7. Chris Fisher: Getting Advisers In The Rooms Where Deals Get Done

Hey.

Hey.

Welcome back to the Broker's Voice. I'm excited. Today I have Chris Fisher with benefits Ally on. Chris, welcome aboard.

Thanks for having me, Andy.

Awesome. Well, I feel like everybody already knows who you are, Chris. But for the folks listening in who have no clue who Chris Fisher is, let's start with the question I love asking. Most of us did not get in this insurance industry by design. How did you find yourself in the world of health insurance?

I was exposed to growing up, so my dad was in the employee benefits industry his entire career. He was a tennis player. Graduated from, with a finance degree from the University of Texas. And as he is fond of saying, when you graduate with a finance degree, you either go into banking or insurance. So he went into insurance, spent his career on the carrier side to start, and then kind of became a benefit broker, consultant, Advisor, you know, 40 years ago now. So from the time I was, I was a little kid, he was a retail broker helping, you know, small, medium and large businesses in Houston, Texas with his own firm. So I was exposed to it from a very young age.

Well, one that makes me feel good because I'm a finance major. I didn't realize most of them go in banking or insurance, so that makes me feel better. I'm actually curious, did he play Texas at tennis at Texas?

Oh, he did. He was, he was an outstanding tennis player. Both he and my uncle, I mean, they were playing hours of Tennessee young age. So my uncle was an American at Rice, played professionally at Wimbledon, US Open, and my dad was I think the number one doubles player in the state at 16. And he was a four year letterman, full scholarship ride at the University of Texas. And despite being now in his, you know, 66, 67 years old, he could tear me up on a tennis court. And so no, they, they, he was absolute scholarship player.

Okay, so I gotta ask, what's your uncle's name?

Ron. Ron Fisher.

And he played at Wimbledon?

He played at Wimbledon, US Open. I think he made it to the semis.

Or the quarters at the US Open in doubles one year. But I mean, he grew up with Arthur Ash and he's still involved with the USTA and all those guys, so.

Wow.

So, yeah, they took it a lot more seriously. I played in high school, I was a mediocre doubles player, but I didn't make the varsity high school team. But I was not playing beyond high school.

Well, that's a really cool story. I did not. I learned something new every day about the people I interview. So that's, that's awesome. I remember as a kid, you know, sitting down, growing up, you know, I'm 44 years old, so when I was a kid watching Wimbledon and the US Open, you always watch the finals, right? And I remember watching Boris Becker, Yvonne Lendle, the guys. I forget, I forget. He's a Swedish guy and I'm forgetting his name.

No, but after Borg, but, but back in the 80s, early 90s. Anyways, tennis, that was kind of when tennis was in its heyday.

Oh yeah. I mean, ouch. Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi. But yeah, I got exposed to it through my dad. You have to close the loop on that story. When I graduated from college in 2004, I want to get in the industry, but I couldn't get a job because all. Nobody was hiring kind of new, fresh people out of college. So I actually. All the group schools that have been kind of in and both out of vogue at various stages during the last several decades were out at that time. So I went to work for Dell, had a successful career in tech sales, and then Cigna opened up their group school in 2006, 2007. So I kind of got into the carrier side at 24, 25, spent some time on the broker side, and then started up Benefits Ally. Nine, ten years ago.

That's awesome. We're going to get into Benefits Ally. The name I was remembering, Matt Vlander.

Don't know that name. But you know, and again, I rarely play tennis now, but I'm a guy.

Guys remember stupid information that's meaningless. So let's talk about Benefits Ally because you're doing some really cool stuff in that space. So again, let's start at the foundational level. People who don't even know what Benefits Ally is, take a minute or two to fill us in.

Yeah, I mean, the way that I kind of describe Benefits Ally is I am passionate about helping both benefit advisors and industry partners to just stop wasting time. There is so much noise out there in the employee benefits world and brokers, frankly are busier than ever. Right. With all the stuff that you have to go do at Benefits Ally, we're really trying to make it easy for benefit advisors to quickly and efficiently learn about new interesting programs or companies that are out there and for industry partners to quickly and efficiently share that message. And, and that's where kind of our three by three by three videos came from.

Yeah, we're going to ask. I'm going to. You're going to. We're going to go into detail on those things because those things are gaining some Pretty cool momentum. You know, what you said, Chris, is absolutely right. You think about the number of vendor partners in the health insurance industry that waste a lot of time and money going to talk to brokers that are never going to do business with them or just are not a fit for them. You know, I can't tell you how many vendor partners I've talked to that plan these trips, you know, and they don't even know if the broker they're about to go see is a fit form, but they're going to jump on a plane, book a hotel for a couple nights, spend a lot of money on meals and to only try to figure out if the broker's a fit. That's. Man, that's a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of marketing time to, to, to really find out. So talk about what you're doing because we're going to go a couple different ways with benefits. Ally here, what are you doing with the, the three by three by three videos? Because we're starting to see them pop up a lot on LinkedIn, which is great. What is your goal with those videos?

I mean the goal I think fundamentally is to have a consistent format for employee benefit brokers, advisors, consultants, to quickly learn about the things that are out there. I think one of the frustrating things for a lot of benefit brokers and advisors is they get thousands of emails and cold calls and LinkedIn messages and they all want to have these 30 minute Zoom calls, hour long webinars to explain their value prop. And you know, I always joke a little bit about webinars. I was like, I have never met a broker that is like, you know what, I'm really bored today. I wish someone would invite me to a 30 minute webinar. I have never ever met a broker who said that. And if I'm a liar, please call me out on the comments on this that you think I'm full of it, but you know I'm all about adding value, doing it quickly. So the whole concept behind these three by three by three minute videos and is we ask the three questions that if I'm a benefit advisor, I care about and those three questions are in order, what is it? You know, what do you do? Number two, how are you different if you're a telemedicine vendor, TPA, PBM, whatever, how are you different than the other 50 vendors do the same thing. And then finally, who's a good fit? You know, if you only play in self funded national accounts? Tell me that. Because if I don't work in that space, I don't want to waste my time or yours. And part of the whole format, why we call it three by three by three, is it's those three questions. But the vendor partner who's being interviewed, it's a live interview, has only three minutes and three slides to answer those three questions. So if I'm a busy benefit advisor, when I watch one of the three by three by threes from benefits Ally, I'm going to get the what, the how and the who from a live person. Not a cartoon character, a live person answering those questions. And I'm going to walk away with the information I want to know in three minutes or in less than three minutes. Go ahead.

No, no, keep going.

And the other key part of it is we're also never going to share your information with anybody. These videos are all public on our website, benefits ally.com but if you do watch the video and you're like, you know what? This is really cool. I want to talk to this guy. There's no crazy forms to fill out. You can hit the button in the upper right corner of any of our videos and automatically open up an email in Gmail, Outlook, whatever your preferred email client is, we can send a message directly to that vendor. So it's all about simplicity, ease of use, not having you waste time.

Well, here's what I want you to talk about because here's what I love about people might be like, okay, why three by three by three? You know why the three minute thing, three questions talk about. Because this is branding here. Talk about how the whole three by three by three concept plays into your personal brand.

Yeah, I mean I got a lot of it. And one of the compliments that I got, shout out Kevin Brown from NFP if you're, if you're watching this. But I was having drinks with Kevin several months ago and he made the comment that, you know, and I've heard this from other people too. You know, Chris, you always add value. You do it quickly. Like I am always not about wasting time. I get to the point and I want to do it quickly. And I think that's what a lot of brokers struggle with, is that these vendors just want to talk for ridiculous amounts of time about their, about their value prop. You know, I won't trash any particular vendors, but I saw a vendor recently who was doing something kind of the mental health well being, you know, stress management space. They made a cool product. The slide deck that I saw from them was 50 slides long. And I'm just, I am Struggling to think of any broker that wants to sit through a 50 slide PowerPoint presentation. And so the reason that I'm so passionate about this is we're all busy. Like one of the, one of the, one of the things I always talk about too. If you watch this on YouTube, this, this video, Amy will go on podcast, but also on YouTube. So if you spend any time on YouTube and everybody does, you'll notice there are always ads, right? You get the pre roll and some of the mid roll ads. And if you're like me, they, you know, force you to watch it for a while and there's like a skip thing that pops up after five or 15 seconds. And if you're like me, your finger is like perched over that, skip that, skip that thing. And so it's like if, if we don't want to watch something for 15 seconds, why do you think someone wants to watch a 30 slide PowerPoint deck? And when you have the artificial or not artificial, when you have the real constraints about three slides, three minutes, three questions, what does it do? It forces that vendor to get to the point and get there quickly. And if you're watching a video and you're like, this guy's boring 30 seconds in X, close it out. And you should. And it's going to force these vendors, force these vendors who are doing interesting stuff to really nail their value prop. So you, as a busy broker advisor, you know, consultant, can spend your time focusing on the things that matter. I would much rather you spend time on our site looking at 153 by 3 videos in 20 minutes, deciding where to invest your time rather than sitting on one 30 minute webinar going this was useless after 30 minutes.

Well, you just hit it on the head. I think a vendor partner's job is very difficult these days because number one, you're selling through the broker channels. And let's be very honest, brokers love to commoditize things. Whether you think you're different or not, they're going to commoditize you. But then when you get your chance to present, you got to be good. You can't come with this 30 slide boring present. I've seen a lot of good solutions not get sold simply because of a bad presentation. And so talk about site. Chris, you said our site. I love what you're doing with the virtual exhibit hall. So one thing, you're doing the 3x3x3 videos. How are you then now leveraging them for the benefits? Ally Insight virtual exhibit hall. Talk about that for a little bit.

Yeah, so it's a totally free site. There's no cost. Excuse me, you don't even have to register. There's no username and password. You go to www.benefitsally.com. and someone described it almost as like Instagram for benefits. Like, it's all about simplicity and ease of use. So if you go to our website, you'll see all of these videos that are available. They're all sorted from newest to oldest, so you can see kind of what's new, what's hot, what's fresh. And every video will have the name of the vendor, will have a very brief description. So again, think of it as like a giant virtual exhibit hall.

But.

But instead of having an exhibit hall where they're giving away stress balls and business cards and fishbowls where a sales rep is cornering you, you can scroll through here. Every booth will have a very brief description. We'll show you the vendor's name. We'll show you exactly how long that video is. Is it a minute, 45, 2, 28? They're all less than 3. We'll also show you when the video was recorded. So you're like, you know what? I don't know if this video is six months old or three years old. We'll show you how old it is, so you know if it's up to date. But also, we want to make it easy for brokers to filter and find the things that matter to them. So there's two ways you can search on our site. Number one, you can search by group size. Every video is tagged based on the group sizes they work with. So a lot of brokers would come to me saying, chris, I'm working on a group, 450 employees. I don't really know what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a couple new ideas to bring to the table. You can hit that site within a couple seconds. We will only show you the booths or videos that work in that segment, but we also have a keyword search where every video we have is transcribed, where every word that vendor says in that video is indexed. So if you type in the word diabetes, pharmacy, tpa, Stop loss, direct primary care, whatever keyword you search for, it will instantly scrub every single 3 by 3 by 3 video. And if the word you search for is uttered in that video, it will pop up in your results so you can focus on the things you care about. And again, unlike a normal exhibit hall that you have to fly to a conference and hang out with a bunch of other people, and that Stuff's fun. I go to those occasionally do this is 24 7, 365.

Yes. And I think there's a win win there for the broker and the vendor partner. Right. The broker gets to come to the exhibit hall and quickly scroll to find the solutions they want for the vendor partner. They're getting a lot of what I would call passive exposure. They're not having to do a whole lot of work to get that exposure because their video is sitting up on your site 24 hours, seven days a week. Talk a little, if you might, if you're willing to, metrics wise, like how many eyeballs are you seeing? Come to the exhibit hall on a monthly basis.

Yeah, it varies. Obviously your fourth quarter, it's down a little bit, but I mean it's thousands of views every single month. Even in the fourth quarter. Last rolling 30 days, we've had well over 3,000 video views, meaning someone saw a video. So that looks interesting. I want to click play play and watch that video. And I think that's part of why we like this idea of the virtual exhibit hall. You know, a lot of vendors have great videos and they live on their own YouTube channel. The problem is nobody is going to your own YouTube channel when you're a vendor. Right. You want to be, you know, you could have a great video. But if 36 people have watched in three years, who cares? Part of the idea behind this is that when someone goes to our site because maybe they want to watch a video on program A, but they happen to see your video for program B right next to going, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know that existed. Let me check this thing out. So yeah, we get thousands of views. So for any, any vendors that are watching us who want to participate, there's no cost to participate in our virtual exhibit hall. When we record a 3 by 3 by 3 video, it takes 10 minutes, typically usually a little less. We'll give you that video so you can use it in your own sales and marketing efforts. We also share it on LinkedIn where most of these videos get hundreds or even thousands of views within 48 hours. And then we'll also include it in our virtual exhibit hall and feature it in one of our weekly emails as well. So it's great, great free exposure.

I want every vendor partner that might be watching this to hear what you just said. So what I'm hearing is if I have a three by three by three video, it's going up on your exhibit hall benefits ally, which is going to get Thousands of views every month. Hopefully my video is one of the most watched. But this is an opportunity to go back to what we started the whole conversation with. Stop wasting time and money talking to brokers who aren't a fit. And, you know, I want you to go to your secret sauce, Chris, which I absolutely love. And you've been doing these for a while. I mean, I'm. I remember I met you in 2000, what, 15 or 16 at Vogue Bell, something like that. Yeah. You came in and representing benefits, Ally. It's where I, you know, we talked about patient care and stuff like that. Talk to me about these trips that you provide for the vendor partners in the industry to help them ensure, again, they're not wasting their time or their money. Yeah.

So we do these programs that we kind of call VIP trips or innovation blitzes. And the idea behind them is that I'm a big fan of selling in person. I love selling over zoom. You could absolutely close deals over zoom. But the reality is the relationships, the engagement that you get when you're sitting across a table from someone and can shake their hand or fist bump or, you know, elbow dap, whatever we're doing. You know, these days with COVID you just can't replace that stuff. You get much more focused engagement attention. But for a lot of industry partners, it's hard to get those in person meetings, especially if it's a market you haven't spent any time in before. Right. You might be a really successful group rep, you know, Atlanta like the back of your hand. But you try and come to Dallas or Phoenix or Chicago or Kansas City, you're in trouble. So we do these things that we call VIP trips, where we basically take care of all of the details. And we'll set up six meetings, a minimum of six meetings in person over two days. We've done several in the last few weeks, including Kansas City, Salt Lake City and Dallas. And we averaged, I think, eight meetings over both those days with an average number of people like 19 or 20. We met over each of those trips where we basically take care of all the details, where the vendor, all they have to do is show up and pitch and. And for the brokers, they love it because we'll typically bring in two or three vendors. So over 45 minutes, they can walk away learning about three cool ideas. You as a vendor, you're no longer having to make cold calls, desperate for somebody to call you back. If we can walk you into meetings with, you know, Gallagher, USI Regional boutique firms, nfp, Mercer Practice Leaders, At Locked In. You know, these are all people we've had meetings with as part of these VIP trips and they love it because it's an easy way for them to walk in and they know that I'm not gonna waste their time when I'm coming in with vendors. We're bringing companies in there, doing something cool, interesting, have a story to tell. So I think it's a win win for both sides. Again, all about not wasting time where don't spend, you know, you could spend weeks trying to get four or five in person meetings in a market. You don't know if we can do that for you. Take it off your plate. Let get, let you get in the right room with the right people where business gets done. That's where this, where this solves. And again it goes all goes back to this idea of not wasting time helping industry partners get in front of the right rooms and help the right benefit advisors learn about cutting edge new programs that help them and their clients well.

And I was going to ask you real quick, flip that side for a second. From the broker perspective, what's the value if you are a broker in one of the markets you're coming to? What's the value to sit down with with you and the vendor partners that are on the trip?

I think fundamentally it's about kind of curating those ideas and knowing that when I walk into one of these innovation blitzes with benefits ally, I'm going to walk away with two or three cool ideas that I can go leverage with my clients and prospects. I think fundamentally.

The employee benefits industry, your success as a consultant or advisor is about execution and being able to solve problems. And when you can walk in and, and show an employer, you know, to a couple ideas that they've never heard from any other broker before, that's a huge win. And you know, whenever we're doing one of these innovation blitzes, I will reach out to brokers. I'll be very transparent. Hey, here's who we're traveling with, here's what they do in a NutShell. Here's a three by three by three and you can decide, hey, is this worth 30, 45 minutes of my time to learn about two or three new ideas? But I challenge you are a lot of broker partners. It's where else are you going to spend 45 minutes to get in person connection, learn about three new ideas that you can walk back with your clients and prospects are. So you know, when we come to a city we typically do a max of eight meetings. So I Always tell vendors too, hey, I'm coming to eight firms. I'd love to come by you. If it's not you, it's some other firm in your market. So if you're a broker and you want to try and stay plugged in with new and interesting stuff, you know, we'd love to have you participate in one of these innovation blitzes when we come to your market, come to your city.

Well, and, and I want every vendor partner to hear what you've been talking about. I mean, the taglines on your LinkedIn banner leverage my network to grow your net revenue. Right. You're leveraging Chris's network with the advisor community to get yourself in front of the right people. So you stop wasting time and money and think about all the vendor part that want to get these rainmaker agreements and referral agreements for the people to make introductions, what you're doing for them. Chris is saying, spend two days with me and you're going to get eight meetings with the right people where the bodies are. And that's so effective.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, we were in Kansas City recently, you know, and we met with a practice leader at one top 10 firm. We met the market president of another top 10 firm. You know, these are people that are incredibly hard to get in front of. And you know, so I think, you know, the question becomes, how do you want to try and get in front of these people? You can send them 400 cold emails over a year and, you know, do you really think that this person is going to reply back to them? And I think that's really where the value comes in. If you, if you've got an interesting product that you feel like more benefit advisors should know about, let's get you in the right room to tell your story in person and do in a way where you can do what you do best, which is sharing your story, sharing your value Prop. Not firing 400 cold emails, not making a bunch of cold calls, hoping and praying, begging that this guy's going to pick up the phone and agree to meet with you. Because it's tough. It's not easy.

Well, let's wrap up here. This has been amazing. Awesome conversations. So many golden nuggets for vendor partners and brokers. If there's a vendor partner listening in who wants to get their butt on a 3x3x3, learn more about how you could help them get in front of the right people or broker saying, hey, yeah, I want to be constantly in the know of what solutions are around the corner because I want to be ahead of my competition. What are the best ways to get a hold of you?

Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. Chris Fisher benefits Ally. We're probably already connected, but if we're not connected, send me a connection request. Love to connect with you. Check out Our website benefits ally.com contact info on there as well. You could always email me or call me c. Fisher benefits ally.com or my cell phone's 832-526-8357. Love to put together a three by three by three for you. If you're a vendor partner or if you're a broker trying to stay plugged in again, feel free to message me or go check out benefits ally.com all of our 3 by 3 by 3 videos are there. Free to access 24. 7 365.

Chris, I want to thank you for your time, man. This was awesome.

Thank you so much, Andy. It was a pleasure.

If you're listening in, guys, take what Chris said to heart. Leverage this man's network. Stop wasting money, stop wasting time. Get in front of the right people. But most important, communicate your message clearly. Chris can get you in front of the right people, but you got to have a good presentation. You got to have a good message. That's where the money is made. So for everybody listening in, you know what happens when you get the clarity on your message? You get the confidence. Massive action happens. Go make it happen today.