The Affordable Care Act, new ways to fill the sales pipeline and Zenefits dominated EBA’s BeAdvised blog commentary this year. The top 10 most-read blogs of 2015 detail the growing number of ACA regulations and reporting requirements, explain why advisers don’t accurately understand the threat behind a tech-focused brokerage and highlight simple-yet-effective ways producers can increase existing client revenue and get prospects to open the door.
10)
“When I examine a business problem I often find myself coming back to the classic fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One area that aligns with Goldilocks’ concept of finding what is ‘just right’ for her needs is the quest to find the right approach for filing and reporting under IRS 6055 and 6056, as required by the Affordable Care Act,”
9)
“Riddle me this: You just had a terrific phone conversation with a new prospect but you failed to book an appointment with them. Now what? Have you ever considered sending a handwritten note to essentially thank them for hanging up on you?” Eric Silverman, principal and owner of the Silverman Benefits Group,
“Do you sometimes wonder if our society has made substantial progress over the last 20 years in routing factual information into the hands of educated consumers? While we can point to areas of vast improvement in certain markets, other areas leave us scratching our heads,”
7)
“Millennials have dominated the national conversation for the past decade, but in all the talk about the newest members of the workforce, we’ve somehow missed their parents — baby boomers. With workers 55 and older projected to make up 25% of the U.S. labor force by 2020, boomers are redefining what it means to be aging in the workforce, and redefining senior benefits in the process. People today are living longer, retiring later and pursuing passions well into their golden years. How can the workplace address the needs of these new ‘senior’ citizens?” Erin Krehbiel, president of ACI Specialty Benefits,
“There’s a lot of noise right now from broker-friendly vendors that propose to offer a Zenefits alternative so that you can scratch your clients’ itches. We’re recommending certain sustainable HR technology solutions to our own agency clients, so you can make like Zenefits and offer HR technology to keep the letter of record. Nothing wrong with that,” Nelson Griswold, EBA columnist and agency growth consultant,
In August, Brad Mandacina, director of HR technology outsourcing at Lockton Benefit Group,
4)
“The more sophisticated employee benefit advisers I know and consult with are increasingly discussing self-funding of the health plan with mid-size employers. With self-funded plans — either fully self-insured or partially self-insured through a group captive — the employer is told that self-funding includes some financial risk but, when implemented correctly for the right employee group, can also provide substantial cost savings to the employer. True. But that misses a value proposition far more compelling to company leadership,”
3)
“’How do we win the RFPs for brokerage services or benefits consulting?’ was one benefit adviser’s question to the other agency owners at a discussion during our most recent Agency Growth Mastermind Summit for our top agency clients. It was, however, the wrong question. A much better question: ‘Why reply at all to benefits RFPs?’”
2)
“Voluntary benefits are misnamed, which confuses the market and hurts the sale of these benefits. We need to call these benefits what they really are,” Griswold
1)
“For those of you who have not seen it, Zenefits, an emerging benefit broker offering free technology, has posted a comparison of their services to many of their competitors across the country. In my opinion, this tactic goes below the line of ethical standards,” Joe Markland, principal, HR Technology Advisors,
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