I’ve spent much of the weekend reviewing responses to a client’s Request for Proposals for claims and managed care services. Here are a few takeaways.
1. Don’t tell how you’ve listened carefully and developed a customized approach designed specifically for the client and then talk about your California MPN if the client is only on the east coast. That’s just dumb.
2. Have someone who can actually proofread – proofread your final. Just because you ran it thru spellcheck doesn’t mean it is right. for example, ‘medial’ passes spellcheck, even when you are really trying to spell ‘medical’.
3. Either learn to write a decent document or hire someone who can.
4. Don’t talk about how you cap costs and guarantee a reduction in admin fees and then exclude case management, bill review, and other ‘managed care’ fees. The game’s up, people – payers know that’s where you make your money.
5. Don’t blather on endlessly about outcomes and quality and results if you don’t have data and compare that data to industry-wide metrics.
6. Can you really – with a straight face – say that 175 LT claims is a reasonable case load for an adjuster?
7. Address your cover letter to a person, not a title.
8. Don’t price bill review on a percent of reduction below billed charges. That’s a scam and everyone knows it.
9. Be clear about basis for pricing, include a definitions section, and be very precise about those definitions.
10. Don’t overwhelm with boilerplate marketing babble. Listen to the prospect, and show you’ve listened by writing a proposal that fits. Throwing everything up against the wall to see what sticks works only when cooking pasta.
Sep
19
Joe, excellent points in your post today…I’ve been preaching just about all of them whenever I speak, whenever I meet with clients, and whenever I have top to top meetings with the carriers or TPAs. Way to hit the nail on the head!!
Joe Picone, Chief Claim Officer, Strategic Outcomes Practice
I agree 100%. Sales people get paid very well when the bring on new business. So, if winning, or at least making a good impression is important, sales teams should make more than a vanilla effort to get more than a vanilla results. Spelling, grammar, and diction all matter. If what you write does not communicate a believable message, everyone’s time is wasted.
Joe,
Great article.
With all due respect, who cares about spelling errors when you had every reason in the world to reject the RFP for financial reasons alone?
The practice of calculating savings based on ‘billed charges’ should be prohibited, period! The game may be up with respect to certain employers who are aware how all of these fees and calculations work, however, there must still be a lot of employers who don’t ‘get it’ as evidenced by the fact that the practice of calculating % of savings fees based on billed charges still gets included in RFPs.
In spite of your best efforts to educate folks about these things, there are simply too many employers who still don’t know how to protect themselves from getting killed by abusive fees on open claims.
What’s really sad is that there will probably be another 100 RFPs from that same (anonymous) company that will be APPROVED by other employers before we get to the end of 2011. Caveat emptor, indeed.