more about your CRM at the end, it's like, there are ways to track all of this. And something interesting that you've told me too is like,

there's a lot of like vanity metrics in sales and in home care sales is where there's a lot of like fake productivity and you've talked about kind of like the laziness and all of that, but it's hard to track these things, but it's possible and you don't want to fall for the additional trap, is like vanity metrics and fake productivity. Can you talk a little bit about that of like what you've seen out there and what that is?

Sean Reiley (46:54)
⁓ absolutely. ⁓ So

when I built the CRM, I've been exposed to so many owners from the big national shows and stuff like that. And then of course we have a lot of friends and people that would turn to us. And this was over the years. And these people are under-capitalized and they're investing in marketers. And I get so mad at the mindset of a lot of these people taking these jobs that we're not IBM. That money is literally coming out of the owner's pocket, literally coming out of their pocket.

So when you don't deliver on that promise, they've invested in you. They're expecting you to work hard. It disappears because they, because they don't even get out there. They put in fake things. So for years I had to implement Salesforce, my companies, Oracle, Siebel. I've done them all clarify. You know, I did them all in the past because I'm, I'm an IT guy, right? And I would implement them and I would go in and people look at the data and they're like,

Is this real? Is it not? So when I designed, this is our second version of CRM. We had a first version. It was very incomplete. We parted ways with that team and we came in with myself. I did most of it myself initially and then I brought my team in. Frankly, it's just because I had the expertise. I just didn't want to waste time explaining it. I just did it.

So it took about a year on the second version. This is about four years ago now, four and a half years ago, I think it was. And so I sat down and I built it, and I wanted to protect owners.

As much as I want the marketer to be able to grow their business and have tools to show them where they're wasting their time and how they can generate more income for themselves and setting benchmarks for that success so they have that stability, I also wanted to make it very easy for an owner to go, do I have a problem? Am I being gamed? And should I cut bait now? And this may sound harsh, but fire faster should be part of the vocabulary.

You can't fix lazy. And when trust is broken between employee and employer, it's over. You got to move on. And sadly, so many people are afraid. I've invested two and a half months in this person. Is there anything we can do to keep them? I'm like, no. I'm telling you right now, you can't fix this. If they won't even do, not even do it well, they won't even do the productivity.

efforts necessary to do the job, let alone are they doing them well, just meet the productivity requirements of the job, then you gotta move on, right then and there. You can't fix them. And by the way, I have tried, and by the way, this has been for years, and not once has there ever been a success in that. It's always been the same thing. So we built a quick, easy tool with colors and compliance that

makes it impossible for them to put in fake information. Makes it impossible for them to fake their day to you. And sadly, I look at it every time and it's literally almost 99%. It's 98 % of all people who fail literally aren't even just doing the job. They're out there for three hours at most. And it's bad. It's sad, actually.

Miriam Allred (50:23)
I love what you've just said though, building the CRM, not just for the reps, but for the owners and to protect them. And I love the advice that you're giving as well of like fire fast. We all wanna fix people, we wanna change bad behavior and we wanna give them the benefit of the doubt. But like you said, home care is unlike any other business and it genuinely is. And it's like, you can't waste time and you can't pour into people because...

the margins are too tight and the revenue is too fragile and it's like you really just can't waste time. And so what other advice do you have for leaders about sales? Like what other misconceptions do they have? What are the things that can you help them like course correct and all your experience? What else do they need to like start doing or stop doing right now?

Sean Reiley (51:05)
So here's what's interesting. So a lot of them don't have a system and they carry marketers too fast. Or they go in undercapitalized. We have quite a few organizations that have come to us. And they come to us in their declining days. mean, they got two months of running capital available to them. And they want to hire marketer. I don't want to be a part of that. I want to hire somebody into that. Because that's not fair. I know for a fact.

Their ability to be where somebody like myself or like anybody who's really been in the business to be able to hit the ground running and get you to where you need to be in 60 days is almost impossible. There are some owners who had that motivation and I've worked with them and they were down to their last 60 days and we kicked them into gear and they're flourishing now. I mean, I can think of three that just off top my head, one just recently.

where I'm like, you gotta do this right now, forget everything else. but I gotta, no, revenue covers up a lot of words and you need revenue. You've gotta go for it. So the advice I would give is twofold. Make sure you capitalize for a marketer. And two, fire faster so you don't use that capitalization up because it feels good to keep the person longer. When people show you who they are, believe them.

And they, nobody does. We want to think the best. I am so sorry. I've been involved in so many employment situations and I keep waiting for the human condition to surprise me and this person who I think is bad isn't bad and it's never been that way. Red flags don't get better. I have to have that discussion all the time.

They have a red flag day one. It's not going to magically get better at the end of the first week or the second week. It's all right. Might need to move on. It's awful. We went through all this process to hire you, but let's move on right now. Why spend the capital? So my advice would be go in capitalized, but fire faster, and know that you do have to have a marketer in this day and age.

Miriam Allred (53:07)
Hmm.

Sean Reiley (53:17)
Digital leads will not carry your business in perpetuity. You have to have multiple pipelines for generating that revenue because your infrastructure has a fixed cost to it. The employees you hire, the rents you have, even your own income that you need and you spend on, and too many people.

buy into this, I'm gonna hold on to them and now I don't have a marketer, I'll survive off my digital. That's great, but the competition's increased. We've gone to, what, 3X, the home care organizations out there, Miriam, that weren't there 15 years ago? And they're taking all those digital leads and so there's just less and less and less business. You have to have every conduit of revenue you can possibly get your hands on.

Miriam Allred (53:55)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Reiley (54:07)
Sorry, I could go on ad nauseum about this. We do these speeches all the time and it's pretty neat.

Miriam Allred (54:12)
I love it. I love the level of specificity that you're giving.

One question about the capital, because I know people would want to know this. What does that look like going into it capitalized? Like a certain cash flow, how do you think about going into it capitalized so that people can understand like what that looks like?

Sean Reiley (54:28)
So I would go in with, and there is a regional flavor, right? LA is gonna be more expensive, New York's gonna be more expensive, and then so on and so forth. So there are different areas that are more expensive. That said, in those areas that you go into, so I like to use the number of 30, 30K, six months. Why? Well.

Sadly, we have a secret weapon. have a CRM that points out when people are lying and they're not going to get there. So we even changed our process for some of the other materials and the other stuff that we provide organizations as part of 52 weeks to now you have to go on the CRM right away unless you're established business, you're already successful there. We don't want to be held liable for

or get blamed because our system doesn't work because there's no tracking, there's no management. And because we want to catch that scenario right away. And we do every time. I mean, we catch it in week one, week two. Yeah, it's sad that we have to give up some capital during that period of time. That's three grand, but it's not giving up 30.

And we want you to hold on to that so you can keep that investment because in the future without a marketer, you will likely not make it. Maybe some of the organizations that have an incredible brand that have been around for 15 years, there are some of those. told you the two markets that that.

can survive because there's enough geriatrics and enough money. But realistically, with the number of agencies that keep coming online and franchises that keep springing up, it's very, very important that you have a dedicated marketing focus that's beyond digital, SEO, and just brand awareness. My personal opinion is in five years, you won't make it if you don't have a marketer.

period. Like you will have to go into the business knowing somebody has to market.

Miriam Allred (56:35)
And when you say 30,000

a month, what are you referring to exactly? 30. Okay. Okay.

Sean Reiley (56:38)
I don't know, 30,000 over a period of six months. Sorry.

I look, I

look at six months because as long as you got a six month runway to afford paying for them, it's going to take them three months to get to the point where they're actually starting to cover their expense. You still have the reason you brought them in is you still need to make money too, right? I mean, you can't just be sinking in that. So six months is really the real runway there to look at three months to getting to profitability. And then you go from there.

Miriam Allred (57:08)
I wanted to make sure I understood that exactly. ⁓ Sean, this has been awesome. Way to go. Thank you so much for sharing all of this so candidly. Just my last question, for those that don't know a lot about 52 weeks or this might be their first exposure to your CRM, there are more more CRMs out there in the industry and outside of the industry. If you had to identify like your core differentiator, I you've kind of like sprinkled it in throughout this conversation. What would be your one differentiator?

over all the rest of the softwares.

Sean Reiley (57:39)
Well, I can tell you Debbie and everybody else doesn't like when I say this, but I'd say it's the only CRM that generates revenue and essentially provides a marketing director in the box for you. Okay. So there are, there are a ton of CRMs out there. There's very established CRMs. They're just not home care specific. They weren't built by somebody who's actually been out in the field, actually seen how these things work. And

understand that those dollars they're investing in marketing are precious and so you have to guard those. So they don't have that oversight.

and they don't necessarily have that ability to say, whoa, where are you wasting your time? You need to go over here. Where are you getting trust? Where are you not getting trust? So our single biggest differentiators are, we can actually, I can show you where we can generate more revenue. And two, I'm also fully can protect you from those employees. So we call it managing the 52 weeks.

First is, are they doing the productivity requirements necessary to be successful? And if they are, what's wrong? How do we improve them? And then lastly, high performance. How do we get them to high performance? Nobody does that stuff. They hand it over and give it to them. I spend...

seven to eight training sessions just trying to explain and teach a combination of sales and not just using the CRM, we can just toss videos over to it. It's what does this stuff mean and how do I turn it into growth and success for my organization.

Miriam Allred (59:23)
Yeah, fantastic. Well said, Sean. You have delivered. Everybody loves Debbie, but I'll tell her you need more airtime because you've got the chops as well. And you think differently than her. Like you're both entrepreneurs. You both know home care through and through, but you're more dialed into. And we didn't talk a ton about like probability. I think what you've identified around just like data and metrics, but there's like the science of the probability and you can get a new marketer and basically like.

predict what's going to happen over six to 12 months. And I think that's really fascinating. thank you so much for all the information that you shared. people are interested and want to learn more, want to talk to Sean, hit 52weeksmarketing.com. That's their website and check them out. know there's dissatisfaction with other softwares or people that are, you know, looking at new CRMs and going above and beyond what their EMR does. so there's options and opportunities out there and Sean is a great resource.

for all of you and we've scratched the surface on the depth of his expertise and so hopefully we're leaving everyone one.

Sean Reiley (1:00:24)
Thank you so much. You've been an incredible host. Absolutely incredible host. Thank you so much, Miriam, for the time.

Miriam Allred (1:00:27)
Thanks, Sean.