Inside benefits placement: A conversation with the Baldwin Group

The brokers are not alright.

According to our second annual benefits placement survey (n=300+ brokers), brokers are spending nearly 40 hours managing renewals and RFPs. Spreadsheeting is still a major time sink. And chasing carrier responses continues to bog brokers down.

To bring these challenges to life, we sat down with folks who are in the trenches—day in and day out.

Nicole Negvesky, National Managing Director of Employee Benefits, and Justin Elmore, Senior Director of Client Experience for Employee Benefits, lead teams at The Baldwin Group, the 15th-largest brokerage firm in the United States.

Below, you’ll find out how their day-to-day compares to what we found in our survey, their take on where the benefits brokerage space is going, and how their teams are using technology like ThreeFlow to tame the chaos.

How the industry has changed

Higher employee (and therefore client) expectations

Twenty years ago, brokers were focused on placing a few core benefits. Now, employers are looking to deliver a much more robust benefits offering—not only to attract excellent talent, but to retain that talent over time. But they’re not willing to break the bank to get it, which ratchets up the complexity.

That ‘tacking on’ adds a whole lot more to brokers’ plates.

Knowing what additional products to recommend is just the start. Then brokers have to market to the right carriers, analyze the nuances in quotes, push back on rates—the list goes on.

“Plus,” Nicole points out, “The workforce itself has changed over the past few decades. It’s super multi-generational, and what one generation needs from an employer program is going to be very different from what another one does,” requiring even more strategic, even out-of-the-box thinking on the broker’s part.

Sweeping regulatory shifts

Paying close attention to compliance wasn’t as big a priority decades ago because there were far fewer benefit offerings to manage. Now, companies with 100 employees want and need that kind of hand-holding and double-checking to avoid penalties.

That ask is really straining brokers, especially the small ones.

Keeping up with legislative changes and providing clients with the guidance they need to stay on track is a whole job in and of itself. In fact, The Baldwin Group has even brought that expertise in-house themselves.

“We hired someone in our region who had 15 years of experience with Blue Cross and could look at large claims, project what clients need moving forward, and help us in our negotiations,” says Justin.

What this means for brokers

Their approach needs to be more consultative

With so many moving parts, clients need expert help:

• Reviewing census data
• Researching the right benefits
• Reaching out to the right carriers
• Negotiating quotes
• Explaining changes to employees
• Maintaining compliance

But they have less time to be consultative

Having the time to think critically about how to make client programs successful is what brokers really need. But they simply don’t have it.

‍Our survey data revealed that every core quoting task takes at least 6 hours, sometimes closer to 10.

That’s true across all roles, regions, company sizes, and revenues, and it doesn’t even account for the context switching brokers have to do—not all of their clients are on the same renewal schedule, of course.

Multiply that by the ten to twenty clients each broker handles, and it’s easy to see how they might end up in a worst-case scenario: having to say to a client, ‘Hey, you’re having a bad renewal season. Here’s this solution that will change the plan, and you’ve got 9 days to make a decision and sign on the line.’

That’s not the kind of service clients remember fondly.

4 ways The Baldwin Group is using technology to adapt to the evolving benefits placement landscape

To give clients a top-notch experience, brokers can’t keep doing the same things by hand. The Baldwin Group is using technology to automate the repetitive tasks and free its teams to do the high-value, consultative work clients need.

1. Managing an influx of RFPs

According to Justin, roughly two-thirds of The Baldwin Group’s clients wanted to run a full RFP in 2025. “In any given year, 25-35% of clients wanted to go to market. But because of the combined size increases and restricted budgets they had, we found ourselves marketing the majority of our clients last year.”

Normally, that would mean a whole lot more work for their brokers. But with ThreeFlow, they could:

• Go to market in minutes. Carriers are already actively using the platform, so no cover letters or emails are required.  
• Automatically collect carrier responses and discuss benefit line items within the system itself, rather than juggling dozens of email chains.
• View side-by-side comparisons and access quote history for quick and easy analysis.
• Convert those comparisons into their preferred template to share with clients (who expect a professional deliverable).
• Configure future renewal schedules based on clients’ preferred timelines, instead of setting separate reminders for each one (and hoping not to miss any).

And that automation was even more crucial because carriers were drowning in the same RFP surge. “Just waiting for the carriers to get back to us compressed the time we had to analyze the data and put together key discussion points with our clients,” Justin says.

ThreeFlow allowed his team to deliver recommendations on time and still have the bandwidth to examine various edge cases. “Clients might want to explore things like, ‘Well, what if we go back to fully insured?’ They want options, and they definitely don’t want surprises.”

2. Maintaining objectivity with carriers

Carriers are trying to push the highest rates. It makes sense from a business perspective. And clients, especially ones that are perhaps newer to benefits placement, don’t know what “reasonable rates” actually are.

As Justin puts it: “Really, it’s our job, I think, to say what’s reasonable, from a rate and a budget standpoint. We see what’s happening across our client base and can use that to inform our negotiations.”

Using Insights, The Baldwin Group can see which carriers are winning business across the org, and track those carrier rates over time. On top of that, they can dive deeper into the details, with:

• Response rates 
• Response timeliness
• Decline rates
• New business premium by carrier

All things they can use to drive marketing, client conversations, and negotiations.

3. Leveraging data for negotiation

Understanding population health is key to designing benefits plans that work in the coming year—and predicting how that will change down the line.

The Baldwin Group is using ThreeFlow to pass coverage and opportunity data directly to the firm’s AMS, carrier rating and quoting systems, and CRM, creating a unified view that helps them spot trends, project future needs, and negotiate from a position of knowledge.

Taking a data-driven approach and collaborating with their internal SMEs means Baldwin Group brokers can walk into renewal conversations ready to explain why certain strategies make sense for that specific client—and inform the introduction of new products or tweaks to future plans.

4. Creating a better work environment for their colleagues

When two-thirds of your clients go to market in a single year, something’s got to give. Either client outcomes suffer, or your team burns out. The Baldwin Group refused to accept either option.

“We’re a high organic growth firm,” Nicole explains. “But it’s hard to hire ahead of unforeseen challenges like that. So you’ve got to find ways to create efficiencies and give your colleagues a great work experience.”

The efficiencies ThreeFlow is creating are helping The Baldwin Group become what Nicole calls a ‘destination employer.’

And it’s working. Last year, the firm was named a Top Workplace by USA Today and Business Insurance and Best Workplace in Financial Services and Insurance by Fortune.

65% of brokers who use placement technology are significantly more confident in their ability to manage quoting challenges—this year and beyond.

Get a demo to see how ThreeFlow can help you do the same.