Cliff's Insights Playbook # 2: Growing Profitable New Sales Through Effective Prospecting

Customized Demographics With YOUR Territories: List of prospects based on employer size, industry, and other demographics. ** Note that with Benefeature, you can customize your territories based on your own organizational structure; no need to search by zip code, state, or county alone!   

Sell Supplemental Products Based on Retirement Loan Activity: Studies have found that an employer with high employee retirement participant loan activity may want to offer Supplemental Products to mitigate these loans being used for unexpected emergency medical expenses.

Group Insurance / Retirement Cross-Sell and Common Customer: Benefeature has linked employer group insurance and retirement plan filings! Easily find employers that use the same carrier/provider/advisor for both their retirement and group insurance coverage (or even more importantly, employers that engage you for group insurance OR retirement –opportunity to leverage that relationship to sell the other line).

Bundle/Sell Additional Products: Quickly generate a list of employers that report offering one product but not another (e.g. offer LTD / STD but not Group Life).

Target a Particular Carrier or Broker Block of Business: Easy-to-use drop-down filters allow the user to select a broker or carrier with certain characteristics such as, length of employer relationship, levels of compensation, proprietary premium benchmarking. Also, Benefeature offers a look into a broker or carrier Growth and Retention characteristics compared with competitors.   

Let’s walk through just two of the prospecting strategies mentioned above; you will need to have a license to Benefeature to follow along. To begin, log on to Benefeature.

Prospecting Strategy #1:

Sell Supplemental Products Based on Retirement Loan Activity

1. The ‘Employers’ search filtering will be to the left of the screen. Select “Add a plan” under the “Retirement Plans” section, select a “Participant Loan Rate”* that would be considered ‘High’ (1.5% or higher), then select any applicable demographics. 
2. For this example, employers with 100-500 participants within the state of California reporting a 2% Participant Loan to Asset ratio not reporting offering any Supplemental Health as part of their benefit package were selected. This returned 201 employers that satisfied the selected criteria!
3. This prospect list can then be downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet by using the button located in the upper right of the screen.
4. The narrative to the employer benefit decision maker could go as follows:

• • "Through my research, I discovered that you reported your employees having a high level of retirement loan activity."
  • "This high level of activity could be attributed to the need to fund emergency medical expenses."
  • "Retirement loans (as well as hardship withdrawals) typically impact employee potential future retirement contributions and earnings."
  • "Offering Supplemental Health products can help mitigate the need to withdraw funds from retirement savings."

* (Calculation = Participant Loans/Assets Under Management)

Prospecting Strategy #2:

Group Insurance / Retirement Cross-Sell and Common Customer

1. The ‘Employers’ search filtering will be to the left of the screen. Expand the “Insurance Plans” filter and search for/select either your preferred carrier or broker. Next, expand the “Retirement Plans” filter and select the desired provider. If you select the same carrier and/or broker for the search, you will be returned a list of common employers.
2. Of course, the larger opportunity exists through leveraging a current inforce relationship either on the retirement or insurance side to sell the coverage that is not inforce. To accomplish this using Benefeature, follow Step #1 above by selecting either your firm as the carrier/broker and another firm as the provider (or vice versa). 
3. Note that any of your returned prospect lists may be downloaded to Excel using the Excel button in the upper right of the screen.

Please use it! If your sales teams have access to Benefeature, have clear direction from leadership around the importance of finding new sources of revenue, and follow these proven step-by-step instructions, you are certain to unlock the power of this business intelligence and significantly grow new sales! 

Please share with us! Please share with us any of your successes or feedback; also, remember we are always here to help, guide, or answer any questions you may have. We are also available to walk through any of these prospecting strategies with you in a personal 1-1 session. Email us at hello@benefeature.com or give us a call at 207-618-8792.

Please be on the lookout! Coming soon…

Playbook #3: For the Carrier & Broker: Leveraging Inforce Block to Generate New Sales

Cliff Murch has spent his career working closely with the sales, marketing, underwriting, and finance organizations of several large group insurance and retirement carriers designing and implementing business and broker intelligence capabilities, traveling across the country meeting with sales teams and broker partners; these proven capabilities have been employed to generate millions of dollars of sales revenue. He has recently founded and now offers consulting services related to these marketing and sales strategies to insurance carriers as well as brokerage firms of all sizes through his consulting firm Insight 360, LLC.