The partnership began in August 2006 with Normal and BroMenn Healthcare’s Healthcare-to Organizations (H20) program. The latter provides comprehensive onsite wellness and occupational health solutions for area employers.

This collaboration started with a simple goal: to enhance the Town’s employee benefits by providing consistent on-site wellness services and resources for the Town’s approximately 360 union and non-union employees, spouses and retirees as an enhanced benefit.

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By Suzanne Dewey
Forté Partners, LLC

Developing and sustaining relationships is an art form that will help you create a robust referral network. As with any relationship, the more personal and interested you are in others, the more long lasting that relationship becomes. There’s no quick formula and any worthwhile relationship takes time to develop.

So where should you start?

The Hospital

Take the time to introduce yourself to call center personnel and the individuals in the marketing/public relations departments. This effort helps them put a real face on their work and also lets them know you appreciate the work that they do. Make sure they have a good sense of your services. Find out what is typical in their outreach efforts and see how you can augment with outreach of your own. Do they have a speakers’ bureau? Do they have ongoing social media endeavors? Can you write a feature article for their newsletter?

Payers

Make sure you’ve connected with all of your payers and are listed appropriately in their online and print directories. Visit the place where they have their insurance call center personnel; introduce yourself and what you offer. If the payers are too far away from your office, simply getting in touch with them over the phone can do wonders. Making the connection more personal and memorable is always helpful.

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It's a dilemma every hiring manager faces: Hire a "warm body" to have someone in place quickly before the position is frozen — or worse, eliminated — or take the time to find, train, and appropriately compensate the right individual for the job.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins says successful companies "first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it." All too often initiatives fail not because of poor strategy but because of the wrong people behind the project. The desire is strong to have the right people, the right road map, and the right results. The deeper challenge is in taking the time to develop a culture with a road map for recruiting and training the right people, and then giving them a clear focus and strategy that enables them to grow and advance in their work.

Much more angst is caused by a quick bad hire than by the length of time the position is vacant while the search for the right candidate is underway. Most customer relations problems result from hires that fall into one of three "warm body" categories:

• The Gift. A person is "given" to the hiring manager by another department or division and put into the role with no regard to strategy, approach, how the individual will interact with the customer, or even the possession of the right skills and competencies for the function.
• The Mapless. An individual brings the right skills, competencies, and experience to the position, but the organization has no infrastructure or strategy to help the person succeed.
• The Dead End. The person has the right skills and competencies and is given training, but nothing is done to motivate or retain the person with a career path. The other dead end is the person who has all the capabilities but is seeking a way to "coast" in an easier job and wants to take advantage of the apparent freedom the position presents.

By focusing on the three key areas of recruitment, retention, and training, a manager can avoid these problem hires and select the right individual for the position and build a highly focused and successful customer development function. 

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