4 min read

Cliff's Insights Playbook # 3: Leveraging Inforce Block to Generate New Sales

Picture of Cliff Murch Cliff Murch : Jul 24, 2024 9:12:44 AM

Sales Distribution Strategy

Cliff's Insights Playbook # 3: Leveraging Inforce Block to Generate New Sales

~50% of employees in firms >100 participants have no access to an LTD plan.1 Identify 10,000+ employers which offer Group Life but not LTD2 with Benefeature to unlock $20 Million in new sales revenue!3

Sometimes finding additional revenue within your inforce block of business is not obvious, but those opportunities may be right under your nose. In this installment, I will summarize several strategies that you can use leveraging Benefeature and AskGMS that will help you to easily identify those in-house prospects.

I’ve included a couple of market-proven strategies below:

Inforce Cases - Products Through Multiple Carriers: Identify your inforce cases that have one or more coverages with you but have additional coverages with other carriers/brokers as reported through Benefeature. It is possible that the employer may find that bundling products with one carrier/broker would be more cost efficient, easier to manage, and result in overall premium savings.

Inforce Cases - Products Not Being Offered: According to the latest National Compensation Survey published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 50% of all private industry workers associated with employers that have 100+ employees have access to LTD plans. If you do not have the LTD coverage for an employer and it is not reported on a recently filed 5500 through Benefeature, it is probable that LTD is not being offered.

Offer Supplemental Health to Inforce Clients: As outlined recently in Playbook #2, 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. With Benefeature, easily identify your inforce employers with high loan activity on their retirement plan!

Upsell Richer Plan Designs to Inforce Clients Where Appropriate: AskGMS is the only product in the industry today that gives real-time insight into the key plan provisions for products being sold as recently as the prior quarter. Based on the industry and size segment of your inforce cases, it may be possible that these employers are not offering plan designs comparable to their key competitors.

Let’s walk through just two of the prospecting strategies mentioned above; you will need to have a license to Benefeature and AskGMS to follow along. To begin, log on to Benefeature (you can also toggle to AskGMS from this logon page).

Prospecting Strategy #1:

Inforce Cases - Products Not Being Offered

1. The ‘Employers’ search filtering will be to the top left of the screen. Select “Add a plan” under the “Insurance Plans” section and select the product(s) that the employer is currently offering that you are interested in. To view your inforce block, select either your carrier or broker name in the “Any carrier” or “Any broker” selection box.

2. Expand the ”Insurance” filter and select “Benefits Missing” from the drop-down menu. Select the product(s) that the employer is NOT reporting on their latest filed 5500 form to the DOL.

3. Expand the “Demographics” filter and select the criteria to further sharpen your focus.

4. For this example, employers reporting 100-500 participants reporting STD but no LTD as part of their benefit package were selected. This returned 2,700 employers that satisfied the selected criteria!

5. This prospect list can then be downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet by using the

button located in the upper right of the screen.

6. In Column V of the Excel spreadsheet, there is a listing of “Welfare Benefits Offered” by employer. Notice that the sample below lists STD as one product offered but no LTD.

Prospecting Strategy #2:

Upsell Richer Plan Designs to Inforce Clients Where Appropriate

1. You will need to either toggle to AskGMS from Benefeature or logon directly and select “Advanced” under the “Buyer Preferences” section located in the top left of the screen.

2. To run an AskGMS plan design benchmarking report, select from the selection criteria menu to the left of the screen the demographics that most closely resemble the inforce case you are analyzing. In this example, I selected the:

3. Once you have selected your filters, select the “Get Report” button located at the bottom of the filter screen to run the report . The report will be generated online – to also get a formatted report, select the “Download PDF” button located at the top right of the screen .

4. For our example, let’s assume that your account manager services a law firm in California with 150 employees. Let’s also assume that this employer has the following LTD plan design:

5. After generating an AskGMS LTD market plan design benchmarking report based on new sales reported by 20+ carriers, we see that the majority of comparable competitor law firms are offering the following plan design:

6. This now gives us a great opportunity to discuss with and demonstrate to the employer that aligning its benefit package more closely with its nearest competitors might be in their best interest in order to attract and retain the best employees.

What next?

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 or give us a call at 207-618-8792.

Please be on the lookout! Coming soon…

Playbook #4: Using Facts/Data/Logic to Manage Your Territories

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.

National Compensation Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024)
Benefeature employer database (2024)
Calculation: 10,000 employers * 5% conservative new LTD attach rate to in force policies * $250 annualized premium per life * 175 average lives