--- title: "How we put $6,778,510 of annual commission on the book for an employee benefits brokerage in eight months. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "59 employers moved their plans across, at an average of $114,890 a year each, in a market that opens twice and closes again. Eight months. A benefits brokerage selling plan design and placement on commission, going directly at the incumbent broker at renewal. No new producers, no association circuit, no waiting for an HR director to find them. The programme is built entirely around a calendar the brokerage does not control." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/employee-benefits-brokerage" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > 59 employers moved their plans across, at an average of $114,890 a year each, in a market that opens twice and closes again. Eight months. A benefits brokerage selling plan design and placement on commission, going directly at the incumbent broker at renewal. No new producers, no association circuit, no waiting for an HR director to find them. The programme is built entirely around a calendar the brokerage does not control. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Employee Benefits Brokerage # How we put $6,778,510 of annual commission on the book for an employee benefits brokerage in eight months. 59 employers moved their plans across, at an average of $114,890 a year each, in a market that opens twice and closes again. Eight months. A benefits brokerage selling plan design and placement on commission, going directly at the incumbent broker at renewal. No new producers, no association circuit, no waiting for an HR director to find them. The programme is built entirely around a calendar the brokerage does not control. - $6,778,510 generated in 8 months, from 59 employer groups at an average of $114,890. - 2,455,281 emails to 1,812,236 companies, producing 4,580 replies at 0.3%. - 769 interested conversations became 238 held meetings and 59 signed employers. - What did most of the work: we kept the cold estate away from the domain the brokerage services its book on. - What went wrong: the programme ran at full volume through July, when nobody in benefits is thinking about renewal. 01 ## Did they get a good result? They did, and the export is printed here as it came out. In the eight months before us the brokerage wrote $2,337,417 of new annual commission, almost all of it introduced by an accountant or a payroll firm. The eight months with outbound running produced $6,778,510 from 59 employers, which is 2.9 times the baseline, with 238 qualified opportunities worth $21,158,200 still live behind them. What happenedThe number Employers who appointed the brokerage59 New annual commission written$6,778,510 Average annual commission per employer$114,890 Against the previous eight months2.9x, from a baseline of $2,337,417 Qualified opportunities still open238, worth $21,158,200 Interested conversations logged769, worth $47,908,700 Emails sent across the two windows2,455,281 Employers contacted1,812,236 Replies4,580, a 0.3% reply rate Bounce rate across the estate2.6%, on 63,837 bounces Eight months of benefits outbound, with the two renewal pushes visible in the send curve. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? A benefits programme is judged on whether it reached people who can fire a broker. 1,812,236 employers were contacted, which on its own proves only that an estate was running. The test is who answered and what happened to them afterwards. 59 employers appointed the brokerage at an average of $114,890 in annual commission. Behind them are 238 qualified opportunities worth $21,158,200, at an average of $88,900, and 769 interested conversations carrying $47,908,700 at an average of $62,300. The shape at the back end is where the list shows itself. 4,580 replies produced 769 positive ones at 16.8%, 238 of those cleared qualification at 30.9%, and 24.8% of the qualified set appointed the brokerage inside the engagement. A list pointed at office administrators produces replies and then stops moving. This one kept converting all the way down. A renewal-window month. Forty-five held conversations, against the low teens through the summer. 03 ## What worked, and why ### We kept the cold estate away from the domain the brokerage services its book on. A brokerage sends enrolment instructions, carrier correspondence and claims escalations from its own domain every working day, and an employer that stops receiving those has a live service problem within a week. None of the cold volume touched it. 465 sending domains were stood up carrying 1,396 mailboxes, every one authenticated on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX before a single send left it, all 1,396 in continuous warmup, each capped at 20 sends a day. Across the engagement the estate carried 2,455,281 sends, finished on a 2.6% bounce rate from 63,837 bounces, and held 89.0% inbox placement with zero accounts in an error state and 21 alerts raised and cleared. The estate behind the two renewal pushes, none of it on the brokerage's servicing domain. What that buys: the domain every enrolment and every claim escalation depends on stayed untouched, while infrastructure built to be thrown away carried all of the reputational risk. ### We built the list on renewal dates first and firmographics second. The buyer is an HR director, a VP of people or a CFO at an employer between 100 and 1,000 employees. That band is where a broker relationship is worth having and where the decision still sits with two or three named people. Below it the plan is too small to carry meaningful commission. Above it the account goes to a national consultancy through a formal procurement round that no email shortens. Firmographics only set the boundary. Inside it, every record was tagged with the month the employer's plan renews, and the sequence was scheduled against that month rather than against the day the record was loaded. An employer eleven months from renewal is unreachable by any email anyone has ever written. The same employer in the eight weeks before renewal will read a mediocre one. What that buys: firmographics tell you whether an employer is worth writing to. The renewal date tells you the only week in which writing to them accomplishes anything. ### We put the offer in the first email and asked a question tied to the season. The opener opens on an ordinary greeting, asks a single question about where the employer is in its renewal year, states plainly that the brokerage places and designs plans on commission with nothing charged to the employer, and only then names the kind of employer this is written for. It closes on a first name and nothing else. Putting the audience marker last means the reader has already understood the offer before being told the message was not written to them personally. Every send went out as plain text, spun line by line across the whole message, so no two employers received an identical string. The three-step sequence and the opener that carried both windows. The opener that ran in both renewal windows. What that buys: an HR director deciding whether to answer is working out what this costs them and what it costs the company. Answering both inside the first email removes the two reasons a good prospect deletes it. ### We ran three touches on even six-day gaps and pushed the volume into the windows. Three steps, six days between each, four variations on the opener and three on every follow-up, all running against each other from the first send. Even gaps were deliberate here. The sequence has to finish inside a window rather than trail out past the decision, and an eighteen-day run is roughly what an eight-week renewal approach can absorb without the last touch arriving after the employer has already signed. What that buys: 4,580 replies and 12,067 out of office responses at 0.7% came back across the two pushes. Three touches inside a live window outperform six touches spread across a quiet quarter, because the constraint is the calendar rather than the number of attempts. ### We reviewed the angles weekly and judged them on qualified conversations. Angles were scored on how many conversations survived a qualification call rather than on how many replies they produced. An angle that pulled benefits administrators with no authority to change broker was switched off while its reply count still looked healthy. Inside a renewal window a week is a large fraction of the available time, so the review had to be weekly and the decisions had to be made on the same day they were reviewed. 04 ## The five angles we test, in every market No amount of experience tells you in advance which framing a market answers. The market decides that, and the only honest way to find out is to put five framings in front of it at once and read what comes back. These five hold across sectors because they describe how a decision gets made rather than what is being sold. 05 ## 1. The timing hook Anchor the message to the moment the reader is already in. In a market with fixed renewal dates the calendar does the persuading, because a question about something the reader is currently working on reads as relevant rather than as outreach. You are about eight weeks out from renewal. Have you seen the carrier's first pass on next year's rates yet? 06 ## 2. The benchmark Show them where they sit against employers of the same size. Almost nobody knows their own percentile on contribution split or plan cost per employee, and almost everybody would like to. We pulled employee contribution splits across employers your size in your state. Want to see where yours lands? 07 ## 3. Risk reversal Move the risk across the table. Carries the most weight where the reader has already been let down by somebody doing exactly this job and expects to be again. Nothing is charged to you either way, and if we cannot beat what you have got, you stay where you are. Worth a look? 08 ## 4. The soft ask Lower the bar until agreeing costs the reader nothing at all. No call, no data request, no commitment. Only permission to send something across. Would a one-page read on how your contributions compare be useful? Happy to send it over with no call attached. 09 ## 5. The status quo challenge Question the arrangement they have stopped examining. Works where the incumbent has been in place long enough that nobody remembers deciding, and the reader knows it. How long has your broker been on the account without going back out to market? Most we speak to cannot remember the last time. 10 ## How we use them All five go live together across a split list on the first day of a window. Within two or three weeks the reply data has named the one or two this market wants, and the rest come off before they burn any more of a pool that only stays open for a few weeks. Which one wins cannot be worked out in advance. That one or two will win is dependable, and running five at once is what turns a guess into a measurement. The same five carry to LinkedIn with shorter wording and the same underlying logic. 11 ## What did not work, and what we did about it Three things went wrong, and one of them was expensive. They are printed because you will meet at least one of them on your own programme. ### The programme ran at full volume through July, when nobody in benefits is thinking about renewal. The build finished in early summer and the sequence was switched on the week it was ready. July and August are the deadest weeks in this market. An HR director in July has open enrolment four months away, no carrier quotes in hand and no reason to think about the broker relationship at all. The sends went out anyway, at the same daily rate the estate would later run inside a window, and they consumed contacts that could only be used once. Every employer written to in July was an employer we could not approach fresh in September, which is when they would have answered. The first pull, built on headcount and job title before any renewal date was attached to it. What we changed: the calendar was rebuilt around renewal dates rather than around the launch date. Every record was tagged with its renewal month, the pool was re-cut so that the sequence started eight weeks ahead of each employer's own renewal, and the summer weeks were emptied of anything except list building and estate warmup. That took the broad pool of 5,057,402 down to a working set of 2,107,251 employers whose renewal date was known, of which 1,812,236 were contacted inside a window. The same market once renewal dates were attached and the out-of-window records were removed. The first ask was a full plan review, which is several hours of an HR director's year. The opener asked for a complete review of the current plan design, contribution strategy and carrier arrangement. That is a real piece of work. It needs census data, a current benefits summary, last year's claims experience and at least two meetings, and it lands in an inbox from a brokerage the reader has never dealt with. The people who said yes to it were mostly the people with nothing to lose, which is a poor description of the accounts worth having. What we changed: the ask came down to a single question the reader could answer from memory, with an offer to send one page back on how their contribution split compares to employers of the same size. No meeting attached and no data requested. The full review moved to where it belongs, which is after the brokerage has already told the employer something true about their own plan. ### Suppression against the brokerage's existing book failed for two weeks. The client's current clients were supposed to be excluded at the point of upload. A mapping error meant the suppression file matched on domain alone, and any client whose HR contacts sat on a subsidiary or a payroll domain went straight into the sending pool. For two weeks a number of the brokerage's own clients received a cold pitch from their own broker, offering to compete against the plan that broker had placed for them. Two of them called the client to ask what was going on. What we changed: suppression moved ahead of the upload rather than sitting inside it, matching on company record, every associated domain and every named contact, with the client's book re-exported and re-checked before each window opened. The client was told the day it was found, which is the only part of this that went right. A programme running two million contacts through two narrow windows does not come out clean, and a case study without a section like this one has had it removed rather than earned it. These three corrections are the part of the engagement most likely to repeat on yours. 12 ## Why this works for employee benefits specifically Every brokerage we speak to describes the same ceiling. The service is good, retention is strong, and every account on the book arrived through an accountant, a payroll bureau or somebody who already knew a producer. That is a fine way to grow until the year you decide to double. Three features of this market make outbound work unusually well here: - The buying moment is on a calendar you can obtain. An employer's renewal date is knowable in advance, which means the market tells you when to write rather than leaving you to guess. Almost no other B2B category hands you the date. - Nothing is being sold that the employer is not already buying. Every one of these 1,812,236 employers has a broker and is already paying for the arrangement inside the plan. There is no budget to create and no category to explain, and the only open question is whether the incumbent is worth what they are being paid. - The commission recurs. At an average of $114,890 a year, a handful of appointments covers a programme like this one and then produces the same figure the following year without anybody sending another email. 13 ## Why would this work for your business? It may well not. The table below settles that faster than a call does, and reading it costs you nothing. This works ifThis does not work if Your buyer's decision sits on a renewal date you can find out in advanceYour buyers can move at any point in the year and nothing tells you when Your prospects already have an incumbent doing the job, and are paying for it either wayYou have to create the budget and explain the category before anything else happens One appointment is worth five figures a year and renews without further sellingThe account is one-off and small enough that volume can never pay for itself The decision sits with two or three named people you can identify by employer sizeThe decision goes through a formal procurement round with a committee behind it You can accept that the year's revenue is decided in a handful of concentrated weeksYou need a level pipeline every month and cannot plan around two pushes A brokerage recognising itself on the left of that table can expect the method to carry over, because nothing about this client was unusual. A regional firm with real plan design capability, happy clients and no way at all of reaching an HR director who had never heard of them. What produced the result was process, and process behaves the same against your market as it did against theirs. 14 ## Before and after Before After eight months Where new employers came fromAccountant, payroll bureau and personal introductions Direct approach into 1,812,236 employers inside their own renewal window New annual commission$2,337,417 over the previous eight months $6,778,510 from 59 employers Average annual commission per accountWhatever the introduction happened to be worth $114,890 Qualified opportunities live at the endNone being worked outside the referral flow 238, worth $21,158,200 Sending infrastructureThe servicing domain, used for everything 465 domains and 1,396 authenticated mailboxes, at 89.0% inbox placement Benefits outbound has exactly two windows a year, and they are not evenly sized. Most employers renew on 1 January, so the large window opens in early autumn and closes when quotes are signed. A second, thinner one runs ahead of the mid-year renewals. Outside those two stretches the market is not slow. It is unavailable. That is why the blended reply rate in this document is 0.3% and why quoting it without the calendar underneath it would be close to meaningless. This was never one continuous campaign. It was two concentrated pushes with a long quiet stretch between them, and the rate inside a window looks nothing like the rate outside one. Averaging across eight months describes a market that was only open to us for a few weeks at a time. The same arithmetic explains the other two figures a careful reader will stop on. 2,455,281 sends across 1,812,236 employers is 1.4 sends each, and only 321,523 leads, 17.7% of the contacted set, had finished all three steps when the export was taken. 1,426,576 of those contacts, 78.7% of them, were still new. The bulk of the list entered inside the autumn window and was mid-sequence when the window shut. So the real question for an agency running this market is what happens in the other ten months, and the honest answer is that the sending stops and the preparation does not. Renewal dates get sourced and verified. Domains get bought and warmed months ahead of the window they will be used in, because a mailbox warmed in September is useless in September. The angles get rebuilt against what the last window actually returned. The list gets re-cut, because contacts move roles and employers change renewal month more often than anyone expects. A brokerage that runs this internally usually does the opposite. It sends steadily all year because steady feels like discipline, exhausts the addressable market in the quiet months, then arrives at the autumn window with a burnt list and a cold estate, and concludes the channel does not work in benefits. The channel works in benefits. It works twice a year, at a volume the rest of the year is spent preparing for. 15 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it A short call covers it. Tell us the size of employer you want to be broker of record for, what one is worth to you in annual commission, and when in the year those plans renew. We come back with how many of them are genuinely reachable, how many sit inside a window in any given quarter, and what conversation volume that supports. If your market has no window worth building around, or if outbound is the wrong instrument for it, you will hear that on the call. Neither of us gains anything from establishing it in month five. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. 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