BenefitPartners Boosts Sales with Value-Driven Marketing

BenefitPartners is one of the leading independent Southern California consulting firms specializing in employee benefits, human resources and executive compensation. They recently partnered with USI, a Goldman Sachs Capital Partners Company, to provide their clients with local expertise with the extensive resources of a national brokerage firm.

Situation

BenefitPartners may be a small brokerage firm, but it thinks big for its clients.

The Southern California firm doesn’t limit itself to providing a standard group of services.

Instead, BenefitPartners starts with what its clients need. Then, it recommends a range of services to meet those needs—everything from benefits strategy to plan design to broker services to benefits communications.

Challenge

BenefitPartners’ clients understood the value of the services they were using. But they didn’t understand the value of the services they weren’t using. They didn’t understand how the firm’s other services could deliver more value to their employees—and to their own businesses.

As a result, most clients were using only some of the services they actually needed.

Marketing materials emphasized features over benefits and presented inconsistent messages. The website promoted one idea, a proposal promoted another, and a company marketing brochure another.

Because clients couldn’t see what they were missing, few took advantage of everything the firm had to offer.

BenefitPartners recognized an opportunity to reach out.

Solution

How do you show a client you can solve more of their problems than they think—problems they may not know they even had?

That’s just the kind of problem Benz Communications specializes in solving.

With years of healthcare benefits communication experience, the Benz Communications team didn’t need to spend weeks researching the industry. We used our industry knowledge to help BenefitPartners create a set of consistent, detailed key messages the firm could apply everywhere.

Then, we helped BenefitPartners create those everywhere materials—a website, a company brochure, a customized proposal template, and several other marketing pieces.

Each marketing communication highlighted benefits so clients could see the possibilities for their business—whether they wanted to engage their employees, increase retention, or cut calls to HR during open enrollment.

Results

BenefitPartners’ marketing materials went from inconsistent to standardized, from features-oriented to benefits-driven.

Not only did the marketing materials hit home with the target audience, but they can be leveraged for a variety of prospects and communications.

Now BenefitPartners executives spend their time creating customized plans and services for their clients—without having to create customized marketing pieces.

By helping its clients better understand what they really need, the firm is now taking much better care of its own needs.