Open enrollment: 3 tips to win new business before

Are you focused on new business growth at your agency? This slower season before open enrollment is a good time to revisit your pipeline and reevaluate your strategy for winning new clients. If you aren’t seeing the kind of business growth you would like, investing a few weeks of your summer to focus specifically on growth can produce good returns in terms of winning new clients both before Q4 and into 2019.

Related: 10 tips to ease the open-enrollment process

Here are three steps brokers can take now to improve sales, grow the pipeline and win new business before the fourth quarter.

Build a playbook

The first step to better sales is a better playbook. Develop a script that effectively communicates your value proposition and how you meet the needs of your clients. Isolate your high performers and standardize their “playbook” for booking and closing meetings with prospects.

With this tool in hand, improving the skills of your sales team becomes a matter of training. Engaging in regular practice with the script, including role-playing, will further improve the close rate at your agency.

Adopt a platform

Going online with benefits and HR software adds another layer to your competitive advantage. Providing a solution that addresses your clients’ pain points beyond benefits, including onboarding, applicant tracking and other components of the HR ecosystem, allows you to present yourself as a comprehensive advisor. The future of benefits advising will encompass a broader consulting element, so incorporating benefits, HR and technology into your value proposition will be a clear differentiator.

There is a particular opportunity around this now, as the majority of employers want to administer benefits and HR online, but are currently using paper-based processes. Solving this problem for prospects with a tech solution helps you win new business and create stickiness with these clients.

However, as more and more brokers go online with benefits software, this competitive differentiator will become less of a deal-winner, and more of a deal-qualifier. In other words, it will be something you have to have to get a seat at the table, but not necessarily enough to win the business.

By going online now, you can take advantage of these efficiency and value proposition gains to win and keep new business this year.

Focus on people

The slow summer months are a great time to really focus on networking before you are too busy in the fourth quarter.

One way to jumpstart this process is by taking a look at your LinkedIn connections. Consider who on this list or elsewhere in your community might benefit from another touch from your agency.

It’s easy to push tasks like these to the back burner when daily operations are so pressing, but investing time, and sometimes money, in networking can produce significant growth for your agency.

By focusing on the people in your circle of influence — in other words, the people and organizations in your market that would benefit from your advice — you can build a bigger pipeline, close more prospects, and see significant business growth before the fourth quarter.

Alex Tolbert is the author of “Online Benefits Technology: The Strategic Broker’s Guide” and leads BerniePortal, an all-in-one HR platform built for brokers by brokers. Before he started the BerniePortal, he worked primarily as a group health insurance broker.