Tag Archives: Sales

Tips to Avoid CMS Noncompliance for Call Centers Selling Medicare Advantage Plans (MAPD)

This is a guest post by Scott Klonowski.

From the point of first contact all the way through the enrollment process, it’s critical to stay compliant with guidelines from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and avoid noncompliance.

Noncompliance costs everyone money. Here are a few important ways to prevent and correct noncompliance: 

Make Sure You Have Permission to Contact & Monitor Calls

According to CMS guidelines, agents cannot make unsolicited phone calls. Additionally, many parts of the U.S. require consent for calls to be recorded. It’s important to be up to speed on state and federal regulations and ensure your agents are using the right language to obtain consent—in both incoming and outgoing calls. 

Follow CMS Marketing & Language Guidance

CMS has clear guidance on their website about presenting information to potential enrollees. Avoid any potential to mislead contacts and refrain from using absolutes or superlatives to describe Medicare plans and benefits. CMS also advises that the term “free” should be avoided when speaking about reduced costs or $0 premiums. 

Keep Health Information Safe

The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) exists to ensure security and privacy of patient health information, including Social Security numbers, IP addresses, images of their faces, account numbers, and more. It’s important to make sure you all of your agents regularly receive proper training on HIPAA, and that your internal guidance restricts the ability to share personal health information with others.

Conduct Regular Reviews & Training

Training agents once and expecting them to remember every detail isn’t sustainable. Through regular compliance training and access to updated knowledge about policies and procedures, you can ensure that your staff is knowledgeable about policy, and also knows where to look for relevant information if they have questions.

It’s also important to monitor and audit adherence to the standards and programs in place. This helps inform your training, internal protocols, and other guidelines.

Streamline Your Processes

Often, reps get bogged down working with static scripts and navigating between screens or tools that aren’t talking to each other. But there’s a way to reduce stress, increase productivity, improve customer experience, and drive sales—all while ensuring compliance.

Cue offers a simple, integrated solution that streamlines workflows and tracks adherence to compliance requirements for insurance companies with phone-based sales and support reps. With dynamic and personalized scripts and real-time call and conversation analytics, both reps and their managers can operate with more support and peace of mind.

About the Author

Scott Klonowski began his journey in insurance as a captive agent in 1993. In 2002, he started Klonowski Agency where he focused primarily on selling and servicing group health plans to small businesses in Northeast Ohio.

After 10 years of growth, Scott recognized that a Human Resources Administrative platform that companies could use to manage their benefits, payroll, timekeeping, and paid time off all in one place was missing from the market. With just a concept and no prior experience in building software, Scott started My1HR in November 2011 with his friend and business partner Glenn Leppo. In 2013, they built connectivity to HealthCare.gov for individual quoting and enrollment, and soon after built a quoting enrollment platform for independent agents, INSXCloud. After helping thousands of independent brokers and agents, Scott sold The Klonowski Agency in 2015 and My1HR in 2018.

Scott now uses his experience working with companies of every size to help business owners find success. From new companies gearing up for rapid growth to mature ones looking to sell (and every stage in between), Scott mentors and provides professional support and guidance to business owners to help them set and achieve their goals.

Cue adds CRM widget, expands telephony integration, and more.

Cue, an Atlanta-based software company, announced earlier this week the release of the newest version of their software solution that will further enable phone-based sales and service reps to improve productivity and drive results both during and after calls. 

By acting as an on-screen teleprompter, Cue helps inside sales and service reps navigate through conversations the right way, every time. Cue automatically updates fields in a customer’s existing system, which allows reps to complete work in real time that is historically left for post call wrap up. Cue also simplifies reps’ tech stack so reps no longer have to toggle between tabs and applications.

New features include:

  • CRM Widget: Cue’s new lightweight widget embeds directly into CRMs, allowing reps to gain the benefits of Cue while staying within a system they already know.
  • Telephony Integration: Handles inbound calls from new contacts within Cue and automatically creates new contacts in your CRM or other external system.
  • One-Step Integration: It’s easier than ever to connect Cue with your CRM, telephony and more thanks to Cue’s new one-step integration, Cue integrates with 200+ systems.

According to CEO & Founder, Michael Wilson, “Instead of having to change the way phone-based customer support and sales reps are used to working, companies can now simply embed Cue’s teleprompter-esque conversation guide right into the systems they’re already using. Between this CRM widget and our enhanced one-step integration, we’re excited to empower our customers to get up and running with Cue even faster and in turn, impact their sales and customer service success.” 

If you have any questions, please reach out to Cue at sales@itscue.com.

Thanks,

The Cue Team

Meeting Demand In A Crisis

The urgency of the current crisis is requiring companies to adapt to the challenges of the market conditions. It’s tough to balance the challenges of battling the pandemic with the need to keep the economy going. Some people even feel that business needs to suspend during this period. We respect their perspective.

At the same time, we feel that there are businesses introducing much-needed innovation that can aid our community and make a difference in the world. These organizations need to surge their ability to reach the market, but many don’t have the communications or business development skills to reach out effectively.

We also know that there is a significant pool of business salespeople who are effectively shut down: Either their companies cannot get product to sell, their core markets are not buying right now, or the company has to furlough or let them go.

At Cue, we want to help. We want to connect companies offering critical products and services with skilled B2B salespeople. And we’re uniquely positioned to do that with our SaaS contact center platform.

Our platform enables the rapid onboarding of new virtual contact center agents with simple scripting and contact management. We come from the telesales world, so we know what’s needed to make salespeople successful. And we have the ability to quickly set upx and train these individuals to support market expansion for companies that have a significant need to reach and educate customers on solutions that will help in this crisis.

There is one caveat:

At this time, we are only offering this service to companies that we believe solve an urgent need within the market. We want to ensure that we are adding value rather than distracting many of the potential decision-makers who are working hard every day to keep their operations going and support their employees. We’ve found a number of companies like this, and we’d like to find others in critical industries such as healthcare, cleaning, automation, and others that are providing essential functions to keep our economy going.

The more we can do today to keep the economy moving, the more it will aid in recovery when we have gotten the pandemic under control.

How We Can Help Your Business

Our team is connecting organizations on the frontlines with temporary help to meet market demand and continue their work in industries that need their services now more than ever.

If your organization is facing surges in inquiries, we want to help you get out there and do the most good with the valuable resources you offer. Our rapid-response program will help you drive outreach, engagement, and expand your ability to meet demand.

And we can get you up and running on our agent desktop quickly while addressing your organization’s unique needs.

How We Can Help Agents

As industries are assessing the individual and economic impact of the global pandemic, many of us are also facing uncertainties in our careers. Many businesses’ customers are temporarily shut down. And contact center agents and business development professionals have been furloughed or experienced layoffs.

We’ve set up a program to match skilled professionals with companies that provide critical services—and need people like you to help them respond to inquiries and rapidly get in touch with the organizations that need them most.

Our platform makes it easy for you to onboard quickly and help these organizations open up their sales funnel while they do the important work of mitigating the effects of this crisis.

Cue® provides a simple agent desktop that streamlines workflow and enables phone-based agents to complete all functions of their job in one place, instead of having to navigate between multiple systems. With Cue®, agents can better assist customers, streamline training, reduce talk time, and eliminate after-call work—all with the confidence that they possess the right tools to engage every person they speak to. 

Objection Handling: Common Sales Objections & How to Respond

If you’ve worked in sales for any length of time, you’ve probably faced at least a few objections from prospects and customers. Objections don’t always have to be a hard no. In fact, when a prospect gives a reason, they’re presenting you with an opportunity to clarify or reiterate the value proposition and address their specific concerns. But objection handling is truly an art, and you have to make the most of these moments when they present themselves. Usually you only have a brief opportunity to communicate and clarify before the call or meeting comes to a close.

Here are a few common objections and some thoughts on how to address them:

We already work with [competitor or similar product].

It’s so important to understand why you’re unique—to understand why what you offer is unlike anything else—and be able to explain it in clear terms. We’re all busy people, and something made your prospect think of an existing vendor or software. This is your chance to change their mindset and explain why they need the specific value only you can provide. Make it clear you don’t want to send their current tools or process into upheaval, but you would like to take time to explain the value. 

But does your product do a specific thing or have a certain feature?

More than an objection, this can feel like an obstacle to qualifying or setting up the next appointment. It can be hard not to climb into an in-depth conversation about features, benefits, and example scenarios. Take questions like this as a sign of interest and offer to set up the next appointment with a specialist who can answer these questions and more as they come up.

Email me the information. I’ll get back to you.

If this feels like they’re brushing you off, it’s because they are. But that doesn’t mean it’s futile. Depending on when it comes up in your conversations, there’s still opportunity to get and hold their interest. For example, if you’ve already delivered your value proposition and talked about what you do, they might still be interested. But whenever it comes up, you need to understand where they are. You can ask specific questions to understand their specific needs more clearly, figure out if they don’t understand the value, or aren’t ready to discuss making a purchase. Once you understand where they are, you can respond accordingly.

Let’s connect another time/next quarter/etc.

Like you, prospects are busy and trying to make the most of the limited minutes and hours we have in a day. If they can push a call to another day, they will. But you can briefly express the value of your solution and ask them to make the time. Perhaps even clarify that it isn’t a buying conversation—you just want to show them what you do or set up a demo, and if they’re not interested then they don’t have to worry about you continuing to reach out.

But don’t forget: It’s important to know when no really does mean no. If they hear you out and still say no, it might be time to let it go. You can’t qualify a prospect against their will, and you don’t want to make them uncomfortable. 

At the end of the day, an easy-to-navigate, dynamic database of these questions and objections can help you and your team ensure and increase success. If you’d like to see what Cue can do for you, from handling objections to providing a wealth of other resources, reach out to us for a free trial.

6 Blogs Every Sales Professional Should Read

We know, it probably doesn’t feel like reading a blog is the best way to help you meet your targets. Time scrolling or swiping through a blog is time you aren’t coaching your team or refining your sales strategy, reaching out to a prospect, or updating your framework for qualifying leads.

But whether you’re an executive, a sales manager, an account executive, or a customer success rep, gaining wisdom and insight from others can help you reach your goals more quickly and effectively.

Here are a few blogs we’re reading these days to help us learn new skills, stay motivated, and refine our strategies:

Sales Hacker

Sales Hacker is great for reps, managers, and executives in B2B organizations. Rich with everything from blog posts to ebooks, webinars, and more, there are options for a variety of learning styles to get the latest strategies. On this site, you’ll find an abundances of tips for everything from social selling and sales enablement to qualifying, prospecting, and calling.

Sales Benchmark Index

The content on this blog has one purpose—to help you meet and exceed your quotas. With insights, articles, and reports on diverse topics and a variety of industries, sales managers and leaders should bookmark and return to SBI frequently.

The Make It Happen Blog by John Barrows

Barrows write in an engaging and relatable way, peppering his blogs with interviews and stories from his days as a salesperson and current work as a sales trainer with top brands. The topics he covers include addressing and anticipating common objections, giving better presentations, and more. He also has a podcast, Make It Happen Mondays.

(Here are some of our favorite business and sales podcasts.)

The Sales Leader

The title gives away this blog’s target audience, but sales reps and other team members could also benefit from Colleen Francis’ insights on pipeline management, productivity, and other best practices. If you’re looking for direct, approachable, and actionable sales strategy, this one’s for you.

LinkedIn Sales Solutions

An ever-increasing number of organizations are emphasizing social selling, and LinkedIn is often essential to a successful social selling strategy. Their blog provides the latest trends and techniques from experts in this transforming space, as well as basics for sales reps that are just getting started or implementing a new social selling strategy.

The Sales Blog

Anthony Iannarino, author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, updates his blog almost daily with insightful strategies and thought leadership content. Equal parts practical and motivational, his posts are easy to read and incorporate into a sales rep’s daily workflow.

How do you stay up to speed on the latest trends and insights?

Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Strengthen Your Customer Success Team

For many businesses, customer-facing teams are essential to their success and customer retention. In fact, federal research estimates that customer contact centers will add the most customer service representatives between 2016 and 2026—projecting 36% growth.

And as your company grows, it may become clear that a new or bigger team is needed to focus on customer success. This team is on the frontlines helping your customers achieve their goals. Tasked with providing resources and support, a customer success team is the first indication of an organization’s reliability. Simply put, it’s their job to keep customers happy.

As you think about customer retention—and the essential functions of your customer success team—here are a few steps you can take to build a strong team:

Talk to Your Customers

This one might seem obvious, but the first thing your team can do is connect with the customers that have already given you feedback. Reach out to the ones that have reported success as well as the ones that have canceled or given negative input. Learn why they’ve given this feedback, positive or negative. Do you notice any trends? Take the feedback and strategize how to meet pain points and facilitate more positive experiences with your product or service.

Develop an Onboarding Process

You’re an expert in your product, and you’ve built it in a way that your customers will find easy to use. But even the most straightforward tools and services can benefit from a defined and effective onboarding process. Your customer success team can proactively engage and teach your customers the most effective way to use your products.This saves your customers time as they’re able to avoid common roadblocks. And it strengthens your relationship with them in the early stages of their customer journey.

Provide Self-Service Resources

Sometimes your customers don’t have the time or margin to get on a phone call. Creating a searchable FAQ or knowledge base can help provide these resources. Equip your success team with the answers to commonly asked questions for their customer interactions, but also create resources for common roadblocks, like how-to articles, webinars, or video guides.

Use Surveys

As your business grows, surveys are a sustainable and scalable mechanism for determining customer satisfaction and getting feedback. Many organizations use a Net Promoter Score® (NPS), but you can also add in surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle. You might consider a survey after onboarding and or at the point of cancellation, for example. If and when cancellations happen, information is your most important asset. Understanding their needs and experience will help strengthen your customer success team and hopefully improve retention moving forward. Just keep in mind that customers can be deterred by too much communication, too—don’t overdo it!

As your customer success team grows and evolves, you may find your team collaborating with other departments, implementing new feedback tools, and coming up with new ways to measure your team’s success and metrics.

Get more visibility, build a stronger success team, and increase retention with Cue. Sign up for your free trial today!

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

5 Business Podcasts We Love

There are more than 700,000 podcasts out there with close to 30 million episodes. And whether it’s for business, education, entertainment, or motivation, approximately 62 million people listen to podcasts every week.

These numbers increase every day. As podcasts evolve, it can be hard to choose which ones to listen to. Here are a few of our favorites to stay current on the latest business trends, industry tips, and technology updates.

HBR IdeaCast

Many of us probably aspire to read the Harvard Business Review more often than we do. But it’s hard to find the time. This podcast is the next best thing. In each episode, HBR editors interview leaders and experts in business and management.

Business Wars

Get to know the challenges faced by the biggest brands in the world. Each season of this podcast analyzes the relationship (or even conflict) between two businesses competing within an industry—from Nike and Adidas to Blockbuster and Netflix and many others.

How I Built This

This NPR podcast takes a look at the origins of the most well-known and beloved companies in the world. With fresh perspective, it explores the struggles and success of companies. Episode after episode offers unique insights into the journeys of these companies and their owners.

The Modern Customer Podcast

In this podcast, Blake Morgan interviews with leaders from different customer-focused brands. Leaders from companies like Allstate, Microsoft, Wayfair, and PwC discuss what sets their organizations apart—from how they invest in their teams and leverage technology to leadership insights.

Experience This!

An encouraging and actionable podcast featuring companies and individual stories about exceptional customer experience. Each episode is entertaining and leaves us thinking about ways to make our customer experience even better than it already is.  

As a bonus, here’s another podcast to get you thinking about your work in a different way:

Weird Work

This fun, off-the-wall podcast highlights some of the most fascinating business professionals out there. The featured jobs are a little out of the ordinary at best. You might find you have common successes and struggles with even the most unusual jobs out there.

What business podcasts would you add to the list? Tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

3 Tips For Sales Coaching Success

Sales coaching is an art and a science. And it’s a key component to effective sales management. In fact, today’s sales leaders count coaching as one of their top priorities at work, investing more time and effort now than ever before. Yet not all salespeople who get coached—even by the best coaches—do better.

Keep these tips in mind to help your teams get results:

FOCUS ON THE MIDDLE

Leaders often prioritize the top and bottom performers on their teams. They want the lowest performers to meet their quotas, and they want to help the best reps keep doing what they’re doing. But what about the middle?

Sales Executive Council leaders and authors of The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adams, explored how sales reps performed and how often they met their targets—from the highest performers to the lowest. They found that coaching didn’t make as significant an impact with the weakest or strongest performers. Instead, with the right tools, average-performing reps made the most progress—successfully delivering a buying experience that led to growth and customer loyalty.

When all is said and done, who you coach matters just as much as how you coach.  

REWARDS AND INCENTIVES WORK—IF THEY’RE EFFECTIVE

Sales contests, incentives, and individual prizes work when they’re changing behaviors, not reinforcing existing ones.  It isn’t as helpful to just offer cash to the first rep that makes a sale that day.

Are there things that your sales team is doing that you’d like them to stop? Or things they aren’t doing that you’d like them to? Design your contests and personal rewards around those actions. It might look like extra incentives for team members who hit a target number of sales for a specific product or working with an individual rep to identify opportunities for improvement and rewards for that improvement.

If you’re not sure what to offer as a prize, learn what motivates your team members. Don’t be afraid to ask them directly.

LEARN WHAT DRIVES YOUR TEAM

Each person on your team is unique. And programs like rewards and incentives work best when you understand what each salesperson’s drivers are. Yes, most of them are motivated by making money, but their goals for that money are probably different. Someone might be saving for a wedding, another might be paying off student loans. And some of your reps probably work in sales because they are self-motivated and enjoy the autonomy.

Take the time to get to know your team. Learn what their priorities are in their personal and professional lives. Ask them about their short and long term goals, how they get and stay motivated, and discuss what steps to take if they don’t seem motivated—for both you and the individual rep. These insights will help you understand how to coach each individual effectively, as well as help you get a better view of your team as a whole.

And in these conversations, tell your team members how they’re contributing to the company’s success. Give them more than financial goals, setting targets that help them feel fulfilled in ways that aren’t just monetary. Help them think beyond quotas and selling specific amounts. Instead, identify what matters to them—is it breaking a company record? Or selling in a specific market/industry?

Revamping your coaching strategy? Better conversations start with Cue. Try it today!