Most health and welfare consultant RFPs ask too many questions and learn too little. A typical questionnaire runs past a hundred items, and most of the answers describe capabilities every credible firm already has: national carrier relationships, compliance support, an analytics platform, a renewal process. Every response says yes. None of it tells you which firm to hire.
The questions worth asking are the ones that make firms different from each other. They fall into five areas.
The people who will actually do the work
A firm is chosen on its reputation and experienced through a handful of people. Ask about those people by name.
Who would lead the relationship day to day, and who would they report to inside the firm?
What percentage of each named person's time would be dedicated to your account?
How many other clients does each of them currently serve?
Who would be the backup if the lead is unavailable or leaves?
Who from the proposal team would not be on the account after the decision?
That last question is the one most RFPs skip. The answer tells you how much of what you see during the process is the team you will actually get.
How the firm thinks about your situation
Capabilities are easy to describe. Judgment is not. Give firms a real situation and ask how they would approach it.
What would you focus on in the first 90 days, and why?
What do you see in our situation that we may be underestimating?
Where would you push back on us?
What would you need from our team to do your best work?
Written answers here are useful, but the real test comes later in the process, in conversation. A firm that writes well and cannot hold the same thinking in a live discussion has told you something important.
How the firm works day to day
Most relationships that go wrong do not fail on strategy. They drift on service.
How do you handle routine requests, and what turnaround should we expect?
How will you report on your own performance, and how often?
How do you escalate an issue with a carrier or vendor on our behalf?
Tell us about a client relationship that went wrong. What happened, and what did you change?
Fees and every form of compensation
Ask for compensation in a consistent format from every firm, at the start of the process.
What would your total compensation be, broken out by fees, commissions, overrides, bonuses, and any other direct or indirect compensation?
Would any affiliate of your firm receive compensation connected to our account?
How would compensation change if our plans, carriers, or headcount change?
Would you work on a fee-only basis, with commissions removed or credited back?
Group health plan sponsors are entitled to disclosure of broker and consultant compensation under ERISA. Asking early and in a standard format makes firms comparable and avoids surprises at contract stage.
Fit with your organization
The best firm in the market can still be the wrong firm for you.
How do you prefer to work with an internal team like ours?
What kinds of clients do you do your best work for, and which are not a good fit?
If we were to end the relationship in three years, what would most likely be the reason?
Firms that answer these candidly are usually the ones worth continuing with.
Questions to cut
Shorter RFPs produce better answers. Consider dropping questions that every firm will answer the same way:
Lists of carrier relationships and national office locations
Generic descriptions of compliance, technology, and analytics capabilities
Firm history and ownership beyond what is needed for due diligence
Long lists of references, when three well-chosen ones will tell you more
Asking the right questions is only half of it
The questions above sharpen a written process. The answers that matter most still come from watching each firm's actual team work through your real situation with you, rather than from what it writes or presents. A well-designed search puts the written questions first and the live working sessions after, so the decision rests on both.
Docent runs independent searches for benefits brokers and health and welfare consultants, with no commissions and no stake in who wins. See how an advisor search works →
Related: How to Run a Benefits Broker RFP (and What a Typical One Misses)