In today’s highly competitive Benefits market, every agency wants to be the pack's leader. But with everyone having access to the same carriers and rates, how can you elevate your role as a trusted advisor and build your brand? Let’s discuss effective strategies for setting your agency apart, enabling you to provide more value to your clients and simplify processes for your staff.

Solidify Your Role as Trusted Advisor

As a Benefits broker, you strongly influence what your prospects and customers buy and why. With this level of authority, you may wonder why becoming a trusted advisor is necessary. Firstly, trust builds confidence and allows you to form long-term relationships. Secondly, it brings peace of mind to buyers who may be reluctant to change. Most importantly, you will lead the pack because very few brokers operate at the level of trusted advisors.

Becoming a trusted advisor doesn’t happen by accident. It requires investing time and effort in understanding employers' needs and taking proactive steps to meet them. Utilizing solutions like Applied Benefits Designer™ will help you engage prospects and customers face-to-face with insightful presentations that help them reach a consensus quickly, avoid additional meetings, show the value of your consultation and solidify your role as a trusted advisor.

Improve Staff Productivity and Remove Friction From Customer Experience

Meet the dynamic duo of healthcare plan modeling. Applied Benefits Designer's tight integration with Applied Epic® allows you to manage your business across all roles and locations, for both P&C and Benefits books of business, via a single view of the customer. Applied Epic and Applied Benefits Designer also integrate with Employee Navigator to fully digitize quote-to-enroll solutions in the Benefits market, making it the first integration between an agency management system and a Benefits administration system in the industry.

With this single source of truth perspective, you get a reliable analysis of your Benefits business with plan details captured in one connected system that integrates data across all stages of the plan lifecycle. This saves time by entering data once, reduces the potential for manual errors resulting from re-keying data, and eliminates the need to rely on locally saved spreadsheets and paper documents.

Start Creating Insightful, Engaging Presentations

An insightful, engaging presentation will always make a more memorable impression on your audience. Attractive proposals and presentations help prospects and customers learn more about your product or service and why you desire to be their trusted advisor.

Interactivity also helps them remember your presentation and how your solutions meet their needs. By steering clear of monotonous spreadsheets and lackluster presentations, you’ll give prospects and customers something to talk about long after your presentation ends.

With Applied Benefits Designer, the pack leader gap only gets wider. Create professional, agency-branded proposals in minutes, and with its interactive presentations, you can seamlessly move from general overviews to detailed plan comparisons with just a few clicks. It also allows you to store medical, Rx and ancillary plans in one database, giving you instant access to carrier plans. Best of all, it simplifies self-funding discussions by offering real-time side-by-side comparisons.

Disrupt the Traditional Renewal Experience

Download our eBook, Budget-Based Benefits: A New Approach to Renewal and discover how adopting a budget-based Benefits planning approach revolutionizes the traditional renewal experience, enabling brokers and employers to begin with a budget and find a plan that aligns with their financial framework.