5 Reasons Treatment Centers are Failing at Bringing in Clients and Retaining Them for the Length of Stay of Treatment.
It is no secret that 1 in 5 people suffer from an addiction and our addiction treatment center system is failing. Treatment centers pop up overnight only to be gone in a few months. What might you be doing wrong and how can you correct it?
1. Your center has boring or outdated programming. Clinical Directors can sometimes be stuck in the stone age. What worked 20 years ago is not working now. The younger sector is shying away from traditional abstinence-based methods and looking for more innovative and meaningful ways of coping with stress, finding their path in life and getting clean and sober.
Treatment centers need to offer more coaching-based and experiential-based groups that cater to the failure to launch client. Asking them to sit in a circle and read from a book is antiquated and one of the biggest reasons they leave treatment early. Treatment centers also need to train therapists in a modality of other types of group facilitation and public speaking to ensure maximum group participation.
2. Marketers or the Business Development team has no pipeline. Marketers job hop roughly every 6 months or so. You see a ‘business developer’ whose job is to secure new business by social media or local events in the community and they are paid very well to work from home. Everyone wants to be a marketer with a nice salary, but not everyone can load their pipeline and bring clients through the front door. This is why you see them with multiple treatment centers in a short window of time, as they have burnt out their pipeline and can’t refill it.
Training all marketers in the art of intervention not only teaches them how to close the deal, it will increase their worth. A certified, trained interventionist on staff is very important to securing difficult clientele. If you chose not to train them in intervention, sales training with the ethical component of the medical field is key
3. Front line Admissions Team has no sales training. Whether you like it or not, the call a client places to a center is a sales call. The lead (or family) is seeking information and the call center’s job is to provide the information and convert the lead to a client. That is business 101. However, what happens is the admissions team is not trained in sales or maybe is a past resident and talks too much about the program or too little. Training the admissions team in ethical sales and conversions is critical to the influx of new clients. You can pay all you want for call leads, google ads and more but if your front line can’t convert, you have wasted a ton of money,
4. Patient Brokering. If you are offering bonuses or paying ‘to put heads in beds’ or paying per client you are breaking the law. There are many ways to network and get quality leads not paying per lead or per head. We have developed a very unique system to help you get the word out about your center that will stop patient brokering and also help you meet with quality referral sources. Referrals from quality sources are the best conversions as their sources have vetted the treatment center and are willing to recommend a place based on true knowledge of the program. A true referral source will have the patients best interest in mind and not be paid for the referral.
5. Enticements or incentives to get someone to come into the treatment center or to stay longer are not ethical. Gift cards, drugs, cash, cigarettes, free airline tickets and more should not be offered for a client to come to a particular center. The treatment center should have a solid clinical program, a nice clean place to recover and a proven track record. If you are working on achieving these goals, offering quick incentives to fill beds now will only hurt your reputation in the long run. Focus on the solid items and build a great reputation.
The Addictions Academy and Rehab Rescue are pleased to offer quality training that can help you increase your lead to client ratio, keep your clients in treatment for the length of stay and keep them engaged. We have also developed a proven system to obtain quality referrals that is not patient brokering, paying per lead or head, it is old school (and it works).
Call us today 1.800.706. 0318 ext 2 or visit www.TheAddictionsAcademy.com and www.rehabrescue.com
