PAINS

   Low enrollment
   Broker management issues
   Low customer retention
   Inaccurate reporting
   Quoting and underwriting delays
   Marketing campaign issues
   Competitor tracking
   Low productivity
   Increasing claims costs
   Increased expenses
   Billing issues
   Profit losses
   Merger difficulties
   Multiple offices and branches
   Internal communications
   Excessive paperwork
   Decrease in service quality
   Other

PAIN DESCRIPTION:

Competition is a primary concern consistently cited by HMO CEOs, yet most companies still manage their competitor information in extremely decentralized and inefficient ways.

Marketing, Sales, and other professionals in just about any healthcare organization know how important it is to have answers to questions like: Who is in your industry and which organizations compete against you for the same customers? What are their skills, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and so on? Which target markets are they going after? How do they compare to you? And most important: How can you outsmart (outsell!) your competitor?

How comfortable are you according to the following checkpoints?

- Know your competitors
- Know competitor plan designs/products
- Run reports on your competitor data
- Compare competitor plan designs/products to your own
- Track strengths and weaknesses of competitor plan designs/products
- Sell your competitor's products strategically
- 40-60 percent share of local HMO enrollees
- Visibility in the market
- No internal competition: brokers and direct sales
- Brand recognition

PAIN ANALYSIS:

Everyday your competitive advantage against other Health Plans is being eroded by the people in your organization. Daily discoveries of why you won or lost a subscriber are made and not captured. In our experience, the easiest way to profitability is not doing more quotes, offering new plan designs, or expanding your staff. The best way is to increase your close ratio, and the most successful way to sell more in less time is to learn what does not work, avoid it, and do repetitively only what works.

Once you have captured the competitive business intelligence, inculcation is done simply by letting HMOZ show you how to apply the specific knowledge for your processes, keyword searches, and competitors library. Imagine that you might know who you compete against on a renewal even before your quote. Now you can.

With plans becoming more and more alike, your brand and service distinctions will make the difference. Positioning your competitors behind you through planting targeted landmines will help you to close more. Such positioning is delivered through automated HMOZ relationship building processes. Moreover, knowing the precise timing gives you the best advantage over your competition increasing morale with the powerful tools in HMOZ.

ADVICE:

For each competitor, HMOZ provides an easy-to-understand "fill-in-the-blank" layout so you have a place to keep info on each organization (similar screens for products and services as well). Change any field name and customize the terminology so that it fits what YOU are interested in tracking about any organization in the healthcare industry, including your own!

With a few mouse clicks, you can immediately create 17 insightful and useful reports about your competitive environment. Generate reports about competitors, plan designs, products, services, etc. in your market, straight from HMOZ.

Reports:

1. Relative Strengths and Weaknesses of Two Plan Designs.
[Shows how two competing plan designs compare to each other, feature by feature.] Used in sales, product marketing, and corporate strategy.

2. Plan Designs Comparison Matrix.
[Shows a side-by-side comparison of the attributes of any number of directly competing plan designs.] Used by sales, product marketing, executives, and new employee training.

3. Competitor Activity by Market Segments.
[Shows which companies are active in the market segments you choose to monitor.] Used in M&A profiling to look for likely targets.

4. Plan Design List by Category.
[Shows which products or services compete directly with each other.] Used by sales, marketing, and executive management.

5. Plan Designs List by Competitor.
[Shows the plan designs produced by each of your competitors.] Used by sales, marketing, and executive management.

6. Plan Designs by Market Segment
[Shows which plan designs compete in each target market segment.] Used in sales, product marketing, and corporate strategy.

7. Relative Strengths and Weaknesses of Two HMOs.
[Shows how two HMOs compare to each other on any given topic (e.g., financials).] Used in strategy, planning, M&A, sales, and recruiting.

8. General Company Information.
[Customizable profile includes key people, financials, ownership, info resources, products or plan designs, active link to their home page, etc.] Used by anyone who needs a solid overview of competitors or other key organizations.

9. Plan Designs Overview.
[Customizable profile includes summary description, strengths, differentiation, target markets, list of features, hints on 'how to sell against', etc.] Used by sales force, account executives, and managers.

10. Plan Designs vs. Market Segments.
[Shows in a graphical view which products compete in each market segment.] Used by sales, product marketing, M&A, and executive management.

11. Market Share Report.
[Shows multiple perspectives of market share information that can be sorted by year, plan design/product, market segment, and/or region. Multiple graphic formats include stacked bars, stacked area, 3D bar graph, and pie graphs.] Used by marketing and executive management.

12. Industry Information Resources.
[Shows the best places to get information on your competitors and the healthcare industry, with active hyperlinks to electronic documents, databases, and websites.] Used by analysts, researchers, or others who want to dig deeper on specific topics.

13. Distribution Channels.
[Shows general distribution capabilities of competitors.]
Used by sales management to probe for vulnerabilities and disruption points.

14. Competitors Monthly Premiums Report for Single, EE/spouse, EE/child, Family.

15. Other Carrier Report.
[Tracks number of different carriers on the same account, shows penetration rate.]

16. Competitor Monthly Premiums vs. Your HMO Monthly Premiums.

17. Plan Type/Plan Design by Account Executive or Manager Report.

More information can be obtained through the Solution Audit Step.

One Demo is better than a thousand words, and one Solution Audit is better than a thousand demos. We encourage you to follow our CRM proverb and take advantage of this opportunity.

Click on one of the three links below to continue your HMOZ research.