I was working for a PEO and prepared a careful analysis on how the client’s in-house HR offerings stacked up against my company’s offerings. Honestly, I thought it would be a slam dunk. The numbers looked great and we had discussed at length things like how working with a PEO would provide long-term stabilization, deliver a better variety of plans to the company’s employees and significantly improve the open enrollment process.
I was a good salesperson – I had listened carefully to his requirements and concerns and had presented a solid proposal.
Then I lost the deal.
I was devastated. I couldn’t figure out why the client decided to stay with the status quo, so after a week I called to see if I could gain some clarity on his decision. He surprised me when he said that he didn’t feel like the change to a PEO was worth it and he didn’t see enough value to make the leap. In fact, the term he used was “apples to apples”.
Apples to apples?!! I immediately began rambling on about how a PEO could fine tune the administrative process for new employees and expand his business into new states, how he could smooth the setting up of new offices from a tax perspective and enhance the culture of the company. I was running out of air and he stopped me short and said, “we compared numbers and not businesses.”
Numbers and not businesses. I realized right then and there that while my proposal was strong in terms of the numbers, I had missed out on perhaps the most important aspect of the story: how moving to a PEO can improve the lives of the business owner and the people in his company. In fact, recent NAPEO research noted that “Across all research, business owners exhibited a strong relationship and general concern for their employees. This relationship is a top consideration for all their business decisions, including outsourcing business functions.”*
I realized that I would be far more successful if I stopped talking about buzzwords like affordable healthcare and stabilized cost and started to talk with prospects about human resource strategies instead of benefit plays. It was then that I realized that I had focused too much on the “what” of our offering instead of the “why” it would matter to the company and its employees. And that was the key to getting over the “apples to apples” comparison.
4 questions that lead to the “why”
I created a list of questions that helped me develop deep, meaningful conversations with prospects and enabled me to get to the real issues that could drive the decision to move to a PEO. We have a list of questions available that you can pick and choose from to help guide your conversations with prospects. Here are some of the ones I’ve used successfully in the past:
- How is your business sourcing and attracting qualified candidates in the never-ending war for talent?
- How are you measuring satisfaction within the current employee base?
- How is your company going to compete when your competitors begin investing in big data?
- Does your business perform trend analysis and review quantifiable employment data to measure growth engagement and performance management?
Of course you have to demo the bells and whistles of the solution and discuss the latest and greatest in PPOs vs. HMOs — after all, that’s what you’re offering. But to really understand the drivers that will make your prospect move to an HRO is in the “why”. By discussing things like how the prospect handles the actual day-to-day burden of keeping up with the continuously changing benefits landscape or how the business is impacted compliance issues, you’ll discover the “why” — the “why” working with an HRO makes sense. These types of conversations will enable you to gain invaluable insight into the prospect’s business and will not only help you seal the deal, but it will also set you up to be a trusted advisor and promote a productive, successful working relationship.
This is part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 will be coming soon and will focus on tips and tricks for showing the value of HRO services to SMBs. Please leave comments or questions below or reach out to us at seeds@prismhr.com.
*Source: NAPEO Market Research Comprehensive Report, March 2018