Lyn Skarmeas, VP and chief strategy and growth officer at Care Dimensions, joins Tony Kudner to talk about leading hospice growth teams. The conversation covers setting expectations before you enforce them, using CRM data to develop liaisons rather than police them, and why growth is never the sales team’s job alone.
Most hospice growth leaders are comfortable with the coaching half of their job. The accountability half is where things can get uncomfortable.
Lyn Skarmeas is VP and chief strategy and growth officer at Care Dimensions, the largest hospice in Massachusetts, serving more than 100 cities and towns in a market with roughly 80 competing hospices. She has spent 15 years there building a provider relations team – a mix of clinical and non-clinical professionals split between hospitals and academic medical centers on one side and skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities and physician practices on the other.
She and Tony dig into how expectations set in advance take the sting out of a hard conversation; how a six-month ramp has replaced the old three-month rule; and how data reveals the territory patterns nobody notices otherwise, like the liaison still calling weekly on an account that has not produced a referral in six months.
The episode closes on the piece growth leaders cannot delegate. Sales gets the phone to ring. Everything that happens after it rings, from the person who takes the referral to the nurse who arrives at 2 a.m., determines whether that referral source calls again.
Listen now, and reach out to Transcend Strategy Group if you want help building coaching and accountability into your own growth team.
