Using health intelligence to win bigger deals

As a benefits consultant, you already use business intelligence tools to help your business run more efficiently. You also use intelligent products like Google Maps in your personal life to send you in the right direction on your next road trip. So why aren’t you using intelligence in your sales process?

It used to be that when crafting clients’ plans, advisors used data warehouses and off-the-shelf reporting solutions, but these approaches are no longer sufficient. To support their clients, sales teams need efficient tools to maximize their resources.

Consultants and brokers who leverage health intelligence to sell are winning larger groups than those who don’t. In fact, agencies using intelligent analytics during the sales process in 2021 grew their average group size from 133 to 505 enrolled employees. That’s a 280% increase.

Health intelligence is no longer simply a “nice to have” feature. You need to have it, and you need to use one that supports your business goals. It’s not the what; it’s the how. How consultants and brokers leverage health intelligence is what sets them apart from the competition. Data should drive every decision through the client life cycle. If you can’t diagnose the challenge, plan impactful interventions, measure the impact, and evaluate success with data, you’re just another person with a stagnant data warehouse.

So how can you use this approach to sell?

Diagnose

Benchmarking and high-cost claim reports are simple and standard, but how are you understanding which levers to pull? Typical data analytics platforms let you look into the past, yet they rarely tell you where you’re headed. This should be your first thought when developing a plan diagnosis. Here are a few sample questions — you can easily come up with many more.

• Do you know where there are cost-saving opportunities for low-value Rx?
• What are populations like those with diabetes, high blood pressure, or chronic conditions forecasted to cost you in the next 12 months?
• How will procedures deferred in the pandemic change future spending?

Questions like these will guide your clients throughout the sales process. Showing them how health intelligence empowers them to ask and answer their own questions is the key.

Plan

Planning is part of every employer and consultant’s process, but a failure to plan with relevant data is a plan to fail. Many consultants are using our predictive analytics to highlight how a potential buyer might use the data. While each employer will be different, these ideas serve as a great jumping-off point to help the buyer understand the value you can bring to employers as a consultant.

Using health intelligence to drive how you plan your sales strategy is the difference between plunging into unknown territory and having a road map. To get where you are going, it helps to know where that is.

Measure

It can be tempting to try to measure everything and to stand out by sending clients a blizzard of information. But, that can be counterproductive.

Raw data can be helpful, but to really stand out, you need to embrace sophisticated health intelligence that provides targeted information about exactly what you need to do to make the greatest impact. That’s especially true when you’re trying to help clients understand if their plans and programs are moving the needle the way they intended. Overwhelming them with information can be an easy way to make yourself seem smart, but the wise move is to provide exactly what they need — and only that.

Whether it’s cost, compliance, or utilization, providing specific business metrics for employers is the way to demonstrate that you’re not just selling a service, you’re a partner who can improve their business. Health intelligence helps clients save money and drives healthier employee outcomes. It means you can have conversations with clients that center on actionable insights in an easy-to-digest format. It also means you can proactively identify opportunities and help keep clients from making the wrong changes at the wrong times.

Evaluate

All the data in the world won’t help if it doesn’t drive action. That’s the difference between health analytics and health intelligence — analytics provides the data but not the interpretation. Health intelligence goes beyond the basics to give direction on what to do. Health intelligence allows organizations to do much more than simply uncover the opportunities that exist within a population by equipping them with the tools to change health outcomes.

Consultants who use data to drive decisions are more likely to be seen as trusted advisors, winning new business that way, rather than relying on “service” as a differentiator. Health intelligence empowers salespeople and their clients to decrease costs, mitigate risks, and avoid future high-cost services.

On the other side of the transaction, it also means you’ll be able to evaluate which sales strategies are working and which need improvement. It’s equally important for you to evaluate your sales strategy using data-driven insights. That way, you can find out where to commit additional resources and where to pull back.

Conclusion

Intelligent analytics differentiates successful sales approaches from ones that fall short. For benefits consultants, a health intelligence solution should be as important in the sales process as anything else. It’s good for all concerned, too. By helping empower employers during the pivotal moments in their benefits calendar, health intelligence can drive organizational decisions that save money and improve care.

Marcus Kammrath is a partner enablement manager at a health data analytics software company Springbuk.