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Cliff's Insights Playbook # 5: Know Your Broker

Picture of Cliff Murch Cliff Murch : Sep 4, 2024 4:03:33 PM

Sales Distribution Strategy

Cliff's Insights Playbook # 5: Know Your Broker

Who is your "best" broker?

Are you sure?

Have you based that on feeling or facts?

Having a 360-degree view of your broker – market presence, new sales activity, your market share, and inforce block of business – is crucial to your success as you compete with dozens of other carriers for their attention, business, and shelf space.

With Benefeature and AskGMS, you can easily pull all of the above, and more, which will allow you to proactively understand your broker with the most trusted and robust business intelligence in the market and build a comprehensive broker business plan.

As you propose proven and trusted sales/growth strategies to your broker based and focused on their preferences, you will differentiate yourself in an ever increasingly competitive landscape.

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

Quickly Identify the Brokers in Your Territory:

AskGMS is the go-to source when attempting to identify the brokers selling ancillary benefits in your territory as well as quantifying new sales potential. This business intel includes all new sales reported over the past 20+ years by the majority of carriers and includes all size segments, including under 100 lives.

Leverage Broker Segmentation Dashboards:

Once you have leveraged AskGMS to identify the brokers in your territory, one click on any broker name will provide you with a robust broker profile with full new sales segmentation by product, size segment, effective year, industry, and new sales situs state.

Quantify and Score the Broker and Their Book of Business:

With Benefeature, it’s a snap to benchmark any broker against other brokers within the territory or with a similar book of business based on recently filed 5500 forms. The unique ‘BeneRanking’ measures plan share as well as year-over-year retention and growth on an easy-to-read visual.

Identify New Lines of Coverage and Sales Opportunities for the Broker:

Benefeature allows the user to quickly access a broker’s book of business based on recently-filed 5500 forms and isolate which products the employer may not be currently offering their employees or may be offering with another carrier or broker. This listing can easily be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet.

Understand Your Broker's most Commonly Sold Plan Designs:

The industry-leading AskGMS plan design benchmarking feature is most commonly used to benchmark a specific industry and product. However, most users are not aware that a broker may be selected, and their new sales can also be summarized by plan design and product. This is a great way to provide your broker with a differentiated look at their business.

Let’s walk through just two of the approaches mentioned above to better understand your broker; you will need to have a license to Benefeature and AskGMS to follow along.

Territory Management Strategy #1:

Quickly Identify the Brokers in Your Territory

1. Partner with AskGMS to customize its capabilities by your firm’s territories.

2. Log in to AskGMS. Select the "Broker Search" link in the upper right section of the screen.

3. Leverage the filter section to select your area of focus; expand the "Show Available Filters" button on the far left to see other selection criteria.

4. Begin by selecting your desired "Products" and new sales "Effective Date" range; for this example, products selected were LTD, STD, Life, and AD&D, the effective date range selected was 1/1/2020 through 3/31/2024, and the broker state was Florida.

5. When the filter selection has been completed, click on the "Get Report" button located at the bottom of the filter list to generate the broker listing.

6. The resulting broker list (almost 600 broker / office locations in this example) will provide key demographics such as name, office location, and number of competitor carriers they have sold new business with. Also included is new sales annualized premium and number of new plans / lines of coverage sold along with your market share.

7. Select the button in the upper lest of the screen to download the list into an Excel spreadsheet.

8. To produce a detailed broker profile dashboard, select any broker name link on the broker listing. You will be taken to a dashboard visual which will summarize that broker's new sales by size segment, effective year, office location, carrier, product, industry, and situs state.

9. Leverage all of this broker business intel to manage your territory, look for new opportunities, estimate sales goals, prepare for broker meetings, and proactively partner with the broker to formulate market strategy.

Territory Management Strategy #2:

Identify New Lines of Coverage & Sales Opportunities for the Broker

1. The AskGMS and Benefeature integration allows for effortless and simple transition from the broker profile on AskGMS to the broker's book of business and competitive profiling on Benefeature.

2. While viewing an AskGMS broker profile, the user may select the link in the upper right of the screen; this will take the user to the broker book of business based on the latest filed 5500 reports.

3. This employer listing may be downloaded to Excel by selecting the button located in the top right of the screen. The download includes key employer demographics - a sample is displayed below:

4. To get more detail about any employer, the user may select the employer name link; to see additional employer plan details, the user may select the "Show Plans" icon located to the right of the employer line.

5. Additional broker information may be accessed by selecting from the menu located at the top of the broker profile:

6. To select another broker while on Benefeature, the user may select the "Search" button followed by "Brokers".

What next?

Please use it! If your sales teams have access to AskGMS and 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 #5: Know Your Employer

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.