Selling employee benefits today is a hardball game. You cannot afford to leave things to chance. Assume your competitor enters the game fully trained with the latest technology and selling strategies. Are you playing this way? Chances are, if you're not selling with all of your equipment, you are selling at a disadvantage and losing to a seller who plays the game better.

Let's examine the use of data gleaned from the Form 5500 series required by ERISA of larger employers. Used properly, they can be a powerful tool that can enable you to win more sales by selling smarter. The key to using 5500 data is to use a database with queries that make your search for sales leads easy.

Employers with 100-plus employees and a benefit plan are required to complete a detailed set of forms on their plans every year. Those completed forms contain a goldmine of data that few sellers comprehend. In the right hands and by exploiting market conditions, sellers with 5500 data greatly increase their chances of becoming an agent-of-record or, at a minimum, getting an opportunity to market an employer's plans.

Armed and ready

There are three ways to tactically use Form 5500 data.

Tactic No. 1: Carrier and TPA business is cyclical. One insurance carrier may have hot underwriting for a couple years. Many brokers will place their groups with that carrier or TPA. Then things change, and those rates become uncompetitive. Benefit consultants not wanting to be caught with uncompetitive rates shop their groups with other carriers and TPAs for more competitive rates. And so the game goes on, as it has for years.

Having access to a database of 5500 information allows you to sense the shift in underwriting standards before the market fully realizes that a new carrier or TPA's stop-loss carrier has the hot pricing. You can look up all large accounts held by a particular carrier, print out all important data on the groups and then market to the groups en masse.

Tactic No. 2: You know which brokerages are asleep at the switch in your market. You know the one that does not provide added value, premium customer service, or any service at all. This spells opportunity for you with a 5500 database. The better tools allow you to look up a brokerage and specify what size groups you're looking for and the range of commissions you'd find acceptable. You can recreate the brokerage's entire book of business with all the details you need to spend the next several months targeting prospects with your value-added services and incredible market intelligence.

To me, this is benefits selling hardball at its finest. Your competitor won't know what happened except that a big chunk of his or her book is under siege.

Tactic No. 3: That 5500 also allows you to cherry-pick accounts that you think you would be particularly well suited to serve. Maybe you have a niche in a certain industry sector, a certain expertise that sector of clients want. Go into a 5500 database and look up clients in that sector. Develop a workable prospect list and then develop a strategy to relentlessly seek the business until you win.

Old data and the pricing game

It should be noted that Form 5500 data is less than current. Employers don't have to file their Form 5500s until the end of the seventh month following the close of the plan year, and it might take six to 12 months after that for DOL to release the data to intermediaries.

Also, it has been my experience that the big-name 5500 data vendors entice prospects to buy at a low or no-cost option, but then jack up the price if you want multiple seat licenses, larger ZIP code territories and queries. You should also know that low-cost tools with the same data and equally powerful queries are available. If you're intrigued by this, do your homework and shop around.