Last April, Judy Diamond Associates released Retirement Plan Prospector+, a brand new upgrade to Retirement Plan Prospector that features an extensive collection of tools to boost retirement plan prospecting, from back office marketing support to advanced data analytics. One of the features introduced in the Retirement Plan Prospector+ update is the ability to benchmark retirement plans on a level of granularity that hadn’t been possible before.
The Plan Scorecard is a form of retirement plan benchmarking, but the default views available through the Plan Scorecard aren’t always the most useful when looking at how a plan stacks up compared to its peers. For example, looking at the Plan Score by industry won’t always give you a good benchmark when you want to compare a small five-person CPA firm when the pool of plans you’re benchmarking by industry against including huge, multinational accounting firms with thousands of employees.
Our Benchmarking tool is the solution to getting the best benchmark possible for every kind of plan by allowing you to build your own set of criteria to benchmark against. We even provide an algorithmically defined peer group for many of the plans in the database, so you don’t have to make your own. It’s easy as saving a search using the criteria you want to benchmark against and pulling up the Benchmarking tool when you’re on the Plan Details page of the plan you want to benchmark. If you don’t have access to the Benchmarking tool in your version of Prospector, you can call (800) 231-0669, option 1 to speak with a sales representative to learn about upgrading to Retirement Plan Prospector+.
The applications of the Benchmarking feature are endless. You can define your peer group for a potential prospect to see how the plan currently stacks up against its peers, and you can use any weaknesses or shortcomings you find to build your talking points when you have your meeting with the prospect. You can even create a saved search for your own plans to use as a benchmark to either monitor their performance against the competition or use as a selling point to potential prospects by noting the strength of your plans’ average performance against their current plan performance.
The Benchmarking tool is just one of the many great features included in Retirement Plan Prospector+, and learning to use it effectively will be a massive boost to your prospecting efforts. If you need help with using any part of Prospector+, we have weekly training sessions available with our experts that you can sign up for, and you can call our support line at (800) 231-0669 from 9 am to 5 pm EST.