Data-Driven Selling | Part 4: Building Broker Pipeline

Building Pipeline

After assigning sales territories, your team now has the direction they need to ‘pound the pavement’ and build pipeline!  In this guide, we’ll be spending most of our time in BenefitFlow, setting our sales territory, finding good fit leads, and conducting our outreach.

The benefits market is highly competitive. Using data to isolate the situations where you have the greatest chance of winning can be the difference between crushing your sales goals or falling short. In fact, some of our customers have reported a 75% reduction in ‘wasted time’ by using a more data-driven approach to outreach, using BenefitFlow.

Setting Your Sales Territory

One of the things our users love about BenefitFlow, is how easy it is to plug in your sales territory and begin identifying good-fit brokers.

Let’s assume I’m targeting employers that are self-funded and between 100-5,000 employees. In real-time, BenefitFlow updates to identify the brokers that have the greatest exposure to those types of clients.

Let’s also assume that I want to target those ‘hidden-gem’, regional brokers (rather than spending time with the national firms). This approach will depend on where you’re seeing traction from broker partners, but we find that the larger national players tend to have longer sales cycles and tougher gatekeepers. Today we’ll be using BenefitFlow to identify those smaller good-fit firms that aren’t on our radar yet.

To reflect this in BenefitFlow, I’ve filtered to:

• Regional Brokers
• With Offices in my territory (Texas)
• With exposure to self-funded employers that have 100 - 5,000 employees

Finding Good-Fit Brokers (and Offices)

A few firms will now jump to the top of my list that I’ll want to pay attention to.  For now I’ll focus on Holmes Murphy, a firm I have yet to get in touch with.

If I jump into Holmes Murphy’s profile, my filters will pass through to their book of business and highlight the Dallas, TX office as a great fit.

Building Contact Lists

Let’s now identify the top influencers that serve those clients. Clicking “See Contacts” will generate a curated list of all the producers, account managers, and vendor specialists that are in-scope.

Another thing users love about BenefitFlow is how we marry our broker contact data with licensing data from the department of insurance. This helps to ensure:

1. You’re isolating contacts that are focused on Benefits (while avoiding P&C and Retirement professionals)
2. The top producers are floating to the top of your list

In the example below, the first contact on our list is licensed in Health and Life Insurance (not Property / Casualty) and they have a very large number of carrier relationships (indicating a high-level of influence). Charles Vaughn (the EB Practice Leader) is definitely a good contact to keep our eye on.

BenefitFlow also offers you a high degree of control over contact filtering. A few other filters to consider when building your list:

• Role: Do we want all contacts or just the producers? You can also isolate account managers or the in-house specialists that focus on vendor assessment.
• Job Title: Do we want to get more specific with the job titles we care about? Maybe we only want to isolate Practice Leaders.
• Years At Company: Do we want to isolate newer influencers that are building out their book? Or more tenured employees?
• License Type: Do we only want to target contacts who we know have a Health / Life license?
• Carrier Appointments: Do we want to target contacts that work with [insert carrier name]?
  
  

For more info on broker personas, reference our Broker Audience Handbook!

Once you’re satisfied with how you’re ‘casting your net’, you can easily select your target contacts, add them to a list, and sync them over to your CRM.

Conducting Outreach

When it comes to outreach, sales and marketing teams will usually have a messaging playbook that involves a deep understanding of their value proposition, which is honed through experimentation and testing. The topic is too broad for this guide, but we’ll give some tips on how our most successful users gather insights from BenefitFlow to make their messaging as targeted as possible.

Did you know: Personalized emails achieve 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates compared to non-personalized emails.

Source: Outreach

1. A Broker serves customers that ‘look like’ some of our best customers

Let’s assume we have a few happy customers that participate in the Construction sector (if we have case studies for them, even better). In BenefitFlow, isolate the Holmes Murphy clients that are also in the Construction sector. In your outreach, you can now share those relevant case studies with producers at this office and position your solution as a potentially great fit for their Construction clients.

2. Your solution can address specific employee pain points

Understanding pain points across their book of business, can be one of the most powerful conversation starters with a broker. BenefitFlow’s Employee Sentiment feature scans the open internet to gather data on how employees perceive their benefits package. In the example below, I can drilldown on Holmes Murphy’s Construction clients and better understand their pain points.

In this example, it seems the employees rate the benefits as ‘so-so’, citing high-deductibles and limited network coverage through their carrier: UnitedHealthcare. Depending on your product offering, you may have a solution that the broker may want to explore. Our most successful power users harness these insights to differentiate their messaging and get more meetings booked!

Ready to elevate your go-to-market strategy? Get in touch to learn more about how BenefitFlow can supercharge pipeline development for your team.