No, this is not puff the magic dragon. This is the magic question you must ask and get an answer to on every first discovery meeting with the prospect.

{WARNING: this is a 30-min session} If you’re struggling with getting prospects into your sales funnel process, this will help you tremendously. Selling is an extremely difficult skill set to master. Especially in today’s world where attention spans, and time constraints have never been worse. If you’re open to some new ideas, I encourage you to li…

Mistake number three is not just something I did, but I think it’s something all people in selling do. Times have changed on how people communicate. And yet most people are still communicating like it was 1999.😂😁

The way buyers are buying today is much different than the way they did 3, 5 or 10 years ago.

Sales, business development, new client acquisition. For anybody responsible for bringing on new accounts in the employee benefit sector this podcast is for you. This will help prevent the number one mistake I made for years and once I corrected it, my results improved dramatically.

NEXT STEP. So you are about 20 minutes into your call and then you panic. Where do you go next? What do you say? Is it their choice or your choice? Use this technique and you will relieve stress and anxiety for you and also the other person. 👊🤟🔥

4 AREAS … OF PAIN. By pain I mean, what is the issue challenge or problem or annoyance that you will determine if it’s worth solving for the client or not. There are lots of problems and challenges with every employer group. Don’t get distracted by getting into the weeds. Focus on just 4 and your conversations will be easier to handle.…

ATNE (pronounced at-knee). Average total number of employees. Get familiar with this term because every single health insurance carrier will be asking you about it. Plus, it will allow you to have more meaningful conversations with prospects.

SIZE MATTERS. OK this is a cliché phrase that’s overused a lot. However, understanding a few basic definitions will become your best advantage when talking with others, as you will educate them and become a subject matter expert very quickly. FTE. ALE. Small Group. Mid Market. Large Group.

COMPETITION. This is your biggest competition. Failing to understand this before each and every interaction is in my opinion the number one reason why deals are lost during the first appointment.

PEPY (pronounced pep-eee). Per employee per year. When your doctor takes your blood pressure at the beginning of your visit, it tells them key things about your health. The same is true with PEPY. This tells you as the advisor some key facts about what’s going on right at the beginning.

ADMINISTRATION. This is the least sexy part of the plan 😄🤣. In terms of money spent towards the plan cost. This is one of the lowest amounts accounting for only 4 to 7% of total cost. BUT … having the right administrator of the plan is one of the most important parts of the whole thing.

$4,300,000,000,000 (TRILLION). This is how much the entire US healthcare ecosystem spends every year. These are the hospitals, the pharmacies, manufactures insurance brokers doctors PBM’s everything. Understanding this dynamic will help you position … “Winter is Coming”

Pharmacy / RX Costs. If you are going to do a deep dive on any component of the health plan, this is where you should spend your time. The amount of money spent on prescription drugs is anywhere from 30% to 50% or higher up total cost.

Top High Cost Claims. A statistic you will repeat over and over is that 80% of the total cost of any health insurance plan is directly or indirectly related to CLAIMS. If that’s the case, don’t you wanna know what the top areas are? So you can discuss insights strategies and ideas on how to reduce them?…

5 Components of a Health Plan. This took me years to become aware of or even fully understand why I needed to know about it. Can you name the five major components of your car ? You probably can and we’re talking about a $50,000 purchase. If you ask a CFO to name the five components of something they spend $2 million on don’t you think they should …

Transition to Discovery. This is how you transition into the discovery phase of the call. How this goes determines whether it feels like in an interrogation or a conversation. Let’s just say it should feel like the conversation.👍🔥👊

Your 🧰 🛠️ tools in your toolbox. These are your solutions. These are all of the cool things we learn about that we want to immediately share with the prospect to show them how smart we are. 🤣 what I’ve learned is they don’t care. Yet. Sometimes the order of things is important.

The NEXT 2 Minutes. 😳 This IS THE MOST important two minutes of your entire pitch.

10 SECONDS. The first 10 seconds out of your mouth sets the tone for the entire conversation.

20 minutes. You got about 20 minutes before the other person‘s brain becomes overwhelmed and starts to lose interest and shut down their attention.

When we communicate with other people, what happens to the other person as they’re listening? This is a key factor to understand before we open our mouth and say or show anything.

What is a “Pitch”? And what is pitching? How is this different than selling?

Selling is hard pitching is easy. This may turn out to be the title of my next book. If selling is involved in any part of your career, I believe this information will prove to be highly valuable to you.

If you’re struggling, hitting your quota or making appointments or generate a new sales, listen to this different approach.

Croc Brain - the crocodile brain. The center part of your brain that everyone has an all information must pass through this area first. Listen to John explains how he has been coached by Oren Klaff to activate this part of the brain.

Every conversation should be like a well rehearsed play. Not totally scripted, but everybody has an idea of where the storyline is going. Listen to this from John as he explains how he opens every call.

One of the easiest areas to address first on the cost increases for group health plans is the pharmacy spend. Listen to this episode as John explains exactly how to approach this.

Pitching vs Selling. They sound like the same thing right? But they are absolutely totally different. Listen to this podcast as John Sharer the amazing insights he learned by being mentored by Oren Klaff.

Who is the logical person for employee benefits advisor to talk with about benefits at a company? The human resources department right. Who is the best person to talk to? Not HR.

Make it easier on yourself and target the right company

Hi Costco specialty drugs that you see on TV commercials are the biggest threat to group health plans going forward

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Source: Oren Klaff. This is straight from pitch anything. Make sure you get the book and the audiobook and use it as your guide. The customer is not the prize. The money you make is not the prize; the status you seek is not the prize. You. Are the prize.

Ask hard questions. Your ability to ask the difficult and sometimes uncomfortable questions in a selling environment will determine how much success you will ultimately have. You will have to work on this skill over and over to get good at it.

This is a staggering statistic that most people have never been told. This will not come from the insurance carriers or anyone deep in the system because this is driving the cost increases. No one in the $4.3 trillion system actually wants you to lower your costs. Once you grasp this fundamental concept, the way you view health insurance cost in th…

Most people understand the 80/20 Rule. This is called the Pareto Principal. In this episode, John explains How only 20% of the members on a group health plan contribute 80% of the claims. You also learn that only 2% of the members actually contribute about 50% of the overall claims.

This is one of the biggest discoveries I made in my entire Benefits selling career. The entire $4.3 trillion healthcare ecosystem makes more money as your costs continue to go up as an employer. How would you like to know about the other FIVE ways that you can purchase healthcare benefits? Now you can listen to this episode…

Most people can explain the main components of a home. But when you ask a sea level decision maker at a company what are the main components of a health plan? They don’t have a clue. Understanding the basic components of a health plan will help you educate and empower decision makers to make the right decision for their company…

Competition Part 2 - Other Options

Competition Part 1 - Status Quo

Plain Vanilla with a TWIST 🍦. Listen to this short episode as John explains how you can make meaningful changes to your employee benefit group health insurance program without a lot of disruption for the employees.

If you’ve ever read the book, Atlas shrugged you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, that’s OK. We all feel the weight of the world on our shoulders and this is an experience. I’m going through now that might be helpful.

This is such a heartwarming story for me to tell. Just listen to this while you’re doing something else.

Without … it costing 🫵 you any money! Just take 10 minutes. Just hit play. Just sit back and listen.

14 years ago I learned about an asset class that I could store, protect and grow my wealth and income. Up until that point I was totally misinformed about this particular strategy.

Do you own a business? Do you want to start a business? Listen to this episode on how you can use your own banking policy to maximize access to capital to grow your business.

How to use a properly design banking policy to fund your future retirement needs. This is incredible. Listen to this.

Having your own bank allows you extreme flexibility and peace of mind to plan for college or advanced degree expenses for your children or grandchildren