David 0:00

Does RFP actually stand for royal pain? Or can we make things better? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Announcer 0:13

Change either paralyzes or energizes. The choice is yours. You're listening to the Shift Shapers podcast. You're about to learn firsthand from businesses and entrepreneurs who have successfully shaped the shifts in their industries. Get ready to become the change you want to see. This episode is brought to you by Shift Shaper Strategies. In sales, if you confuse, you lose. Clarify your message so you win more clients, crush your sales goals, and build your practice. Learn more at ShiftShaper Strategies.com. And now, here's your host, Story Brand Certified Guide and Chief Transformation Strategist at Shift Shaper Strategies, David Saltzman.

David 1:04

And to answer that question, we've invited Spencer Smith, who is not only SVP of sales at Plansight, he's also a fellow podcaster. He's the host of a really great podcast called Self-Funded with Spencer, which is, you know, very clever. So welcome.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Well, thank you having me, man. And I really appreciate the joke to kick off the show. You caught me off guard, which I love it, man. That's great. And to answer your question, that is exactly what RFP means, 100%.

David 1:29

Yeah, you know, my opinion about RFPs for a long time, and I've been at this a long time, as you know, is that there's two kinds of people. There are people who hate them and people who haven't had to fill one out yet.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Exactly. They're horrendous. And I know we'll get into the plant site stuff later, but absolutely RFPs suck, and I've been very adamant about saying it in that fashion because they do, and everybody understands it, and it's why PlantSite exists.

David 1:50

Well, yeah, but I was going to say, at least you guys are trying to do something to unsuck it, and we'll talk about that in a minute or two. But before we get into the whole RFP thing, there's been, as you know, a tremendous resurgence of interest in self-funded plans by advisors who understand them and know a lot about them, by advisors who don't really know a lot and maybe need some hand holding and whatnot. What kind of topics are you covering recently? What are you hearing on your podcast that might be of interest to my folks?

SPEAKER_02 2:15

Well, I get this really fortunate position, David, where I get to have people effectively come to me and say, hey, have you heard about this? Or they'll refer so-and-so to me to talk about something they're doing. So I get to kind of be apprised of some really cool solutions that are out there. So not just really insurance-based solutions, but a lot of kind of bolt-on point services or additive enhanced benefits that aren't your typical nuts and bolts, medical dental vision, things like that. I had a gentleman on, the founder of an organization recently called Cariloop. And what they do is provide support for the actual caregivers. So let's say, you know, God forbid, wife is diagnosed with a, you know, sort of degenerative disease or terminal illness, and you as David are going, well, what do I do now? I'm supposed to be taking care of her while I'm in the home. Cariloop does something really cool where they actually have coaches that provide support for the caregiver themselves. So you, as David, need somebody to talk to and have a question. How do I get through medical billing insurance, et cetera? And they provide support for the actual caregiver and a family member that has found themselves in that position unexpectedly. So stuff like that. There's just really cool that there's all these great solutions out there. And sometimes it's hard to vet and find them or whether or not they're even useful. And so I get referrals from people I respect of other businesses that are, you know, clearly they're doing something interesting. And so they make for great conversations on the show. So stuff like that I really lean into because I find it interesting. And it's really good to know just what's out there. And I've been fortunate in my position to be able to find that stuff out.

David 3:43

And for folks who want to listen to your podcast, they can find it any place they find their they download their podcasts. I presume you're on all the major platforms.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

Yes, sir. Yeah. I use Anchor for distribution, but I I am also on YouTube, Spotify, of course, Apple Podcasts seem to be the most popular platform, at least for my listener base. But yes, all the typical places you find the podcast, I'm there.

David 4:02

Cool. Enough shameless promotion. Let's talk about RFPs.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

I'm not ashamed.

David 4:06

So but I am. You know, somebody once told me you should never be ashamed of who you are because I'm not ashamed of who you are. So, you know, we're having too much fun here.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

We are, yeah.

David 4:15

What are the major challenges with RFPs, you know, from your perspective, as somebody who's working to try to make it a less onerous and more equitable process?

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Sure. Well, I've been on the other side of an RFP. So let me give you my perspective on the person that was managing them, then I'll obviously get into what we do at Plansite. The process itself is probably a decades-old process. Let's call it 20, 25 years, where we're doing the same three or four things email, PDF transcription, Excel, and then using Excel and trying to repurpose it as a client-facing presentation, which it was never designed to do. So I've done that. I know the things like, oh, whenever I copy and paste a logo from one tab to the other, it's now blurry, and I now have to reformat it because the scaling is different. Or just errors, right? So plugging in a formula, forgetting an absolute reference, copying, pasting, and next thing you know, 25 other formulas are now incorrect. So things like that. That is what the headaches, the pain points that every single agency we talk to are dealing with. It is the data entry, it's mundane and it's very error prone. So PlanSight entered PlanSite about four and a half years ago into the market. Our co-founders, both brokers themselves, both recognized that problem and decided why don't we go all in? Because if it's a problem for us and our individual agencies, then clearly it's a problem broadly for the market. And so they built software to manage that whole workflow more efficiently, more automation, and hopefully we think a little more fun to do it than your typical way.

David 5:42

How do you get past the fact that, and I'm just going to take a guess from my 40 years of experience, that at least half of the RFPs that you might see as a broker are already baked. They're written with a particular broker in mind, or a particular brokerage in mind, or a particular carrier in mind. How do you get past that? How do you bring different people to the table and maybe find a better mousetrap when you're all when you're going through the RFP process?

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Well, so I say one point of clarity I do need to make, and I apologize if I didn't do that correctly. We're not really a tool for brokers to go solicit new prospects. We're the tool for brokers to manage current clients or a prospect that they have that they want to market their insurance lines externally to the carrier and vendor space. So we're really not a tool that a broker would use to try to win new business with other clients. So I just want to draw that line of distinction right there. So I don't know, does that alter the question, Dave, or I want to make sure that I I was clear there? A little bit. A little bit.

David 6:39

But you know, still, you know, uh if you're looking at an RFP, somebody wrote it. Yes, correct. And it's entirely possible that the person who wrote it has a particular bias. You know, maybe maybe I've got an existing client, but they've got a new HR manager, or they've got a new CFO, and they've got a favorite broker or favorite plan or whatnot elsewhere. I mean, I think as I understand it, part of what Plan Site's trying to do is bring kind of an equanimity to it, make it easy to get numbers in and compare them. Talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

David 7:09

No matter how you do it, that's really the challenge, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:11

It is, it is. And so when we position ourselves, we position ourselves as sort of an unbiased third-party platform. We're the tool to make the transactional experience better, but PlantSite doesn't put any undue influence into the outcome. We don't have special incentives where we're recommending one carrier over another based on some bonus program that exists. We are completely agnostic and neutral into the outcome, with the entire intent, like you said, to be able to solicit more valuable bids in, make sense of them, and then look at them in a comparable way that is unbiased, that is agnostic. So may the best man or woman or best carrier or vendor win based on the actual substance of their proposal, their ability to position it, obviously the influence they have with their carrier reps and things like that. But the end of the day, we're removing some of the bias that typically exists, like you said, on the front end of that distribution and of the selection process by just laying everything out in a way where everyone gets a voice and everybody gets an opportunity to position themselves without that unnecessary influence on the front end.

David 8:18

What are some of the other problems that you're that you're solving? Then we'll get into kind of how the process works. But I mean, I know one of the things that I think there's a lack of is benchmarking. I know that's something that you guys play around with and you have as part of your platform. How does that play into it?

SPEAKER_02 8:31

Well, and one of the things, one of the bigger problems and one of the benefits I think that our carriers like the most is that there is a de-identified period of time where I get to actually see competitive bids. So there's no auction environment, there's no shot clock where people feel like, oh, I'm just being commoditized to be the cheapest price. But I am getting objective underwriting information on every single RFP. So as an ex-carrier rep myself, I used to have to hound my broker partners to go, hey, how do I look on this one? Do I think I have a shot? And it's a really, I want to call it a dumb conversation, but not a productive use of time for anybody. And if you are a broker that's fielding hundreds of these calls a week, you're probably ignoring them. So what we do is step forward in the sales process, you know, and step two or step three is where we pick it up because our reps know where they stand. They share that information with their underwriters. Now I get to make a determination is this one I think I can win, or should I move on? Am I a way out in left field and now I know it and I'm not even going to waste my time? That really helps those carriers get valuable information to do their job.

David 9:34

You're talking about a whole let's let's let's kind of back up a tiny bit. You're talking about a whole different kind of a beast than most people are used to when they think RFP. So I'm a broker, I've got client ABC, and they want to go to market. Am I normally working with a written RFP as I would as I would be if I were trying to win a new piece of business? And does that get input into your system? What's what's the process like?

SPEAKER_02 9:59

Sure. Well, so most brokers today in-house have some sort of whether it's formal or informal, a checklist of items that need to be included. Check these things off before I send an RFP out. It's just like a training structure. We've been pretty obsessive about going and do our due diligence in the market to say, what do you need? What do most brokers include? Then we get to sit in the middle. So we get to go to the carrier world and say, what do you need? What can we give you so that when you receive an RFP, it's cleaner? Everything you need is there, fewer questions, so you can start your evaluation process quicker. So what we do is formalize that front end. It's I kind of call it like triage. Here are the items if you want to go to market for medical insurance. These are the seven items that Plansite requires. These are attachments that need to be included. It's not prohibitive in nature where it's too restrictive and RFPs never go out, but we're trying to clean the process up. Whereas today, if I'm uh a broker and I want to send an RFP out to Guardian, I can send them an email and a census and say, give me a quote. And they're gonna go, well, give us these seven other things. And you go back and forth over the course of weeks, it gets pended, you know, because that carrier is like, well, they don't have what we need, let's just set it aside. And so it becomes a very inefficient process. And so what we do is we make that more organized, more consistent, so that we can promise our carriers when they receive it on their desk, this RFP is now more ready to go than your typical RFP would be.

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David 12:23

How do you handle regional variations? Is this something that can be used all across the country and with any carrier or any set of carriers, or do you only have certain carriers that work with the software?

SPEAKER_02 12:32

Well, so we're not very proactive, and I mean that in the very certain way. We don't just go to market and say every carrier sign up and wait for an RFP. We wait where, oh, now we're in this particular state or this particular region, and here are the regional carriers in that region. Now we have a real use case to motivate them to join. And so we work with every individual broker partner that we sign up to say, all right, give us your list of carriers. Here's ours. We benchmark those against each other. Oh, here's the two that you need that we don't have. Now let us uh go contract with them based on, you know, they'll they'll give us a referral or a warm introduction, but we pick up that sales process from there. And so we do that intentionally because I don't want 500 carriers on our platform and 20 are receiving RFPs every single day. Nor do we want to dilute the marketplace so much where you're just overwhelmed with selection and those individual carriers feel like they're being diluted because they're just a number rather than maybe a valuable preferred partner of those brokers.

David 13:30

When you teach brokers how to use the system, do you give them language that they can use with clients so that it becomes a differentiator for their agency to say, look, you know, we don't just pop this out on a random fashion. We've got this process and blah, blah. How do they describe what that process is to their clients prior to going out to market?

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Well, prior to going out to market, I mean, it's going to be it's not going to be too dissimilar to what their collection process is today. I think we add a lot of intelligence to the point of the client deliverable where they see the results of the RP. That's where I really think we assist our broker partners especially in making them look good. It's not just the aesthetics, it's not just the layout, it's really pretty when they print it out. But we actually add language to like contract provisions or you know, things like standardizing each benefit type of what an industry standard summary of that benefit should be. I mean, David, if you've you've got some experience in this world, every individual office within a brokerage might select different things that should be on a spreadsheet. And most of them distill it down into something that is too succinct, it is missing key elements. We you kind of enforce a requirement of these are the key elements to make a decision on stop loss or short-term disability. This is what the market has said is important. And so every RFP that goes through us, we have a control of what the input looks like, and then the output itself also has guardrails to ensure that those things are there. So we add even like some definitions inside the platform that help explain provisions that they may not be aware of. It's just trying to make them better at recommenders of business because they have all the things that they need front and center rather than trying to find it on page seven of a PDF proposal.

David 15:06

So if I'm back to looking for coverage for ABC company and maybe some ancillary benefits as well, as a broker, do I just log on to the platform, make those selections, and then push the G O button and you guys go do your thing?

SPEAKER_02 15:18

Well, there's a little more of the front end kind of setup. We want to make sure that we obviously train them, um, right? It's a new piece of software for them. So we usually take anywhere from two to four training sessions just to kind of establish the what and the how, get the right folks in there, get their documents set up. If we can import things from like a benefit point, an agency management tool, we'll extract some of their client data out there and populate it into ours to make it the setup easier. But part of our training is also using real-world use cases. We would like for the training to actually be useful. So oftentimes we'll say, all right, well, what's an upcoming RFP that you think fits? Let's use this 11.1 RFP to go to market for short-term and long-term disability so that you get a test run, but you also get one that actually, you know, we we presume it's gonna go well, which we we hope it does, and it does. But we say, all right, well, if if we do this, it might as well have a positive outcome for you in the real world to impact a client. So we're very intentional at that implementation process to make sure we, you know, make sure their time is valuable and that if they're putting this effort to adopt a new piece of software, then we're there supporting them every step of the way as well.

David 16:23

So let's talk about the deliverable. Once the process is done, as a broker for ABC Company, what do I get back? What does that look like? How extensive is it? How presentation ready is it? All of that kind of happy stuff that a broker might want to know.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

I would say that's one of the things that do make us stand out, David. If I'm ever asked what differentiates us from some of our competitors, that end client deliverable is absolutely first class. We built our own presentation software building tool that effectively bypasses Excel altogether. And if again, if you know what Excel is like, you you know it's infinitely malleable and you can do everything you can envision, but it introduces a host of problems into the equation as well. So with those guardrails, that allows us to we control the way quotes come in, we control the way we spit them out. We bypass Excel so you don't have to worry about blurry logos and all the things I described before. They can still annotate the page, they can still make it pretty. But the really cool thing, David, I think is we actually help them port in their branding guidelines, their color palettes, their hex codes, their logo. So everywhere these things show up, they're in the right place, they're in exactly where they're expected to be. That you could blow this thing up to three, 400%. It's still going to be high resolution. So the quality of that finished product when they're most vulnerable sitting in front of their client is absolutely of the highest caliber. And so that's where I think we often pick up business. If I'm in a competitive situation with one of our competitors and they see that deliverable, they go, well, I usually only get an export in Excel, and then I have to go copy the results into my own, and it kind of defeats the purpose. Plansight gives you that full, complete solution, and that's why I think we win more often than not.

David 18:00

Aaron Powell And in what kind of forms can I present that information that I get? I mean, most people these days are used to being online. It's starting to change a little bit. We're not back to the before times yet, but some people, frankly, what I'm hearing from our folks is some people, even though you could meet nose to nose, would much rather read meet electronically. It doesn't involve all the folder all and add an extra hour to the front and back of the meeting and all that kind of stuff. What are the different modes in which I can present this? Can I present it as hard copy? Can I present it online? Can I present it in a PowerPoint type format?

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Absolutely. So great point. All three of uh the typical formats that you can envision we utilize. But um, PDF is the simplest, right? This is designed to print a PDF. We started this whole thing pre-pandemic when the idea of meeting virtually with a client was nearly non-existent. And we put a heavy emphasis on that because we still think most brokers, even today, are seeking to print it out or hand it over electronically, like you said, David, for their client to ultimately print it out and mark it up. And if that's the case, it's fine. The third way, which is kind of my preferred way, and I hope we see more people shifting this way, is an actual in not in-person, but live presentation of the software over a Zoom. So our platform was designed where you can have your client logged in with you, you can share your screen and in real time model those contributions, set your claims projections, make your selection process with your client watching so that they're happy. And we also don't have to have two to three meetings to accomplish the same things. Because if I go to a meeting today and I present my findings and my client says, Yep, I like those, but I need you now to model the contributions. I'll go, okay, well, in two weeks, I'll come back, we'll do a bunch of modeling, and then we'll show you the findings. Well, what if they're unhappy with that second meeting? Now I got to go back to the drawing again. We can do those all things, all those things real time. And the more comfortable our partners get in the system, the more comfortable they are in front of their clients doing it. And it just saves everybody time if we go that path.

David 19:54

That's awesome. That's a big win because I I've been in all of those meetings, and sometimes you end up with five or six meetings to get where you want to go. And clients' requests change as the numbers start changing. So you'll make a change they asked for, and they'll go, Whoa, that's gonna happen? Well, let's do this instead. And you're back and forth and back and forth. We've got about a minute, two minutes left. What do you see in the future? What's coming down the road, both for you guys and just in general, in terms of this ability to be more proactive in quoting and doing it more electronically?

SPEAKER_02 20:25

I think the biggest thing is that really the change or the shift that this industry is going through right now, where insurance companies are embracing tech. Insure tech is the space that we operate in or that category. Things like an API. So an API is simply a set of instructions where one piece of software talks to another in case any of the listeners aren't aware of that. And so we we view ourselves not as a quoting tool solely, but a hub for information. Like I mentioned benefit point earlier. We have employee navigator integration. We just released an API yesterday with a carrier that quotes level funded business right out of the gate with underwritten quotes, just using a census, and it's instantaneous. We view ourselves as the way that we collect and normalize data in, then when then we'll disseminate that data to every other bin admin system or every other agency management system, you name it. Redundant information is being keyed into like six different places and it's all the same information, and somebody has to manually type from one screen to another. Plant site could be that intermediary that collects it all and sends it everywhere else and eliminates all that data entry. And I truly think that's what the future of this type of software is going to be.

David 21:29

So it's efficiency and effectiveness.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Absolutely. A hundred thousand percent.

David 21:34

Well, and that is a great place to end our conversation today. Spencer Smith, Senior Vice President of Sales at Plant Site, and the host of Cell Funding with Spencer. Check it out. It's a great podcast. It's not as good as ours, but it's a great podcast.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Agree. You're a probate.

David 21:50

We peacefully coexist and we're friends.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

We do it's all good. Absolutely. Well, really appreciate you having me, man. This has been an absolute pleasure.

David 21:56

Spencer, thanks so much. Be well, my friend.

Announcer 21:59

The Shift Shapers Podcast is a production of Shift Shaper Strategies and may not be reproduced or quoted in whole or in part without our express written permission. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.