There may be many Human Resources services your small and medium-sized business (SMB) clients would be interested in, but don’t currently have. Focus on ways to customize bundled services to cross-sell and upsell.
Key takeaways:
- As a broker, you’re an expert in building trust and identifying your SMB clients’ core needs and pain points.
- Emphasize the value of bundling employee benefits with other HR management services and how cost negotiations can deliver more cost savings.
- Focus on personalization and customization with each of your clients to identify related services they need.
As a broker, you’re always looking for new ways to grow your brokerage. By now, you know cross-selling and upselling are effective ways to increase your revenue, small and medium-sized business (SMB) customer lifetime value and commissions. When executed properly, these tried-and-true tactics also serve businesses with time and cost savings while increasing client satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
In this guide, we walk through recommended ways to cross-sell and upsell in the world of employee benefits.
Asking the Right Questions
When you know your clients well and already have strong relationships, you can better identify additional products and services that make sense to offer them based on their pain points and ongoing challenges.
What are your clients’ latest core HR objectives? How are they unique from other businesses?
Once you know that, it’s time to determine how you’ll bring these added employee benefits into the conversation. You can focus on how these additional benefits, services, or products meet your clients’ needs and stress the value it brings to their organization.
Common Core Business Needs
Employee benefits are everything within the human capital space. Employees today prioritize their benefits sometimes even over salary. Beyond work-life balance, they want to feel that their companies prioritize their well-being, financial goals and familial goals.
Core benefits for smaller businesses are health, dental and vision insurance, retirement savings options like 401(k)s and paid time off.
These areas each come with ancillary options you can bring to the negotiating table. For example, life insurance and disability insurance are becoming more in-demand. Employees look for companies to offer retirement contribution matching. Supplemental benefits like legal insurance, health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts are also becoming more common.
There are many options available to convince clients to reap the rewards of more employee benefits. Always focus on how the options you offer align with your client’s goals – customization is crucial.
Two tips for Cross-Selling Health Insurance
Health insurance remains the top employee benefit for your clients’ employees. Here are a few strategies that can help you cross-sell health insurance:
1. Use Customer Data to Identify Potential Opportunities
Gather and analyze data that tells you which employee benefits your clients are using the most. Identify gaps in usage and offerings where they could purchase additional services.
2. Bundle Related Products
Your clients lean on you for employee benefits, but they likely have other human resource needs. Talk to them about bundled packages that include a range of services, from HR management to HR tech to workplace management. They may also want support with retirement planning and workers’ compensation. Bundling can assist your clients in streamlining operations.
Two tips for Cross-Selling Health Insurance
Health insurance remains the top employee benefit for your clients’ employees. Here are a few strategies that can help you cross-sell health insurance:
1. Use Customer Data to Identify Potential Opportunities
Gather and analyze data that tells you which employee benefits your clients are using the most. Identify gaps in usage and offerings where they could purchase additional services.
2. Bundle Related Products
Your clients lean on you for employee benefits, but they likely have other human resource needs. Talk to them about bundled packages that include a range of services, from HR management to HR tech to workplace management. They may also want support with retirement planning and workers’ compensation. Bundling can assist your clients in streamlining operations.
Strategies for Upselling Medical Insurance
While cross-selling is offering related services, upselling is about upgrading them. Here are a few strategies to do this effectively with medical insurance:
1. Ask for Feedback
Identify which products and services will help your client solve a specific challenge they’re dealing with. For example, maybe their business has grown significantly in the last year, and they need a more premium employee benefits offering to keep up with employee growth.
2. Personalize and Customize
Similar to cross-selling, you can position your solutions as bundles, not just individual products. Relay exactly how upgraded bundles meet your clients’ core needs. This way, you can show them the value of upgrading their current services and investing in more premium, comprehensive coverages.
3. Identify Opportunities for Personalized Pricing and Discounts
Business clients love incentives. Part of your personalized approach can be negotiating a lower rate for packaged benefits that give clients a better deal. Lower rates can come from more complex negotiations around the prices of individual products and services.
Just make sure your pricing structure allows for flexibility while meeting vendor margins. Your commissions shouldn’t suffer to offer these discounts.
How Partnering with a PEO Can Help Brokers Drive Value
PEOs can be a pivotal partner in helping your clients level up their employee benefits. However, they bring a lot more to the table, including HR support, regulatory compliance and risk management, payroll administration, workers’ compensation and retirement planning solutions.
What’s more, PEOs will work with you to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Lean on your PEO to create customized packages while you keep focusing on the front end of the customer relationship.
Many brokers may hesitate to explore a PEO partnership for fear the PEO will take their clients. But that’s just not how it works – at least not at PrestigePEO. We’re committed to helping brokers establish stronger client relationships by meeting every HR need and providing holistic solutions.
And that includes cross-selling and upselling opportunities with employee benefits packages and other services.
The PrestigePEO Difference
PrestigePEO was created by brokers for brokers. We offer a range of HR solutions outside employee benefits, giving your clients the support they need to keep growing. In the process, you’ll see boosts in revenue and relationships with your SMB clients.
Our staff at PrestigePEO will work with you to create customized packages for them. It all comes with a competitive commission structure and unlimited earning potential.
Find out more by getting in touch with us today.
