PlanSource Increases Sales Velocity With Bloomfire

PlanSource is a fast-growing benefits and HR administration software company. They’re committed to making benefits shopping and enrollment intuitive so that people get the healthcare coverage they need. They partner with insurance carriers and brokers to help thousands of organizations and their employees get access to custom benefits plans.

The Challenge

PlanSource’s sales consultants face a tough challenge that is common in the information technology sector: they’re expected to know both broad and deep information, and to be able to tap into that knowledge quickly throughout the sales process. To add to this challenge, the sales consulting team has grown quickly, and many team members work remotely. 

When Heather Moran joined PlanSource as the Director of Solution Consulting in 2017, she knew that her team of sales consultants needed a better way to share knowledge in real time during the sales process. She realized that information was being spread out across many different locations—or confined to the minds of individual employees—and that PlanSource needed to centralize all that knowledge and make it searchable.  

The Solution

Heather had solved a similar problem with Bloomfire at a previous company and recognized that PlanSource could use this platform to streamline knowledge sharing across their team of sales consultants. PlanSource’s sales consultants now use Bloomfire to store, share, and find information ranging from policies to sales decks to best practices. The sales consultants are able to share information with prospects and customers at the moment they need that information in their buying cycle, leading to a positive customer experience.

Bloomfire really gave us the opportunity to share information, bond with each other, and essentially level up in a way that we hadn’t been able to before

Bloomfire’s tagging feature is especially useful when it comes to connecting sales consultants with the right information at the right time. When a new post is published, Bloomfire automatically creates tags based on the content in that post, while also giving users the option to add tags manually. “The tags allow us to be flexible by using keywords that are commonly associated with specific use cases or asks,” says Heather. When PlanSource’s sales consultants perform a keyword search that contains a specific tag, content that includes that tag is given extra weight, helping it to rise to the top of the search results so that the consultants can get to it quickly. 

PlanSource’s sales consultants have also found that Bloomfire’s Q&A engine is a valuable tool for sharing information. Heather says that they’ve set up a “Help a Teammate” button on their Promo Bar, which lives at the top of their homepage, so that team members can quickly navigate to new, unanswered questions. “It creates a clean space for experts to weigh in on open questions,” she says. “This has been instrumental in us having a quick turnaround on answering questions.” 

According to Heather, Bloomfire has been a game changer for PlanSource, and has helped her remote team members have greater solidarity. “It really gave us the opportunity to share information, bond with each other, and essentially level up in a way that we hadn’t been able to before,” she says. 

After seeing the sales consulting team’s success with Bloomfire, other department leaders have expressed interest in the platform and see opportunities to expand its use across PlanSource’s revenue teams.