Prospecting Plans with the Lowest Ratings in Planisphere

The Ask:To win business, every financial advisor, should do their best to analyze nearby 401(k) plans. The key point here is benchmarking and choosing the right target plans. Our clients frequently ask us to help them find the best plans for prospecting, however, requires taking specific steps.The Problem:While you can find a lot of publicly available information on 401(k) plans, you need to show a plan sponsor that their plan is benchmarked correctly and that it has room for improvement. There needs to be a way to put their plan in context, because knowing the plan data is not enough. You also need to show it in comparison with other similar sized plans to come up with a decent analytical report and proposal.

The Solution:Planisphere has its own benchmarking system, so advisors can show a plan sponsor exactly how their plan is performing compared to others. All you need to do is select the plan you’re interested in and go to the Plan Performance section:As you can see here, this sample plan performance rating is below average (39.17 out of 100), which might be a good starting point for a conversation with the plan sponsor. The overall plan rating is based on several factors that you can check in the Benchmarks section.But what should be done if you want to find as many plans with low performance as possible for better prospecting? You can do just that from the Search screen:

A basic assumption for underperforming plans is 40 out of 100 or lower, so you need to go to the Primary Criteria and set it up in the Plan Score Performance section like it’s shown in the picture.After the search criteria are set you can click on the Find button on the top to see a list of plans with the lowest performance rating. With Planisphere, you can go ahead and create a report for any one of them, or simply export all results into one spreadsheet for future reference.