If you’ve been to our blog before, you’ve likely heard us talk about the
benefits of Salesforce CPQ — how it helps with pricing, quoting and more during the sales process.
If you work for a health insurance provider, though, you may not think that Salesforce CPQ is right for your organization. I get it. A whole host of factors make your sales process much more complicated than the typical one: the multiple options you offer on any one health plan, all of the variables that influence rating, the role of brokers in the process, etc.
The truth is, though, that a solution as flexible as CPQ can meet the needs of any type of business, across a range of use cases. In the health insurance world, account executives and managers can use the tool to pull together the perfect assortment of plan options, collaborate with underwriters on pricing, automate the onboarding process and manage renewals. Below is the nitty-gritty on how CPQ can help healthcare payers save time during their sales and onboarding processes and ultimately deliver greater customer value.
4 Ways Salesforce CPQ Delivers Value During the Health Insurance Sales Process
1. Create the perfect bundle of plan options
In health insurance, the trick is catering to the diverse needs of the group you’re working with. Each one likely contains members ranging from people like me (28-year-olds with delusions of immortality) to the more risk-averse.
With Salesforce CPQ, an account executive can select different plan options to include within a quote, from
essential plans and those with high
deductibles to ones with richer benefits. From there, they can select add-ons for vision, dental and other services. CPQ lets them align the right array of options for both government and commercial plans so that it presents account execs with a simple and easy-to-navigate screen when they’re trying to pull together the right choices for a group or employer.
Then, after the broker secures the deal, it’s easy to return to the quote during the member onboarding process and select the exact number of subscribers for each option. That way, the information is tracked on one comprehensive set of records, making it easy to kick off the renewal process and better forecast the pipeline for next year (more on that in a bit).
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2. Simplify the pricing process
In previous posts, we’ve discussed the power of
CPQ’s price rules to automate specified business logic into quote pricing. This may work for smaller employers and groups, but rating for many larger groups depends on one too many factors to rely solely on these processes. You want your underwriters to own this process instead, with some assistance from CPQ.
Here’s our recommendation: Use
approval processes to route quotes to your underwriting department once they’re ready for rating. That will allow the account executive and an underwriter to collaborate on the plans involved to determine the correct rate for each. Your team could also set up the approval processes to send the quote to management or the executive level after the underwriter, if necessary, streamlining the whole workflow through multiple roles before you send it off to the broker.
And even though you can’t automate your entire rating process, you can still leverage a lot of CPQ functionality to simplify it. You can, for example, build specified rules and multipliers into your rates (like, if the premium for a family version of a plan is always a certain multiple of the individual rate). You could also store all of your standard co-pay rates on a back-end table that CPQ can look up, automating the co-payment information for your plans and making it easy for your admins to alter these base options in the future. These little tricks help your team rate your quotes accurately and quickly, benefitting your potential customers throughout this process.
3. Automate your contracting and onboarding processes
As mentioned above, Salesforce CPQ can help your health insurance organization streamline its sales process, getting you to a place where an employer’s or group’s elections are tracked in one comprehensive quote with the correct number of subscribers for each plan option. Once the business is won, the automation magic doesn’t stop there. You can configure CPQ to
create contracts directly from closed quotes, passing the necessary information on to your customer service reps, claims processors and any other employees that may need to see it when a member calls in. This feature helps ensure that no critical information gets lost in the handoff between teams.
We can say the same for the onboarding process, too. Without the right technology, it can be challenging to keep track of each step in the process for every new member group. Combining CPQ with
Salesforce’s broader automation functionality can help. It lets you automatically create onboarding task notifications for your teams once the group’s plans are set, whether those reminders are set up as
Salesforce Tasks or
Cases or sent as
email reminders.
Here’s my favorite solution for your onboarding process though. If you’re using
TaskRay, you can configure a
project template containing the general steps in any onboarding process. From there, you can automate CPQ and TaskRay together to clone that project template any time a quote is won. Not only does this solution automatically lay out each group’s onboarding process in an agile, easy-to-use project management system; it also gives you a scalable solution. Any time your team adds a new step to the standard onboarding rhythms, it’s as simple as adding a task to the project template — from there, that step is replicated in every future onboarding project.
In all, these automations simplify the transition from sales to service for your teams, allowing them to deliver quality, consistent assistance to your customers throughout the entire process.
4. Create renewals with a single click
To bring everything full circle, CPQ also helps your account management team with plan renewals. We recommend creating a
Salesforce report showing all contracts set to expire in a specific period (say, the next two months). Then, you can also create a button or checkbox on the contract to produce the renewal opportunity. With the right setup, your managers can see all expiring contracts and kick off the renewal process for any one of them with a click of a button. CPQ takes care of the rest, automatically creating the renewal opportunity with the same plan options as before and assigning it to the right account manager. The account managers have the flexibility to add or remove plan options, of course, to upsell or cross-sell along the way. But this functionality saves them a bunch of unnecessary legwork in getting to that point.
Before I go, here’s one more useful best practice. Over time, your organization will undoubtedly phase out old plan options. When that happens, you obviously don’t want those obsolete choices showing up in your renewals. CPQ has you covered here as well. Mark the product as expired in CPQ and tell the platform which newer plan option you’re replacing it with. Then, when an account manager creates a renewal of a plan containing that option, CPQ will automatically phase out the expired one and substitute the right replacement in. It’s just one more way CPQ makes life easy on your staff, letting them better serve your members.
In sum, with the right combination of features and functionality, CPQ can serve as much more than a sales tool in the health insurance world, transforming into a solution that automates much of a payer’s quoting, rating and onboarding process. With that type of solution in place, your customers and members will see the benefit — every team will have access to the information they need when helping members, and they’ll all have more time to focus on customer service and satisfaction.
Looking for more information on what Salesforce can do in the healthcare space? See how
Salesforce consulting for healthcare can bring real change to your organization.
