When I first got into the insurance broker business, I used to make ‘cold calls’ to businesses out of a book that we would purchase each year called the Cole Information Directory. It was a list of business phone numbers by street address rather than alphabetically, like the White Pages, or by Industry, like the Yellow Pages.
There was no reason to target all the businesses that start with the letter P or that were all in the same industry - like Plumbers.
We tried to make all of our new business sales appointments in the same neighborhood or, even better, in the same building, because we didn't want to spend our days travelling across town from sales meeting to sales meeting.
We wanted to do the meetings and get back to the office to try to make more sales calls to set more appointments.
25 years ago that was ‘business intelligence’.
Today we have better ways to find high quality prospects.
The Federal Tax Form 5500 has information that can be used to find and evaluate both employee benefits / group insurance and retirement planning prospects and opportunities. Once relevant new business opportunities have been identified, the problem has always been how to get this information into the sales CRM.
Now users of Salesforce can search the national database of Form 5500 tax filings to identify businesses they would like to target.
Then with a click, import those Accounts, Contacts, Form 5500 Tax Filings and all the related Schedules directly into their instance of Salesforce.
The information inserted into Salesforce includes every field from the Form 5500 and all the related Schedules - as provided by the US Department of Labor.
You can view or download a pdf of the filed Form 5500 from any tax Filing record.
Then, using native Salesforce functionality, you can build list views and reports to filter by any field on the Account, Contact, or Tax Filing and Schedules found on the Federal Tax filing.
Not So Cold
Before you ever make contact with a prospect, you can have so much useful information. You may know the name of the right people to contact, you might find that they are overpaying commissions, or, maybe most importantly, is the opportunity even worth pursuing?
Finding relevant high quality new business opportunities is always just a few clicks away with the all new BenefitsGuide: Business Listings.
Click here to see recorded video demonstration