In a thought-provoking panel, Excel Health Plans CEO, Dylan Slattery, delved into the world of healthcare and explored the best practices for selling health benefit plans at the Ascend Leadership Summit 2023. Dylan talked with other health benefit experts, Mark Holland and Daniel McCauley, about how to position NextGen (Next Generation) health plans to be as successful as possible. Dylan’s experience at Excel Health Plans focused the conversation on the most impactful topics for brokers.
“I feel like so often in our space, we focus on a race to the bottom of the spreadsheet. Talking about, ‘What’s the rate? What’s the rate?’ But, at the end of the day, if you focus on the rate, you live and die by the rate. We need to shift the conversation to value-based selling.”
Business owners are trying to find creative ways to provide competitive benefit plans, but they don’t know their options. Most business owners, C-Suite executives, and HR team members assume that you have to accept the Blue Cross, United, Cigna, Aetna-type plans and their yearly cost increases. Dylan and his Excel Health Plans co-founder, Michael Patton, know there are great solutions for business owners who are really ready to make a change. However, the question becomes how to sell and build these plans. The process has to start with trust built between the business owner and the broker. Dylan and the panel discuss the importance of a 30-minute fact-finding meeting right at the beginning.
Once there is agreement and trust after the initial meeting and the financial benefits are laid out, the conversation switches to the HR team. Dylan explains, “There needs to be a way to navigate from the CEO or CFO to get the buy-in from the HR director.” This is one of the places where Excel Health Plans help brokers the most. Excel’s health plans are easy to explain and roll out so that top-level care is readily accessible to members. The broker will have an easier time selling the plan, and the HR team will have an easier time understanding it. After the event, Dylan talked echoed this idea:
“With Excel Health Plans, brokers have something they can go out and can just sell, and they can just rinse and repeat. That is the biggest advantage … There is going to be a certain line below which it’s not going to be worth your time to build a self-funded solution … Our pre-packaged plans can function as a solution to keep you above that line.”
Check out the Excel Health Plans YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZQnCmJ0nv0 for the whole interview.