Engaging a Lead Generated through Intro Benchmarking

Step 1 - Receive a Lead (Group Contact with an Intro Benchmarking Report They Have Already Generated)

Step 2 - Initiate Your Introduction

Sample Follow Up Email / Script

Thanks for generating a benchmarking report from us, have you had a chance to review it?  I’ve taken a look at your comparison and after hearing your feedback I’d like to offer some of our insights about the report. This was a live benchmark generated from a growing database, it’s part of a tool we use with our Employee Benefit clients every day, reviewing plans, making recommendations and supporting decisions within organizations. I’ll provide my opinion as well as offer you additional benchmarking reports at no cost so Let’s Set a Meeting

Step 3 - Follow up to Set a Meeting and Conduct the Review

INTERNAL GOALS

1.  To create curiosity for a follow up benchmarking report.
2. To create uncertainty in current support and services from their Advisor and lead to a review, plan audit to change advisors (AOR) or even marketing of plans as necessary.

Follow Up Meeting

Start with their Feedback: “What were your first impressions?”

• Get feedback, look for a trigger event for the goal, the employer may leap frog from this to an entirely new subject that you could run with them on like a specific benefit or issue.

After Feedback noted, if no Trigger Event - Set Stated Goal to Employer:

Our objective is to review the report with you, make sure you understand it and offer some insight about what this means for your group.  This is part of the service we offer and happy to explore more benchmarking with you or complete a full benefits plan audit when you’re interested in learning more.

Further Explanation to Employer for Context:

What you received was just one example of our introduction benchmarking.  The report provides a summary of benefits included vs not included and how that compares to other employers like you.  The report also offers a ranking of one key aspect of each benefit.  I’d be happy to review those with you.

As you can see with the tool we can generate this insight rather quickly, so please ask questions and we can explore more information wherever you’d like. We can also generate other versions of this report for you, looking at different combinations of industries, provinces and group sizes.

Lastly, as this is just an introduction, we can also do a full comprehensive report covering more details about each benefit.

We don’t charge employers an additional fee for this reporting, we use these reports to help employers uncover context about what other companies are offering, how they stack up and to generate new insights that help us provide clients better advice.

Let’s go through it:

The top bar of each pair is the percentage of groups that include this benefit vs those who do not, marked in blue are the benefits you shared with us that are included.  The second bar is the ranking, and while we didn’t ask for a full summary or booklet of benefit details we’re sharing one key aspect of coverage, especially from the employees perspective, to show you the range of other offerings.  This is the middle 50% from the bottom 25% to the top 25% thresholds with the middle marked by the median value.

Let’s go through each one:

[SAMPLE SCRIPT NOTES - each one designed to create curiosity to probe further, generate another report or make the ask for the benefits plan booklet]

Life Insurance - we’re just showing a flat amount here but many employers offering a multiple of earnings.  We can follow up with more detail here and discuss why employers choose either strategy.

Dependent Life Insurance - it’s not as common as we think and often out-dated coverage, these are the types of details we help uncover for clients and monitor each year to ensure they stay current and competitive

Critical Illness - so this is covering only mandatory, often employer paid plans but there’s lots of voluntary options available now as well.  Compared to others on this page it’s a relatively newer benefit option so one that many older plans haven’t considered or added.

Short Term Disability - here we’re looking at the range of weekly maximums.

Long Term Disability - what we’re showing here is the monthly overall maximum but there’s lots more to explore including non-evidence, schedules, definitions and taxability.  We spend alot of time with clients making sure the details of this are optimized.  There are lots of areas of risk we cover off here.  If you provide your booklet we can come back with a full page analysis to ensure you’re on track.

Prescription Drugs - it’s a very common benefit and here we’re just sharing the coinsurance which employees often compare.  There is of course alot more to drugs and an area we have alot of strategies we offer as it often represents the majority of your claims and costs in health care.

Paramedical - this is the per practitioner maximum which is one of the more common definitions.  We’re seeing alot of interesting trends in this area such as breaking out mental health practitioners from other practitioners, again, more detail we can dig into with you.

Basic Dental - again this is just the coinsurance but we can also look at benefit amounts, maximums, recall and even scaling units to really show you the details of your plan and how that ranks

Dental Major - coinsurance is shown here for ranking but many employers value looking further at the combined maximum amounts and other details.

Vision - amount (typically every 2 years), but there are other strategies to consider like HSA that heavily influence some benefits like vision coverage from being offered insured or not

Orthodontics - included or not for at least the dependent children, some companies also cover adults

EAP - included or not, they’re not all created equal and we can share with you some of the differences in solutions we like to highlight for clients in the marketplace

Taxable Spending - gaining in popularity with traditional providers, not always included in the plan but sometimes also something offered directly by the employer

Diagnostic / Support - a wide range of solutions from second opinion to health care navigation services, a foundation of care and employee support (sometimes included with your plan but also available from speciality providers)

EXTRA - Benefits Advisor Notes

Unless the Employer reveals a specific objective on their side the next goal is to collect the booklet and set a meeting to deliver more / demonstrate your value and earn AOR.

In addition to explaining each field the objective is to increase curiosity about more benchmarking, to initiate the questions from the employer “what about X?” and then to say, Yes, if you provide us your benefits plan booklet we can get you a full benchmarking at no cost.

This can also happen by reviewing the comparison: “I see you chose manufacturing, BC, etc. but we can also look at this for other provinces that you operate in etc.”

If you see something well under benchmark or out-dated and want to get more aggressive questions:

• When did you last review the plan?
• When was your last meeting with your advisor?
• What were their most recent recommendations?
• What is your process for reviewing benefits?

For More Detail on these questions see Step 3 of "The First Prospect Meeting"

The goal of the above is to expose a scenario where the employer is not receiving value and then to offer to conduct that full review and talk about the value and importance of reviewing benefits.