Meeting Plan Sponsors at Their Point of Need

I’m a big fan of marketing guru Jay Abraham. In his 2000 book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition, he tells readers, “Probably the biggest mistake people make in any business is that they fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their product, service, or company. You should believe passionately in your product, service, or company. But you should fall in love with your clients.” Abraham repeatedly advises that it’s not about you and what you do; it’s all about your clients and what they need!

At the AllianceBernstein Advisor Institute, we have a similar perspective: success starts by meeting Plan Sponsors at their point of need. Until you know their concerns and how they’re managing their business, you cannot have a relevant conversation about how you can meaningfully help them.

This kind of awareness starts by recognizing that Plan Sponsors are busy and don’t have time to educate you about their plan. You aren’t meeting them at their point of need by asking, “What keeps you up at night about your current retirement plan?” The likelihood is that they aren’t worried about their plan or they would have already taken action to fix it. There are many consultants ready to help Plan Sponsors fix something that’s broken.

Education is the key to developing new business. Start a meaningful, relevant and inspiring conversation by teaching Plan Sponsors something they don’t know but should be concerned about.

Behavioral Finance to the Rescue

An insight from the field of behavioral finance can help you execute this strategy. As you know, retirement plans are complicated and Plan Sponsors often have multiple responsibilities. This complexity creates the perfect condition for narrow framing: the built-in tendency to focus on one or two things and edit everything else out of awareness. This means Plan Sponsors might miss or ignore some detail of their plan’s design that may cause the plan to be substandard or in violation of Department of Labor (DOL) guidelines or legal requirements.

Solving the Unknown Problem

Making a Plan Sponsor aware of current or potential inadequacies in his plan’s design creates the opportunity to solve an unknown problem. One way of pointing out the deficiency without making the Plan Sponsor feel as if he dropped the ball is by explaining that “best practices” for retirement plan design is a moving target. This means that any two- to three-year-old plan is likely to be obsolete in several significant ways; what a great opportunity to start an important and relevant conversation. You can offer to send your current best-practices checklist so that he can explore the current state of plan design.

When you meet with the Plan Sponsor, describe the common shortcomings of many of today’s plans. Review the last five or six plans you built, and point out where improvements were made to those plans. Explore the emerging standard of best practices that larger plans are adopting. Then show how you would integrate those into this plan design.

This conversation meets the Plan Sponsor at his point of need. It sets you apart and establishes you as a superior provider who is able to educate a Plan Sponsor about the complexities of the evolving industry. If executed properly, the conversation will be interesting and relevant. Who wouldn’t be eager to do business with you?

Contact your AllianceBernstein representative for more information on current best practices of retirement plan design and a list of common areas where retirement plans are often obsolete or violating DOL guidelines.