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Creating a benefits strategic plan for your clients (50 lives and larger) is a great way to engage clients in a discussion about what are they trying to accomplish with their benefits program and expenditures over the next three to five years. Your clients are going to be coping with all the market dynamics and the rippling effects of regulatory compliance, so what they need is a process for managing change. And you can be their "change agent."

Throughout his 35-year career in the employee benefit business Larry Brodsky has come across few opportunities to introduce a product to an employer that is both new and almost universally appreciated. The president of Lawrence S. Brodsky Agency in Palatine, Ill., found such a product about two years ago after a Web search for pet insurance introduced him to Pet Assure. Not an insurance program - but a discount plan for pet owners.

How well is your agency managed? Is it being managed to generate maximum top-line revenue and maximum bottom-line profit?

When HHS published its template for a Summary of Benefits and Coverage my first thought was, "Wow, this looks a lot like the summary information available in my products and many other products on the market. Now we have yet another version of how to communicate benefits to consumers, and we have the government telling the experts how to do something we have been doing for years."

With health care reform swirling all around us and impacting the way we all do business, I'm switching gears for a moment to focus on our future by glancing back at our past. Remember the pride you felt when you graduated college? Good grades, good memories and a diploma . . . your ticket to dreams of a bright, successful future - do you remember asking yourself, "OK, now what?"

Benefits sales technology can help you sell more. It's a proven fact, but unless you've tried the right technology and someone trained you how to make the technology sing like a song bird, you would not know.

If you are like most of the group health insurance agents that I speak with you sell new groups one of three ways: 1) You wait for the occasional referral; 2) You call companies asking for a chance to quote on their health plan; 3) You call companies asking for an opportunity to stop by and introduce yourself.

The Hartford's recent announcement to divest its retirement division has more to do about the economy and the parent's corporate direction, perhaps instigated by an activist investor, than it does about the quality of its retirement business.

The pending implementation of the Department of Labor's new rules on fee disclosure was one of several topics that had hundreds of financial advisers, consultants, fiduciaries, IRA experts and record keepers gathered in the Big Easy, at the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries 401(k) Summit buzzing with nervous anticipation.

The concept of value-based benefit design is still an evolving one, but it boils down to the market's effort to determine how to best derive value out of a health care plan, says Stephanie Elliott, director of activation strategies at UMR. EBA spoke with Elliott and client Rebecca Shipley, director of total rewards at Vail Resorts, about the success Vail has achieved in a few short months by using VBBD with its unique employee base.