See the show notes for this episode: From Confusion to Clarity: How Innovative Software is Changing Employee Benefits | Show notes.
0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to a very special episode of Experience-focused Leaders! We're trying something new here. We're talking to practitioners who are on the bleeding edge of innovation, and we found one who happened to be a customer of RELAYTO in an industry that we love. Whitney Boyer is the CMO of LHD Benefit Advisors and she will tell you today how a small marketing team can do some really, really amazing things! That's why we wanted to hear from you, Whitney, because we were blown away by what you were able to accomplish. Welcome to the pod!
0:00:42 - Whitney Boyer
Thank you for having me on here!
I think there were three things that I wanted to talk to you about and touch on a little bit because, as you said, we're kind of a smaller agency. We have a small marketing team. Whenever I introduce a new service, a new platform, or a new idea, I want to make sure that we can use it in as many ways as possible. And that we have a lot of different use cases across a lot of different departments so I can really make sure that the value is there. So that's been one of our biggest goals as we're working with the software.
0:01:24 - Alex Shevelenko
Great, well, let's dig into that! We saw that you're one of those CMOs who is wearing mini hats and maybe the most classical. The B2B CMO really does need to be very close to the sales team and enable the sales team, and you had some wonderful stories about how you are doing that. We'll come back to that. But I think one of the other special things about the world that you live in is that you know one of the deliverables of LHD benefits is a superior employee experience for your clients. So for those folks who are new to the benefits, communications, and benefits advisor world, guide us a little bit. What does that mean, what are you on the hook for your clients and what are they on the hook for inside their organizations in terms of creating great employee experiences? Then we'll come back to marketing in a second.
0:02:23 - Whitney Boyer
Our marketing department is in charge of essentially every client-facing deliverable that we have. So a lot of the deliverables that we give them—we would call that employer-facing—it's a lot of their financial documents, plan performance metrics, renewal information. That's a lot of stuff that we have to provide to them. But then they're also responsible for communicating those benefits to their employees. And so we try as best that we can to get that information to their employees also. So a lot of the stuff that we have is employer-facing and employee-facing as far as deliverables go. In addition to the whole marketing side that you were talking about.
0:03:16 - Alex Shevelenko
It's four: marketing-sales, then the Head of HR, the Head of Finance, and the CEO, depending on the size of the organization that is your direct customer. Then, their customer, which is me trying to figure out what open enrollment means and why the health of my family depends on me making the right benefit decision. Did I get those four pieces right?
0:03:48 - Whitney Boyer
You absolutely did, yes!
0:03:50 - Alex Shevelenko
Okay, where do you feel is the biggest challenge right now in the industry? Wearing both of your hats. Maybe the carriers hat, the insurance carriers that educate people about some of the plan decisions, and then the HR hat. Where the biggest breakdown is? Or is it all over the board?
0:04:14 - Whitney Boyer
It's all over the place, for sure. But I think one of the biggest issues is communicating your benefit plan and employers' benefit plan to their employees and making sure that they understand what's available to them. Because the majority of consumers don't really, they aren't really concerned about their benefits until they need them. And then it's like you want to get in front of them and educate them before they need it, to make sure they're on the right plan, to be sure that they're a smart healthcare consumer, knowing how to shop for the best care for the best value, making sure they know where to go, how to live a healthy lifestyle. So I think communicating that plan and getting that information to the employees is something that a lot of employers struggle with and something that a lot of advisors like us are trying to figure out how we can help with.
0:05:10 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. And is this a one-time thing that happens around November, October season, around open enrollment? Or then when you join a new company or have some new event? Or is this really shifting to be an ongoing challenge where you know how to take care of yourself better and take advantage of many of the things that the company already invests in, and pays a lot of money? I just want to throw out a statistic in case our audience doesn't know. It shocked me but benefits advisors and brokers drive 1.2 trillion in insurance spending in the United States alone. And so this is a major part of our economy, a major part of the total overall healthcare span. So these are very, very sizable decisions that these, ultimately the employees, need to make, even though there are some guardrails that you provide and advise them on. Is that accurate?
0:06:12 - Whitney Boyer
Yes, that is spot on. And so I would say, historically, you're renewing your medical plan before open enrollment. The plan of the majority of employers will start at the first of the year. So then they have open enrollment, like you said, sometime around October or November. And historically, that's when we know that we have those employees' attention. So that's when we would try to do the majority of the education: “Ok, here are the plans that are available to you. Here's how you choose which plan.” It'll take effect in January and then you're kind of done after that. But we are definitely transitioning into figuring out how we can continue to educate people throughout the entire year.
We have a lot of different initiatives to stay in front of those clients, but it's a struggle because all of those employees consume information in different ways. So we can't just print off an employee benefits guide anymore and physically hand those out and expect everybody to read through it, understand, enroll, and have no questions. There are questions constantly coming in throughout the entire year. And people need to be able to access their benefit guide and the details about their plan. Really, I mean throughout the entire year, especially outside those open enrollment months. They need to be able to access that quickly and easily and be able to find what they're looking for.
Employee benefits and health benefits are just an overwhelming topic and I think people have a lot of questions. Sometimes they're even embarrassed to ask some of the questions because: “I should know what this means, but I don't. Where can I go to find out more of this information?” So we're always trying to think of different ways to help educate those employees, make them feel more comfortable, and confident in whatever benefit options are available to them, and make sure they're trusting their employer to do the right thing and to have the right benefits available for them. And then their employer trusts us to make sure that we're setting up the plan in the best way that we can. So it's a long story short. To answer your question, it's definitely a year round initiative to try to continue to educate employees on what's available to them and what they need to know.
0:08:39 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, and I think I'll throw out something that I saw, that I love what you were able to do just to draw attention to a couple of areas. One is you have educational resources, the sort of 101 questions. Some people are video learners and they want to have a quick snippet video. Some people want a longer video, and some people are very textual so they just want to read the text in a linear kind of journey through a guide, and some people want to navigate directly to the areas that they have a question about because they're pretty familiar. And some people are totally new and so they want a different experience. There are different generations in the workspace, they have different preferences. So I feel like you've done a tremendous job of allowing this diversity of consumers of this benefit content. And some of them are not even employees of a company, they're the spouse of the employee who is really the principal decision-maker on this topic.
How do you get that to them in the right context as well? What are some of the secrets that made you innovate in that area, and what have you done that you're really excited about bringing to your customers?
0:10:05 - Whitney Boyer
Definitely have the benefits available online and digitally for all of these employees. That's been the first goal that we had was how make something like a benefit guide more accessible not only to the employee but also to their spouse at home who is the decision maker. So how can we do that? And that's really where we would lean on RELAYTO because there are so many different privacy levels depending on what the employer is comfortable with. But the majority of the time, the link is just available to everyone. They can send it to their families at home, they can bookmark it. A lot of employers will then put it into their HRIS system. So giving them digital access was goal number one.
But then we took it, I would say, a little bit further. We didn't necessarily just want to upload the existing benefit guide and have them view that with a link. We really wanted to improve their entire experience. So we created what we're calling digital benefit guide websites and we lay it out exactly like a website. You can navigate with that top bar, you can scroll through. We have a lot of different buttons that jump to different pages and it's just a much different experience, and it's a really great user experience.
0:11:44 - Alex Shevelenko
So I'll pause you. You're kind of mirroring the document or presentation with a website and it's like you could create it in a very simple to create, like it's a PowerPoint effectively, but it's designed in a clever way where people who want to feel like they're consuming a website are getting that web-like experience.
0:12:06 - Whitney Boyer
Yes, you're exactly right and that was really the key to making this whole thing. Because, again, we're a small department. We have over 200 clients. We can't create every single benefit guide every single year for all of our clients. So we created a PowerPoint template and when we created that, we knew we were going to use it in RELAYTO. So it was designed specifically for this benefit guide website experience. We did just a little bit of training with our account management team who they don't have design backgrounds, they don't have marketing backgrounds, they're not always super great with tech. But we designed it specifically—
0:12:57 - Alex Shevelenko
What’s an average age becausecause I’ve met some folks from the industry and it’s like you're probably more on the spring chicken side of the industry or does it vary?
0:12:59 - Whitney Boyer
It really varies, it really does, and I'm not just saying that to get out of answering the question. It's really all over the spectrum. We have people who have been doing benefits for years and it's so great to have their information because they've seen and experienced everything, they've been in the workforce for a long time. And then we have that younger generation also that's just entering the workforce. They haven't seen and experienced as much, but they're a little bit more aggressive with the technology that we have. So we have a really good mix.
There's definitely a lot of ages within the organization, but we knew we had to create something that they could all use, whether they were good at tech or not, whether they're good at design or not. That shouldn't be part of their job. Just plugging in the numbers and being able to have access to a technology that's easy to use didn't require a ton of training from me. So we designed our PowerPoint knowing that we would have account managers using it and that we would need them to upload that then into the system, so designed specifically for this digital benefit guide website in mind. It's a good end-user experience, but it's also we set up a template so that not a ton of heavy lifting on my team, and pretty easy to use for the account management team. So a lot of different purposes there.
0:14:25 - Alex Shevelenko
Awesome! So you effectively, I'm going to label it because I think this is the way we think about it a little bit but you kind of democratize marketing to people who would never think of themselves as somebody who would produce marketing-grade content or that are website builders. They don't think of themselves as like, I'm gonna go spin up a landing page or site. That's not their DNA and yet they're going and doing that. So you democratize marketing design for them.
0:14:59 - Whitney Boyer
Absolutely! And it really empowers them too, like they are so proud of themselves when they're able to use this and offer a really wonderful experience for the clients and to be able to say like, oh yeah, I helped create this!
I think it's really empowering for all of them to be able to do it and then they're excited to do it for a lot of their other clients as well. We looked at it when we were trying to figure out what solution was out there for us to be able to offer this digital experience for our clients. We looked at a lot of different ones, but that's ultimately how we landed on RELAYTO. We felt like it gave us the best opportunity to be able to mass produce a lot of content. Because it's got to work for every client, had to work for every department, as we talked about earlier. We just had a lot of purposes. Anybody in the marketing field can work with somebody to create a really great website, but how many of those great websites can you create in a year? Can you create 200 websites in the months of July, August, September?
0:16:07 - Alex Shevelenko
No, it's all concentrated. Because this two-to-three-month period is when the majority of the clients need that site.
0:16:20 - Whitney Boyer
Yes, absolutely, and so we can do a lot of setup in advance. This spring we started doing a lot of it. Early summer we start doing a lot of it. But a lot of our clients—actually, the majority of our clients—won't get their renewal until October. Then maybe in early October, and then maybe in late October is their open enrollment. So we have like a one-week period that we get their numbers, we get to them, they approve them. They come back to us, we finalize them, confirm with the carrier, then get it updated in the benefit guide, and have to make it live for all their employees to see. So there's a lot on the day before open enrollment starts. We're trying to get stuff done as fast as we can and that's really like 200 custom websites in a day.
0:17:09 - Alex Shevelenko
One of the things that I noticed—and it's maybe a tweak in the industries that are more regulated—is that some of those hubs that you're providing inside where the guides, they also contain other documents. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think that there's probably a lot of other folks that have maybe their flagship site, but then they have like underneath and all that goes into this and all the supporting resources. There's no really easy way to integrate them, but I think you managed to do this, so I would love to hear your take on it.
0:17:53 - Whitney Boyer
There are two purposes to it, and the first one is a legal reason. There are certain documents that by law, an employer is required to make easily available to all of their employees, like some different compliance documents, and some of their different plan documents. They legally have to make sure that they're providing those to every single employee. So that was a challenge we saw. If they didn't have an intranet or an internal site, they were like, “How do we get this? How do we get these documents out to everybody?” It has to be available to the public too, so it has to be on a public site. We knew we had to get these documents in there to make it a lot easier on the employers, so we kind of created a separate hub for that.
AI was not one of the reasons that we even picked RELAYTO, we didn't even know how cool the AI was going to be. We just knew we wanted that digital website experience for the benefit guide. But then we learned all about AI and it has been one of the best features that we have. I think I even told you we advertised it as AI-powered digital experience software and immediately everyone was like, “Benefits are boring. What is this AI stuff like? Tell us more about this!”
0:19:14 - Alex Shevelenko
Just one of those of When Harry Met Sally moments when you're like, I gotta have that AI digital thing.
0:19:25 - Whitney Boyer
Exactly! So the plan documents also serve a purpose for that, and the compliance documents. So when an employee is on their benefit guide website and they have a question, they can go over and type it into the AI Chat. And as long as we have those plan documents stored in there, the benefit guide doesn't have to be 100 pages long, 80 pages long to list out every single detail. That's so overwhelming. If we have the plan documents in there, the user can ask the question there and even if it's not answered in the benefit guide, it will pull that information from those plan documents. So it makes the AI work really, really well. But then it also serves the purpose of a public facing website to share those compliance documents and the plan documents and all of that stuff.
0:20:16 - Alex Shevelenko
You could go through thousands of pages across 20, 30, 40 documents and get fast to the one question, a specific question that may be covered. One of the stories that I heard is like I have whatever special medical thing that I'm particularly worried about. I want to get to that quickly. How can I do that? Where is it? That's very real questions for some families that are trying to both make the right decisions and not be overwhelmed by consuming a thousand pages.
0:20:46 - Whitney Boyer
You're absolutely correct. I don't want to say “burden” because it makes it sound like the HR teams don't want to help their employees, but they get bombarded with so many questions from employees like, well, is this covered? Is this medication covered, how much is this going to cost me? Which hospital should I be going to? Just a lot of different medical questions. And what we've realized because again, I was thinking once I learned more about this AI Chat, that it's a really great tool for employees.
Maybe they're too embarrassed to ask their HR person a question. They can go into that AI Chat and ask it in there. But what we're discovering is that the benefits are so complex that it's hardly possible for one person in an organization to know everything about it. So these HR teams will get questions from employees. Then they'll go to the AI Chat and ask the AI the question because they don't know the answer. And then they get their answer through the AI. It shows them exactly what document it's in, what page it's on, and they can go there and really, really quickly answer a question for these employees instead of having to search through pages and pages of documents. And maybe then they'd have to spend hours on the phone with the carrier's customer service, waiting to hear back when you can just type it in the chat and they get the answer.
0:22:22 - Alex Shevelenko
So I heard you use AI Chat in your RFP responses and your own marketing, and I saw a screenshot of it on your website, which was awesome and made my day. So you're doing it in marketing and sales, and then guess what? People like it.
It helps you and it helps them, so it becomes their little sidekick. Then, it obviously ultimately helps employees get faster the right information that helps them make decisions that take care of their health and their family, which is really, I think, we all know ultimately. Could you know who wouldn't get behind that?
It's almost like a value chain of benefits around this.
0:23:14 - Whitney Boyer
Totally, and we kind of talked about the biggest challenge when it comes to employee benefits for employers and it's educating their employees. You brought up the RFP process. Another huge challenge we were experiencing is that we get these gigantic RFPs from prospects and we spend hours and hours filling these RFPs out. We're happy to do it because we want these new clients, we really want to show off and we love talking about ourselves.
But what we realized is that these RFPs end up being 30, 45, 50 pages long of information. And we're thinking to ourselves, “There's no way that these people have time to read through a 45-page document.” So we're spending hours filling out a document that we're not even sure anybody is reading. Back to the AI Chat. Then those prospects—if they're just a few things that they really care about in that RFP—they can go into the AI Chat, ask those specific questions, and get their answers right there instead of having to dig through that entire 45-page document to find the answer.
0:24:27 - Alex Shevelenko
Do you let them know about it? You kind of mentioned it like, hey, we want to be easy to work with, and you don't want to hide the small print.
0:24:39 - Whitney Boyer
One of our goals is to be really, really transparent with all of our fees and our commissions and things like that. Our ultimate goal is to be really transparent with our clients. We feel like being transparent right from the get-go really gets them comfortable with us and they will trust us. So we're like, “Hey, here's our entire RFP, we have it on this, use it through here, view it through here, use this AI Chat. All of our report examples are here. You guys have full access to that.” So they can click on different appendix items that we also have stored within RELAYTO but then we talk about them in the document. So it's a whole, really seamless experience without having to read through a 50-page document.
0:25:24 - Alex Shevelenko
Let me imagine, so it's a little meta, because it basically says we're easy, we want to work and help you consume the information the way you want to. And here's our fee response. And here's a presentation or later use it in the finals presentation.
Inside that, you're making it very easy for them to search for stuff but also access real-life examples of what you're doing, which could be with RELAYTO, could be with something else, but, like oftentimes, it sounds like it could be related to on the differentiated employee experience or the way you do the reporting with your clients, or how you help them make better decisions, at whatever level they are, whether they're chief human resources officer or benefits expert, you providing the full range of evidence of how you're easy to work with, versus just saying, you know, trust me.
0:26:38 - Whitney Boyer
A lot of these RFPs ask, what makes you different from your competitors? It's easy to say like, oh, we're trustworthy, trust us, or we have the most experience, and I think I told you this before. There's like four of us here in Indiana that all say, we're the biggest in the state and like, based on whatever numbers we decide to use, we are the biggest in the state. So we're all kind of telling the truth. I really feel like using RELAYTO has been a huge differentiator for us, because they get to actually experience during the finalist process what it would be like for their employees to use this technology that we keep talking about. So we talk about our AI-powered digital experience software, but they actually get to use it and they get to see how it works. They can envision all of the ways that it would benefit their team and all of the ways that it will benefit their employees. So it's just kind of like a real-world demo or a real-world use case for them.
0:27:34 - Alex Shevelenko
Finally, somebody using AI Chat in business in the real world, versus just talking about some pilots, that's great!
0:27:45 - Whitney Boyer
It sets us apart, and our last couple of prospects and finalists presentations have specifically praised your ability to present this information in a way that was different from anyone else we worked with. It was easy and helpful, and that's one of the reasons that we chose to work with you.
0:28:06 - Alex Shevelenko
I love marketers who bring in the revenue. This is amazing, right? This is the dream of every marketer. And historically, it's been a little bit like, oh, I bring in the leads or I do this or a brand, and here you're creating a branded and differentiated experience, but it's actually so close to revenue and the differentiation of delivery that it sounds like it's taking it, it's making a better revenue generation. Portfolio that's directly attributed to marketing.
0:28:48 - Whitney Boyer
Absolutely! And then our advising team and our sales team. They love it because they can go into the analytics too and they can actually see and maybe even tie some numbers back to that, like, “We know that this many people or this many decision makers at the company have gone into the document and viewed it.” It helps with validating everything that we're doing: how many people are seeing our stuff, how many people are looking at all the pages and what pages are they looking at? The analytics, too, have been really helpful.
0:29:16 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. So you're able to show that this digital experience has evidence of employee engagement if you're going at that level, but then you could tweak it over time and improve it to say, hey, we have the smart solution. Then you could see if people actually engage, and then you may tweak your strategy depending on where they engage or if they engage. Is that right?
0:29:53 - Whitney Boyer
Absolutely! We've been talking about, which I feel like has been the theme of this whole thing. It's like, okay, the sales team can see the analytics and the RFPs and me for all of my marketing stuff, I have a lot of different gated content that lives in RELAYTO and people are required to put in their email address. I could see how many views it's getting and how many leads it's generating, all through RELAYTO. And then we can send employers their financial information and we can see. Usually, those are password protected, so then we can see the exact individuals who are looking at the plan performance information. And then we have the benefit guides and we can see how many employees are spending the most time on this HSA page. We think you need to educate your employees more about the HSA, how it works and the best way to use an HSA. So it's also kind of informing us on what topics to help educate their employees on throughout the entire year.
0:30:58 - Alex Shevelenko
Oh my God, I see. So you could basically know where there's the most interest, and then you could also say, hey, you told me this is really important and you're paying a lot of money for this, and nobody looked at it. Let's go redesign the guide to drive that maybe health and wellness program that we're kind of suggesting.
0:31:17 - Whitney Boyer
Hey, here's what we think you should inform your employees about throughout the year, like here's what we think, here's what the majority of employers do. We can go into the analytics and say, “No, this is exactly what you need to be informing your employees on, because this is where we feel like they're clicking this the most, or they're watching this video the most. They clicked on this pop-up and they read the definition of this insurance term. This is where you need this information that they want to know and that they need to know.” So it's more of an informed decision when it comes to how we communicate with our employees better. What information do we share with them?
0:32:03 - Alex Shevelenko
I got it. So you're moving away from a monologue to a more informed discussion, where you're paying attention to somebody's body language and guiding the conversation based on that.
0:32:14 - Whitney Boyer
Yes, and it absolutely feels so. It's custom, too, for our clients. For example, hey, we have a custom communication plan based on the analytics of your benefit guide and your documents.
0:32:27 - Alex Shevelenko
Awesome! I love it. This is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, Whitney. So you're connecting the dots in areas where people historically have not been able to do. Like, every great HR and corporate comms team wants to be a little bit more like marketing, but I think they just sometimes maybe lack the analytics or the tools or kind of. They just get stuck in what doing, whatever they're doing, and you basically democratized award-winning content. I saw some of your experiences. They're very beautiful. You managed to do amazing stuff with a small team, but you're basically democratizing it all the way from insurance carrier information to you the bespoke benefits packages to employees.
I'm curious, is there this competitive nature of the insurance and health insurance world that's driving even more of a necessity around this? This is not a nice to have. You mentioned that you have four competitors, but I think that's not just related to brokers, right? I just think there's a lot of competition and a lot of complexity that we're talking about. How does this reduce complexity? Is it driving the edge to get to be more competitive and lead the industry? Guide me a little bit on the competitive nature.
0:34:05 - Whitney Boyer
Absolutely, yeah! There's definitely a very competitive industry and we have a lot of great benefits advisory firms in the state, and I think that it's wonderful to have that much competition because it really encourages us to constantly be better and to constantly be innovating and to be better than we were the day before. So I definitely feel that I want to be the firm that all of our competitors are chasing after, like I want them to say, we want to be like LHD. Have you seen their stuff? It looks so good! Have you heard what their clients say about them? Have you seen how they walk through the renewal process? Have you seen their plan performance documents?
So I want to be that agency that people are kind of chasing after. There are certain things that I think we do better than anyone else in the entire business. I want to make sure that we continue to be innovative and cutting-edge because I don't want to be status quo, I don't want to be the same as any of our competitors, I don't want to offer the same things and I definitely don't want to fall behind. So we're always looking for what will make us just one step ahead of our competitors. How are we going to be that much better? What can we offer our clients? What can we do to make things easier for our clients? And so we're always looking at different ways to be better. And I feel like technology is the number one thing that we've been using lately to make us better. We're always wanting to be one step ahead and figuring out what we can use to be one step ahead. And I think I feel strongly that RELAYTO is putting us in that position.
We just did a rebrand, which we had been talking about a little bit. If there was anywhere I felt like we could improve, it was in the look of our deliverables. We service our clients better than anybody in the entire state, but our look left something to be desired. So we did our new rebrand. But it's more than just the look.
A lot of times what I hear from people, they'll say like, oh, give it to marketing and they'll make it look pretty. And I don't get offended by that, because we do make it look pretty. We make a lot of stuff look pretty, but we also want to display information in a way that's easier for our clients to digest. So it's actually like making the content better, making it look nicer, and then putting in a platform like RELAYTO that makes the user experience better. So we're not just attaching a gigantic PDF and an email and sending it off that they then have to search through their inbox. They have links to these hubs where they can go and access all of this beautiful information and helpful information, and we’re just making it easier, always trying to innovate. I think that that's how we differentiate ourselves and are always one step better than the competition.
0:37:24 - Alex Shevelenko
I love it, I think, this sort of distinction between the visual form and the fact, like the utility of it, and how you combine the two to create a beautiful experience, whatever you are in the information journey. We got inspired originally by Steve Jobs, who I kind of love his quote to his team. He said to someone, you guys baked a beautiful cake, but for frosting, you covered it with duck shit, right, I think that's okay on the podcast and it's such a visceral metaphor. But I think, what I love about what you've done is you have the rebrand and it's consistent, but even in doing that, you've thought about how to make it interactive and more visually interesting for your industry to get an edge. And then, on top of it, you're kind of using AI and all these other things.
You know hey, look you may not care about the beautiful, the beautiful brand. You may just want to know a very specific answer that sits in page 54 of document number 24. You know that you would normally never discover if you're like dependent on it but, now you could answer.
That was one question, and that's where you combine. By the way, you get there and you get the context, which is what I think is great. What you've done is people get an answer, but it's not some sort of made-up AI thing. You could go and find, check, and validate it because you can read the full context. It's very convenient. You don't get lost inside there.
0:39:03 - Whitney Boyer
So that's been really important to the HR people that we work with. Cause, the number one question that we get all the time is, “Well, does the AI give you wrong answers? Are you getting wrong answers?” It does not give you wrong answers because it will go to the exact place and give you the exact page number and the exact document where they found the information, so you're not getting wrong answers. Essentially, it's citing its source right below where it's answering it. So you have the confidence and your employees have the confidence that they are getting that right answer. I love that feature in the AI, and how it links back to that.
0:39:42 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing! I'll give you a shout-out that I was reading up about LHD, and you know we got to know each other through United Benefit Advisors, which supports over a million employees. Through that group, you were selected as a partner of the year award recipient. So thank you. It's amazing to see because we see it on our end.
But I'm sure you can bring it across the business as an innovator you really are. Leading the industry groups across states, across the country in this experience. And so I wanted to ask you about this perennial challenge between marketing creating content and then salespeople could have never known being super happy about it and being kind of sometimes late adopters around this, and you've shared a few stories that there are always early adopters and then there are some folks that even don't have the incentive to change but then over time, they change. Tell us a little bit about how are you getting the rest of the organization excited about the change that the marketing team has introduced.
0:41:00 - Whitney Boyer
For sure. So I think the way that we can get the most success out of something like this is having our own internal champion or a sales champion, because I can go into this group of salespeople and I can talk all about, hey, I have this new technology, you have to use it, you have to try it, you're going to love it. And they're all looking back at me like, she's in marketing. She doesn't know what the sales team needs or she doesn't know what it's like to be sitting in those meetings. And I've been doing this for 25 years and I don't want to change what I'm doing. Why would I all of a sudden start adopting this technology? What I've always done has always worked, so why do I want to change? So we always are going to get a little bit of that.
But we had a newer salesperson and he's pretty aggressively trying to grow his book of business and we've worked really, really closely with him to make just a lot of custom documents and a lot of custom prospect presentations and custom deliverables. So we've worked really, really closely with him, and then in turn he's kind of learned a lot about how we are delivering our information and our message out to our prospects and out to the industry. So, just working really closely with him, we have set up some really really great prospect hubs and put that RFP in there. He's done some custom data analysis for a lot of those prospects and we'll put that information in there, put some testimonial videos in those hubs, and then when it's time to submit the RFP, he does it through RELAYTO. They get that whole experience. They can easily access the RFP, they access the AI Chat, and they have really quick access to all the appendix items. So it's easier for him. It's a really great way to deliver these RFPs and all of the information.
But the real difference maker is when we have started winning new clients, essentially because of the marketing deliverables and what those look like. But he's got a lot of great information in there too. But when we start proving the value and the success of everything that we're doing and there's a salesperson who's using it really well and he's actually like winning new business, it really starts to show that value and convince a lot of the people who probably would have been very late adopters and they can get excited about it. And then we have all this feedback from clients that they love the experience and they'll talk to their friends in the industry and their friends will be like, wow, that's absolutely incredible! I want to work with a company like that, so it helps with referrals. So really having that early adopter, the sales champion that works very closely with us, that's been the best way to show the value and to really be able to measure some of the success of what we're doing.
0:44:16 - Alex Shevelenko
I got it. So you effectively worked hand in hand and co-created. It was your expertise in the tool, and then you kind of enabled them to do stuff on their own, I would imagine, over time. But you needed to partner together to create the first experiences.
0:44:33 - Whitney Boyer
We needed him for the content and he needed us to be able to package it all together and make it easily digestible. Then package it into a hub where we can just share a link and he can easily send that off again instead of attaching a gigantic 50-page PDF with 50 more pages of appendix items. And then you get the error message back that it was too big to send. So then you have to upload it to our shared file and then send a secure link, and this is just much easier.
0:45:10 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing! Well, I love how we went. I'm really, really grateful to have you on this journey, and I can't thank you enough for sharing this. I know you've shared your experiences of best practices with other folks in the industry, and I salute you for that. How can people find you? How can they discover LHD? Tell us how our audience could learn more from Whitney and from the award-winning work that you guys are doing.
0:45:56 - Whitney Boyer
I love calling it the award-winning work that we do. We are officially award winners. Definitely go to our website, check out our new brand, and let us know what you think about that. It was a labor of love. If anyone's ever done a rebrand, they know how much time it takes, and how involved so many different people have to be. Our website is lhdbenefits.com, so definitely go check that out and then find me on LinkedIn.
Whitney Boyer, LHD Benefits. Send me a message. I'd be happy to answer any questions or walk you through some of the different experiences that we have. Like you said, I've done that for a lot of our UBA partner firms. There are other independent insurance agencies across the entire country. A lot of them are pretty similar in size as us, may have kind of small marketing teams or maybe even never had a marketing team and are like, hey, we need some help with our marketing. Can you help us get started? What advice do you have? So I talked to a lot of different UBA firms and kind of went back and forth, brainstorming different ideas. So yeah, go check out our website and find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect. I'm happy to tell you more about our award-winning deliverables and everything that we do, but thank you for having me on!
0:47:20 - Alex Shevelenko
It's been a treat and it's been fun to clone you for a little bit and have you share your story with our audience. Congratulations again! This is something that we saw the amazing work that you were doing on our platform and we wanted to salute and celebrate innovators who are doing things even without engaging beforehand too much with us. You just figured stuff out, so we are grateful. I'm not surprised that you're doing award-winning work. It's obvious to us. Thank you again!
0:47:57 - Whitney Boyer
Yeah, thank you so much!