Empower your healthcare sales prospecting with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

hello this is dr eric bricker with a healthcare z and this is the how to sell in healthcare podcast in today's episode we will be discussing how to sell to the large market for employee benefits solutions and by large market i mean employers that are greater than 2 000 employees oftentimes 2 000 to 10 000 is kind of considered a large market and greater than 10 000 or sometimes greater than 50 000 employees is considered jumbo but i'm going to put the two of them together and say a lot of these approaches can be used for sort of all these types of employers that have greater than 2000 employees it's important to remember that the number of organizations really do stratify in other words that the number of organizations with greater than 2000 employees is actually far fewer than the number of organizations with less than 2000 employees and you can go to the department of labor statistics where you can see how uh how stratified or how distributed it is so while greater than 50 percent of the us workforce works at these larger companies they do represent a smaller number of individual organizations and that's gonna impact sort of how we approach them and we're gonna start off similar to what we did for the small group and mid market and then we're going to start off with prospecting and then move to the initial meeting so the way that you prospect and have initial introductions to the large group market segment is different than mid-market and small group okay so for large market prospecting it is going to be for the most part direct and it's not going to be through a broker or benefit consultant now of course these large employers do use brokers and benefits consultants however the relationship between those brokers and benefits consultants is different for a number of reasons okay reason number one once you get to a larger company now remember a organization typically spends about 10 000 per employee on the health plan every year so for a hundred employees that's a million dollars for a thousand employees that's 10 million dollars so we're talking for 2000 places we're talking at least 20 million of spend and if you have 10 000 employees then you're spending 100 million dollars every year on health care so that means that the employer because it's such a large expense they're going to have a larger number of people within the organization itself that have the expertise to go through the procurement process for for getting these vendors and much more expertise in managing their own employee health plan and they oftentimes will use their broker or consultant they will use their advice they will use them on a project basis they will use them um to do due diligence on various you know vendors or solutions etc but the relationship is different okay what are some other ways that the relationship is different so okay so one the relationship is different because there's just more people and more skill and more experience and more acumen by the employer itself okay so typically you're going to have a vp of hr who's looking over this huge organization then you're going to have somebody who frankly might be a vp of benefits or a director of comp and benefits or sometimes it's referred to as a vp or a director of total rewards and um and so there's there's oftentimes a significant uh compensation component in addition to their benefits component and the benefits component includes a fairly significant 401k component a quote-unquote financial benefit not a health-related benefit so they have a lot of responsibilities and again just to point to the fact that they have a lot of um skill dedicated in that area they might have dedicated you know employee health plan strategists and employee health plan uh you know analysts and managers etc so there's more of a hierarchy even just within employee benefits because they're much larger organizations i mean some of these organizations are literally doing 500 million sometimes a billion dollars a year in health care spend for the largest of the large whether it be state organizations or or big you know fortune 10 uh employers now the other way that it's different is the typically the consultant or the broker that they're using is oftentimes paid differently so that broker consultant is oftentimes either their fee arrangement is a little different it can be one it could be on a retainer so they're paying let's say a monthly amount to keep that broker consultant on a retainer or two it's project based so they will define a project and it could be like let's say an actuarial project that they want assistance on et cetera and so they pay that consultant or broker on a project basis now that with that in mind the brokers and consultants still and this is a controversial area but i'm still gonna go there they are still and this is this has been anecdotal through many people that i have spoken with over the past 12 plus years in employee benefits and health insurance is that there are still quote unquote override payments by the major health insurance carriers to benefits consultants and you have to look a and there are over override payments by the pharmacy benefits managers to the benefits consultants and the brokers as well and you have to look really closely at your contact the employer's contract between their broker and consultant over what fees they do or do not need to disclose and the way that they structure those uh those payments from those outside entities and well as well so in other words if they have those payments through let's say a wholly owned subsidiary that would be a quote-unquote separate company that has a different profit and loss and so the consultant that the employer have might be part of one quote-unquote subsidiary within that company but then the um and they don't even call them override payments right what they they will call them marketing bonuses or loyalty bonuses i mean there's all sorts of different names for these things but the point is is that there are that there's money paid by the vendors directly to the broker or consultants and those need to be disclosed sometimes require contractually required to be disclosed by the employer but not always so that you know that sort of you know payment not from the employer to the consultant aside let's just talk about payment to the the the broker or consultant directly from the employer okay so the um the things that are different about the relationship is one is that there's more expertise on the employer side too that the way that the um the broker or consultant is being paid is different uh for large group as as well and really i would say the sort of uh third aspect that you need to be aware of is that the broker consultant is still part of the buying team so you when you think of the the buying team or the buying group um then the broker consultant are still absolutely a part of it uh and they definitely have influence and they also needed to be they also need to be persuaded but whereas with the small and the mid group you go to the broker consultant first and persuade them first and then they bring the employer along that oftentimes in the large market that you want to go directly to the employer and the employer will then bring the broker or consultant along and if it's a very successful relationship and you can actually make the broker consultant look very smart and have a be a very well-run implementation and have it be a very well-run program then that broker a consultant after after they see that with one or several of their clients or within their office or within their practice they will then spread that across other groups that they that that you did not directly go to but rather the consultant was like hey this very large uh company used uh this particular vendor it would be good for this other completely unrelated company to also to use that vendor as well so you want to also from a a a referral standpoint you also want to have a positive relationship with that uh that broker or consultant on the large group as well okay now in prospecting for small and mid market we talked about making lists of brokers and consultants based upon uh linkedin and you're gonna do the same thing for large group except in this case what you're gonna do is when you're starting the list you're going to need to have company names now this is where it's fairly easy on the internet to look at lists of large companies i mean i mean you can just start with like the fortune 500 or the fortune and you can go through and through a linkedin search by looking at by looking those organizations up and then searching for a title like um vp of hr and vp of benefits or vp of total rewards or or director of benefits or benefits manager and within that bureaucracy or hierarchy within hr at these very large organizations then you want to you don't just want to have like one target person you wanna you wanna sort of uh you and a prospect across a range of these people because there are some vps of hr that came from the benefit side of the business and they know benefits super well and there are some vp's of hr that know almost nothing about benefits because they did not come from that side of hr so but but you don't know there's a again a priori you don't always know in advance which vps of hr do or do not have that type of understanding or expertise um likewise when you get to the uh the director or the vp of total awards or comp and benefits they might be a compensation person not real i mean yes they do health insurance and it's actually from a from a p l perspective it's actually a greater responsibility but they're really a compensation person first and so they really lean on their quote unquote benefits manager underneath them so maybe in that situation it's actually the benefits manager that you want to be prospecting most heavily but again you don't know so you want to do starting from the bottom working way up you want benefits analyst benefits manager director of comp and benefits vp of hr all within that organization and sometimes you even want to do the c-e-c-o-o or the c-f-o depending upon who the head of hr reports to and for a lot of these they you know they they um they call him the c-hro the chief chief human resource officer and a lot of times that chro reports into the ceo and you know frankly at these organizations because they're so big you're never going to get to the chro and you're certainly never going to get to the ceo and so actually trying to target lower down within the hr and benefits bureaucracy is actually a more effective way to go about it so you're gonna need to spend a lot of time so again i would i would spend like two hours every morning from five to seven with these large employers uh targeting them okay and then again you're gonna do outreach by email and phone and again you're gonna do probably a total of you know 12 outreaches you're going to do like seven emails and five phone calls again you're just going to leave voicemails and you're going to have to do some detective work to get to their phone number and you're not going to have their direct phone number you're basically going to end up having to call through the phone tree at the company and this is where aaron ross actually has a lot of great information about those initial phone calls because what you do is you kind of play there's this old detective tv show called columbo and you want to kind of try to play colombo when you call the company and be like you know hey i i work in a company that you know provides employee benefits you know services and you know frankly there's there's a person within your organization that would probably be really interested in um learning about the service that we provide and other clients that are like them who found a ton of value but you know but but i don't know who that person is within your organization who's the right person to really contact so you're not trying whoever you get on the phone you're not trying to sell to them what you're really trying to do with that person you get on the phone is is to be like hey who's the right person at your organization that would find value in the type of solution i'm talking about and that's the same way you want to go about your emails as well too with your emails the call to action is not necessarily even you know hey can you get on a five minute phone call with me like we did in the small group in mid-market it's hey could you um could you forward this email to the person within your organization who you think would really be the best person for this email and you know could you cc me on it that would be great and sometimes they'll forward it to that person without tc and you and then you'll just hear a roundabout from somebody else that you never even knew existed or sometimes they will ccu on it but that's the so the call to action is a little different right you really need to do some exploring within the organize and you're going to use your crm then because within one quote-unquote um uh it's called an account within salesforce.com within one account and that's going to be like the company name so the account is gonna be like walmart or the account is gonna be like um american airlines or the account is gonna be like kroger grocery stores and you're going to have different contacts again in salesforce that's what they call them different contacts within that account and so what you're going to do is you're going to need to map out within that account who all those different contacts are and who really has responsibility and there's a note section within is that if you're going to have they probably won't take your call so you have to understand and listen if you were in their shoes you wouldn't take the call either because you're coming you get every yahoo on the planet contacting you you don't know what's real you don't know what's not you can totally waste all of your time talking to all these people without ever getting your actual job done so the fact that they don't talk to you is to be expected so there's only a few ways to get around that one is through persistence two is through voicemails okay and then three is through this sort of detective method to get to the person who actually cares within the organization about what it is that you have to talk about so the yield might actually be like 200 people that you're contacting gets you down to ten five minute phone calls which gets you down to one 30 minute phone call so just know that you're gonna have to cast your net really wide and have the top of your funnel be really broad for these large groups because they have people calling on them constantly it's highly competitive to get their attention which brings me to the next point about large group prospecting and that is as we talked about in earlier podcasts there's sort of two types of of you know marketing can be broken down into two categories it can be inbound marketing and outbound marketing and everything that we've talked about so far in regards to marketing has been outbound marketing based marketing now for the large group inbound marketing is actually effective to a certain extent i would say in the small market and mid market inbound marketing is not as effective and inbound marketing only works and inbound marketing is another way of saying content marketing it's basically another way of saying creating content that is it that is not sales it is of educational value to whoever is seeking that value and it does not involve any sales at all you do not sell and it involves blogs it involves videos it involves podcasts but it does not sell at all it is strictly educational and had a you know your company should have a blog your you know you even as an individual sales person could have a blog where you do not sell all you do is create valuable educational content for the end user and so i wrote a blog every week for 10 years so 52 weeks a year times 10 years i wrote 520 blog posts almost without fail i probably did 50 a year there's probably a couple of weeks where and i would post a re-run during a holiday week or what have you so that blog helps for a number of reasons one is because they the people who are doing inbound marketing uh you're going to basically be found not by interruption but by search so so people are gonna and so it's really through seo so this is where you're going to want to do at some degree of seo search engine optimization for your blog and it's not hard there's a gazillion videos on youtube about it but the key to seo is not so much the key words it's that the content is valuable and it's frequent so i wrote my blog weekly and that was frankly on the low end many content providers say that you should actually be creating content daily some content creators say you should be creating multiple pieces of content a day and or at least multiple times a week so if you want to be found you need to create a lot of content and you need to create a lot of valuable content so what is it that you know that a lot of other people don't know that they would find helpful and i guarantee you there are gobs of things that you know that people in hr employee benefits yada yada brokers benefit consultants tons of things that you don't know that they don't know that you know and if you don't know those things yourselves then you start interviewing people right you know you start having a you know a q a um you interview somebody on a podcast there's many folks that go about that method of bringing expertise and value to people by interviewing subject matter experts okay so the um the inbound marketing let me tell you a story we had a 14 000 employee company in the midwest that we landed as a client it was worth over half a million well over half a million dollars a year in revenue that they contacted us because of the blog and we would have never they weren't even on our prospecting radar like they should have been like i should have been blowing out these people and these people went after us because they were like look this content on this blog is like exactly i have talked with i've had initial calls and we have had sales with very large organizations in america because they contacted us from the content that we did on our blog and we also now we also did monthly educational webinars okay and for the blog and for the webinars you're also going to want to send this out um to all of your existing clients and you're also going to want to send it to out to all of your existing relationships with your brokers and consultants and basically everybody knows so you create like a newsletter you're like hey here's my weekly blog and you're going to email it out to them and you're just going to email them like a link to your blog okay and likewise for our monthly educational webinars we would email out invitations to all our existing clients and all our existing brokerage consultants and prospective brokers and consultants bespoke prospective folks and we would get like 200 people a month on our webinars and we would have we wouldn't even be able to get we would be prospecting with brokers and consultants and with large employers and we would not be able to get any response from our prospecting but they would get on our webinars and and this takes it takes time and so that 14 000 employee company in the midwest had been reading our blog for over a year before they reached out so this is not a quick thing i would say that in general the sales cycle for the large group large group large market is over a year oftentimes it's multi-year but you gotta get started somewhere if you wanna close a large group sale in two years you gotta get started now you can't get started in two years but when you're doing your sales projections don't expect those guys to close and we'll talk about seasonality and employee benefits in the next um episode of the uh podcast but it is very long sales cycles for the for the large group and you want to use inbound and outbound lead generation or marketing or whatever you want and marketing in business to business is essentially lead generation that's all that's that's the sole purpose of marketing is to generate leads for the sales team okay so again similar to aaron ross we separated out um prospecting outbound prospecting to large group from uh sales for large groups so we still had the prospecting team do the um do the prospecting okay and they would do they would keep track of the emails and they would leave the voicemails and for the now for the five minute phone call for the large group we would go straight to the subject matter expert to the smee which would either be me or it would be one of the sales people or would be one of our people from operations but five i mean five minutes with one of these large group contacts is like gold again it it's going to take you potentially 200 um people that you're out reaching to just to get 10 of those calls so those calls are super value super valuable and the types of companies that will actually take your prospecting calls and want to talk to you are not necessarily even in interested in buying from you okay this is super early in the quote unquote dating process they're not even interested in buying you what they're interest what they have is a problem or a perceived problem and frankly they just want to learn more about it they're like look i got this problem and oftentimes it's a problem that has been brought to them because what causes problems within organizations is oftentimes people don't oftentimes proactively identify the problems it's because somebody else typically their boss has identified the problem and they've made it their problem so it's typically it's embarrassment it's seniority it's peer pressure it's all these things and and that is from by the way this is not an eric bricker theory here that is from the book hope is not a strategy from an incredibly senior dun and bradstreet uh corporate sales person who is incredibly successful and it's really which are what you're probing for with that prospecting is the pain of embarrassment and pers and potentially being fired or looking bad or not getting a promotion because that's going to ignite the fire underneath them to actually want to talk to you okay so if somebody they're not bored okay they're not not they're not not busy okay they are they are busy they are not bored they got a lot going on so just the fact they get on the phone with you for five minutes means they've got some sort of problem okay now it also means too that they are an or likely an early adopter so not everybody that has a problem is an early adopter but the people that go right then this gets to we'll talk about this in another episode too this goes through the the jeffrey moore technology adoption life cycle of early adopters pragmatists conservatives and skeptics in terms of sort of the way that people adopt new disruptive solutions and so the people that will take your five-minute call typically fall into the early adopter and the pragmatist category and there's at least twice as many pragmatists for every one early adopter and you can tell the difference between a pragmatist and an early adopter is because a pragmatist has a problem but is not super excited about solving it like they'll solve it because you know for cya or because they have to or because of peer pressure and they see other people in other organizations solving this problem but it's really the early adopters that really see the problem and are actually excited to solve it for a number of reasons i we worked with one highly successful hr executive who is an hr executive at a incredibly multi-tens of thousands of employee company and we worked with her at several companies before and she was an early adopter because she was really a go-getter and she wanted to work her way up the corporate ladder and so she knew to work her way up the corporate ladder that she had to have these wins that she wanted to be a problem solver and she wanted to go into these organizations and she and you know whether it was a turnaround or whatever but she wasn't looking to hide and just not get fired she was looking to to make a splash and really make some improvements and gain notoriety and recognition within that organization so that she could then springboard that to another job and another organization that was even higher and she totally successfully executed that over like 10 years like i saw her do this to the point now like i said she is incredibly successful and she was an early adopter like i don't think she you know drove a tesla in 2012 like i don't necessarily think she is just like into like cool technology but she was an early adopter because she she was highly ambitious and saw adopting new solutions as a way for her to achieve her ambition okay different people are early adopters or other reasons we had another person who was an early adopter because she just loved benefits i mean she literally said that at the first in-person meeting that i had with her she's like she'd been working in benefits for like 35 years it was unreal and she's like listen i love benefits i love it and oftentimes you can find these people too because they're on like the boards of the local business group on health etc etc they do they speak they're national speakers so those early adopters now the problem is is that the early adopters are a lot of times they are even more popular like i said because these people they do they do national speaking or local speaking or they're on the boards of directors of this business group on health and so every company every vendor and their brother is trying to get in front of these people so you think it's hard to get in front of a of a corporate hr benefits person it's even harder to get in front of these um you know quote unquote early adopter type folks so you're gonna the what i was trying to get to is that when you have these five minute phone calls you're not gonna have the prospecting team do the five minute phone call you're gonna have the prospecting team contact the smee and you're gonna be like hey smee and you're going to have to have this relationship up front or this expectation up front set that hey smee i've got a call and you know you the prospector and the company are going to have to pick the time next tuesday at 8 am and you're going to call up this me and be like smee i gotta have you on tuesday at eight and again you have to have the relationship with the smes boss to be such that that's me is gonna drop whatever else they're doing to make being on that call with you because the company is gonna be totally turned off if they don't have a high degree of expertise immediately on the phone with them okay so that is another difference in terms of how you're going to be um cultivating these leads that is different from large group than from small group and mid market okay so you get to smee on the five minute phone call and again you're going to have the call to action be i want to have a 30 you know the next step is to do a 30 minute you know more of a deep dive and you can even say you know at that point a lot of companies like to bring it you know because oftentimes the five minute phone calls just could be with one person and it's good to say hey look a lot of times for that 30 minute call a lot of times people with you know want to invite uh their colleagues within the organization sometimes it's one other person sometimes it's a couple other people sometimes they even want to uh bring their broker or consultant in on that phone calls well i'll you know say i'll leave it up to you whatever you want to do because some sometimes the employer is very hands off with their broker and consultant and it's really the employer that's driving the ship and they're driving the bus and other times they actually like to bring in their consultant early because they they really do have the consultant really does have a lot more sway there's listen there's a lot of very large organizations where the consultant has been the consultant with the hr department longer than any employee in the hr department there are many companies where that benefits consultant like has a badge for the company they can just swipe in and get through security and they've been with that company consulting with them for like 10 years and the most senior executive in hr has only been there for like four that totally happens and so but but you don't know when that happens so you don't want to overstep your bounds they look a lot of times they're going to want to bring uh you know a couple of colleagues on the phone maybe you want to bring your consultant i'll leave that up to you and then you're going to have that 30-minute phone call again on that 30-minute call you're going to have the smee and your sales person so because they have a larger more complex buying team at the employer then you and as far as selling goes are going to need to have a more complex team on your side as well and by more complex i mean it could be a small i mean a compass we had like the smee and the sales person it was a team of two and then as we went further along in the sales process we would bring in the account management folks so that they were part of that so that it wasn't just like oh we're hey we're it's sold now here are these brand new people that you've never met before so we would incorporate those account management people on some of the later uh sales calls as well and of course the sales people would stay on the implementation calls as well too to make sure that you know it wasn't just like a handoff but it was a transition over oftentimes multiple months okay so the and the reason that you need the sales person in addition to the smee and the relationship between the salesperson and the smee they're um and this is just how we did not everybody has to do it this way is that look especially in the beginning the smee being the subject matter expert is still gonna do the majority of the talking like they're going to do the entire 30-minute presentation they might do subsequent presentations and what the what the um what the salesperson needs to do is they need to ensure the follow-up between each of those calls and each of those meetings because the calls in the subsequent calls and meetings don't happen unless the salesperson is constantly pushing on that and the smee is not it's not their job to do that that's the sales person's job to do that okay what else is the salesperson doing there are probably you know during that maybe during the five minute call but definitely during that 30 minute call there might be specific needs that come up related to the company that you're going to want to corral additional smees it might be a technology smee within your company or it might be a a lot of times and this is where our account management team was super helpful is because it was the account management team that was really the employee engagement experts because they were in charge of getting utilization of the program after the program was in place so they would have communication challenges within their employer so we would bring the account management people and we had an employee engagement playbook and we had case studies of employee engagement about how different employee engagement strategies worked in different types of employers and that was actually incredibly helpful during the sales process especially during objection handling when their objection would be like oh we can't communicate to our employees for xyz reason and we would bring in the account management speeds not to talk about things in theory but to talk about actual case examples of how we'd use various communication strategies to reach you know disparate types of employee populations and it's the it's the job of the salesperson to internally make that happen within your organization to get the right people sort of on the right calls and at the right meetings at the same time that initial sme that's not their job to do that so sort of the quarterback of the sales process of the quote-unquote sales team for the large group sales is the sales person so at that point the prospector's probably not involved because they just got the init because it's a ton of work for the end for the to just to get the initial smee on that five minute phone call like that is a ton of work and they should be totally we had variable compensation and we would pay them based upon the number of five-minute phone calls that they could get set up and they would do the five-minute phone calls for small and mid-market but yeah but even if they had this sme on the five-minute phone call for the large group we'd still pay him for it it was totally valuable okay so that gets us to the 30-minute meeting and i have not described the 30-minute meeting in detail but you're still gonna have that slide deck that you used for small and mid-market okay i would argue that you can use the same slide deck for small mid market and you're gonna do some tweaks to that slide deck for the large market i don't think you need to have a completely different set slide deck between the small mid-roof slide deck and the large group slide deck but i do think the slide deck and the talk track needs to be somewhat different okay what's a specific example of that okay it's important to like we talked about this in previous uh podcast it's important to incorporate stories in your uh 30 minute pitch or presentation okay those stories for large group need to be large group stories if you tell a story about a group with 75 employees to a company that has 15 000 then that story listen that story could be completely appropriate and accurate for that 15 000 employee company but oftentimes people are just looking for reasons to say no and just just the fact that your case study or your example was for a 75 employee company and they're 15 000 then they'll say yeah but listen we're a 15 000 company you don't know us right that's one of the classic things that large employers say is literally every single one of them that i've ever talked to says were special were different were unique yes but they're not us we do things differently here and listen a lot of times they do not always a lot of times they think they do things differently but in fact they really don't but you need to be able and so you know when you talk about whether it's existing clients for references or you talk about industries or you talk about like i said examples those need to be geared towards and then also if you're let's say you're talking about employee communication the way that you have an employee communication strategy for a small company versus a mid-market company versus a large employer also totally different you would never use a small group communication strategy with a large employer so that smoking communication strategy that maybe you used in your small group slide deck mid-market slide deck you are not going to use that let me give you an example in-person open enrollment meetings very large employers do it almost exclusively online maybe they do some webinars maybe they'll do a handful of in-person benefit meetings just for executives but do not talk about in-person open enrollment meetings for these very large companies they're just going to be like what are you talking about we have 75 000 employees literally in all 50 states there is no way we do in person employee benefit meetings whereas for a small medium-sized group if you don't have some way of addressing the in-person employee benefit means they're like look that's the central part of how we discuss our benefits at our company it's part of our culture so with that i will pause around large group prospecting in sales and thank you so much for giving me the most important thing that you have which is your time and attention and again this is dr eric bricker with a healthcare z thank you much so thank you so much for listening to the how to sell in healthcare podcast