Introduction
Outdated Employee Benefits
Traditional, one-size-fits-all benefits packages are no longer enough in today’s hybrid and remote-first workplace.
Over the years, there’s been a considerable gap between employees and their companies. A recent survey revealed that only about half of employees are satisfied with their benefits.
A common cause of this dissatisfaction is when employees are unaware of what benefits they have or if their benefits don’t support their lifestyle.
This is where Benepass comes in.
Better Benefits By Benepass
Benepass is a modern fintech platform that delivers personalized employee benefits at scale.
Recognizing the outdated and ineffective one-size-fits-all model, the company provides a flexible platform to administer modern benefits tailored to diverse employee needs.
Ideal customer profile (ICP): Benepass serves mid-market and enterprise companies across various sectors, including tech, healthcare, finance, and nonprofit organizations, with the number of employees ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands.
Value Proposition: In addition to offering a more streamlined benefits experience for employees, Benepass’s value proposition extends to the employer itself. Offering a comprehensive benefits package not only helps companies attract top talent but also helps them retain their existing workforce.
By partnering with Benepass, companies can offer a benefits package spanning multiple partners and offerings without needing the administrative capacity to manage it.
Key Takeaways: Diving Into Benepass’s Growth Story
I had the privilege of speaking with Jacylen Chen, the Co-founder and CEO of Benepass. This article highlights the go-to-market motion that accelerated the company’s growth.
If you are in a rush, here are the key takeaways.
- Collaborate with channel partners to build credibility and extend your product reach
- Use specialized roles to improve the efficiency of your sales team
- Leverage a pricing structure that supports organic expansion
Collaborate With Channel Partners To Build Credibility and Extend Your Product Reach
Educate stakeholders who influence the buying journey
The biggest unlock to Benepass’s growth was learning which stakeholders shape a customer’s purchasing decision.
Through conversations with early customers, Benepass learned that health insurance brokers acted as trusted advisors to key decision-makers (e.g., Heads of Benefits and Total Rewards).
Recognizing this relationship, the company started educating the broker market about its product offerings and sharing various client use cases.
This strategy empowered brokers to assist their clients better while establishing Benepass as a credible player in the industry.
As brokers learned about Benepass’s services and value proposition, they evolved into evangelists, extending the company’s reach by recommending it to their broad client base.
Each broker typically served between 10 to 20 clients, and through these relationships, Benepass successfully increased its brand awareness and generated warm leads.
Create content around industry insights to build awareness and attract demand
To further amplify the ‘educating the market’ strategy, Benepass published content that answered a pressing question for companies: “What is everyone else doing?”
After realizing companies were eager to stay competitive with their benefits, Benepass started publishing benchmarking reports and SEO-optimized articles based on industry standards and trends.
This move positioned Benepass as a thought leader and provided an effective channel to garner leads. In fact, Benepass’s 2022 Benefits Benchmarking Guide is one of the company’s most successful pieces of content.
Beyond annual reports, Benepass also has an extensive library of content to help educate companies on all things benefits. From topics like Benefits 101 to Leadership Insights, Benepass’s blog is a repository of resources that companies can keep referring back to.
As a result, Benepass’s content strategy drives awareness and demand at the top of the funnel, while the company’s specialized sales team focuses its effort on closing deals.
Use Specialized Roles To Improve the Efficiency of Your Sales Team
Have BDRs outreach to warm leads to improve your top-of-funnel conversions
In a traditional sales funnel, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) usually drive top-of-funnel activity through outbound initiatives. But this sales process can prove to be inefficient.
Benepass discovered that having SDRs cold call and email prospects was time-consuming and didn’t achieve the highest ROI. Reps would spend most of their time just trying to get on the phone with a cold prospect who typically didn’t want to be called.
As a result, the company pivoted Reps into more of a Business Development (BDR) role where they focus on reaching out to warm leads.
The company’s marketing efforts supported this transition from a cold outbound to a warm outreach motion. Using data insights like search results rankings and article click rates, Benepass focused on creating content that aligned with what prospects were already looking for.
By using targeted content for every stage of the buyer’s journey, the company was able to warm up leads and pave the way for BDRs to establish contact quickly.
This approach increased a Rep’s productivity by allowing them to spend less time trying to connect with cold prospects and more time qualifying potential opportunities.
Increase your sales team productivity by specializing their roles
To further refine the company’s sales engine, Benepass realized the importance of specialization to improve efficiency.
It’s common for early-stage companies to have their team cover all aspects of the sales funnel. But as your company grows, specialized roles are needed to scale the sales engine.
This transition occurred organically for Benepass. Instead of having Account Executives (AEs) cover all stages of the pipeline, they mostly focus on closing deals, while the BDRs qualify the leads.
However, scaling your business isn’t just about growing your team; it also involves having a pricing model that grows with your customers.
Leverage a Pricing Structure That Supports Organic Expansion
Use a pricing model that scales with your customers
Your company’s pricing model is more than just a way to generate revenue; it’s also a way to support your customer’s growth while improving your net dollar retention.
For Benepass, that meant having a pricing model that scales alongside its customers. The company structures its pricing as a function of the customer’s size, determined by the number of seats they buy (i.e., the number of employees) and the number of spending accounts they maintain.
As a customer hires more employees, they naturally add more seats and spending accounts. This leads to organic expansion in revenue for Benepass without additional sales efforts.
A payments layer can be a great driver of organic growth
In addition to adding more seats or spending accounts, Benepass’s organic expansion comes from customers funding more dollars into their benefit programs.
Around 70% of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions, while the remaining 30% is generated through interchange and interest income.
Each time an employee swipes the Benepass card, the company earns a percentage of that payment.
If an employer increases their benefits account – say from $100 to $150 a month – spending increases by 50%. This, in turn, has the potential to increase Benepass’s fintech revenue by 50%.
Lessons Learned and Recommended Resources for SaaS Founders
At the end of my interview, I asked Jaclyn what lessons she learned running Benepass and what resources she recommends to other SaaS founders. Here’s what Jaclyn said:
Lesson from the founder: Double down on decisions quickly
As an early-stage founder, you need to make a lot of decisions quickly with a relatively limited set of data.
You don’t have six months or $50,000 to invest in every experiment in the hope that it will be successful. So you need to grasp the straws (i.e., strategies and tactics) early and say, “Hey, it’s sort of working, let’s just double down on this.” And that comes from a combination of data and gut feeling.
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