What sales automation costs a benefits agency, and what the hand work costs now

How does DoBetter price a sales build?

Every DoBetter build is a fixed fee, scoped after discovery. It works in four steps:

1. A free intro call. It takes 30 minutes.
2. A $1,500 paid discovery. Half is credited to your first month, and it’s a full refund if I can’t help.
3. A fixed fee build.
4. Optional monthly support.

Nothing is billed by the hour. I’m Chris Cordon, and I run discovery myself.

What makes a sales build cost more or less?

The biggest driver of a sales build is the number of carriers whose quotes it has to read. Every carrier lays out its quote PDF differently. The first job is to take every quote from every carrier your agency gets and have a custom agent map where the rates are and where the plan designs are. Five carriers is a smaller job than fifteen.

Other things that move the price:

How many tools.

A proposal generator alone is smaller than a proposal generator plus renewal comparison, a deal room, and a notetaker.

How the proposal should look.

A proposal built on your agency’s brand guidelines, with your photos and cover designs, takes more setup than a clean default.

Rate tables.

Ancillary and voluntary products need their rate tables loaded, like dental priced by zip code and life and disability by SIC code.

How many people use it.

One producer is simpler than a team with separate logins and saved producer details.

What it connects to.

Creating the group in your enrollment platform, or dropping meeting summaries into your CRM so they’re ready to paste into a deal room, means connecting systems.

What does it cost to keep doing proposals by hand?

Doing proposals by hand costs the account manager’s time on every single quote. At my agency, we sent the carrier’s quote as is, like most brokers were told to. When a client needed more, the account manager rebuilt everything in an Excel spreadsheet and made the graphics with no design experience. The bottleneck was our account manager, by no fault of their own.

The cost is proposals that go out late, look like carrier paperwork, or don’t go out at all.

What does it cost to do renewal comparisons by hand?

A renewal comparison done by hand costs time first and accuracy second. A typical renewal has 2 or 3 plans. Someone has to find last year’s quote, hand type the comparison, and do the increase math. “The only thing wrong about doing it by hand is the absurd amount of time that it takes. If you try to get it done fast, that’s where you miss a rate, do the wrong math, and go blind from all of the individual cells in the Excel spreadsheet.”

A wrong rate on a renewal costs more than time. The client catches it, or worse, doesn’t.

For an outside benchmark, Plansight, which sells renewal software to brokers, says brokers save five or more hours per client renewal with its tool. That’s their number for their product, and it gives a sense of how much hand work sits inside one renewal.

What does it cost to go without meeting notes?

Going without a notetaker costs the details you didn’t write down. When I left the company that paid for Fireflies, I was running meetings and running out of yellow notepads. I can’t put a number on what my notetaker saves me. In my experience, the summary is saved within 60 seconds of the meeting ending, and my agent picks up the follow up from there. Before that, follow up depended on my handwriting.

Quick answers

Is there a refund?

Yes. If discovery shows I can’t help, the $1,500 comes back.

Can I start with just the proposal generator?

Yes. It’s the build I’d start most agencies with.

Is there a monthly fee?

Only if you want ongoing support. The build itself is a fixed fee.

Do you charge per proposal or per user?

No. The fee is set by the scope of the build.

Why isn’t the build price on the site?

Because it depends on your carriers and tools, which discovery sorts out.