A native of Orlando, Florida, Kristen Appleman began her HR career in the Sunshine State, but has since moved to Atlanta, Georgia. She serves as Senior Vice President for Health, Wealth, Tax, Compliance, and Business Development with ADP TotalSource.
Just a few weeks ago, during our 2022 Annual Member Meeting, she was elected to serve as NAPEO’s 2022-2023 Board of Directors Chair. A dynamic leader with a passion for service, Appleman is excited to take on the new role, and she’s prepared to develop a plan to lead the industry forward. She spoke with PEO Insider® to share more about her background, career, plans, and goals for this upcoming year.
Hiring sales talent feels like diving into the shallow end. The pool of job-seeking sales business development executives is sparse. We have the new-to-PEO applicant that may demand high wages and bring minimal professional or sales experience. We have the tenured “retread” that applies to all of our postings, demands high wages, uses our offers against one another, and seems to be with a new PEO every 18 months.
Random acts of marketing are when a business is stuck in an endless cycle of short-term marketing experiments: an email blast is tried this month, a webinar next month, and social media ads the month after that.
While random acts of kindness usually result in good feelings for both the performer and the recipient, the same can’t be said for random acts of marketing. Instead of good feelings, business leaders who are stuck on a “hamster wheel” of random acts of marketing find themselves disappointed and frustrated.
PEOs are often on the forefront of new and innovative ideas to help employers and employees grow their enrollment. One idea that has recently gained traction in the health insurance market is the Individual Coverage HRA, or ICHRA1. ICHRAs are a new type of group health insurance that can provide significantly lower premiums and offer another avenue to win or retain business.
While the pandemic may have reinforced the benefits of marketing, savvy business and marketing leaders have always recognized the importance of marketing to establishing a company’s image, supporting sales strategy, delivering key insights and developing new prospects. The past several years have proven the ability of a strong, well-funded marketing department to accomplish four important objectives.
Over the summer, NAPEO commissioned Povaddo to facilitate focus groups among business owners to determine what prevents and facilitates the using of PEOs. Three in-person focus groups were conducted in New York City in July, followed by eight additional online focus groups. Participants were divided into four categories: Large businesses with hourly employees; large businesses with salaried employees; small businesses with hourly employees; and small businesses with salaried employees.
Large businesses were defined as having 36-150 full time employees, while small businesses were defined as having 11-35 full time employees. All focus group participants were either business owners or primary decision makers of hiring professional services.
It’s time to come to terms with the biggest hurdle in marketing right now: people don’t trust you anymore. Don’t take too much offense — people don’t seem to really trust anyone these days, but the fact remains that they don’t trust you either. According to the Edelman 2022 “Trust Barometer” survey, 63% of people believe businesses are "purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations." So in an environment like this, how do you reach customers through marketing and advertising? In the past, the answer was simple: prove it. Providing data or showing statistics about the impact of having a PEO was enough to lend credibility to claims of benefiting small businesses. However, that moment is over. People are increasingly skeptical of the marquee numbers we’ve been using to tout PEOs for the past several years.
For today’s PEOs and the employers they represent, attracting and retaining talent requires facing challenges on multiple fronts. Workers’ priorities have shifted to center on health and wellness in the wake of the pandemic. Employers must recognize and support the “whole employee,”and attend to employees’ needs both on and off the clock. Runaway inflation has further raised the stakes, compelling small business employers to help their staff manage a higher cost of living amid steeper supply costs. And the Great Shuffle has heightened the competition for talent, empowering employees to leave if their needs are not met.
Palm trees. Sunshine. Buzz of voices. We enjoyed all that and more at our annual conference in beautiful Palm Springs. Reflecting on the event took me back to my first experience with a PEO over 20 years ago. You see, I started my career in human resources, and the SMB I worked for used a PEO. Can you believe it? Whether it was destiny or coincidence, even back then, it was easy to fall in love with the PEO model and perhaps no surprise that I later went to work for a PEO in a field HR services role. Talk about being a kid in a candy store! I was exposed to different industries, ownership structures, sizes, and business needs — learning and growing along the way.
As I write this, I have just returned from our 2022 Annual Conference and Marketplace in Palm Springs – and what a conference! I think every conference has great energy around it, but this year it seemed particularly powerful. I think in part, it was pent-up demand from everyone, happy to be meeting without restrictions. When we planned this event in California, we assumed we may have some fall off in attendance because of the geography, but we like to spread the conference locations around. As it turns out, where we had about 850 attendees last year, we had a thousand attendees in Pam Springs – just outstanding.
Crisis communication is a large part of that response plan. It includes the collection, organization, and dissemination of timely and factual information to mitigate the impact of a crisis. It’s the dialogue between your PEO, your clients, and respective stakeholders before, during, and after an incident. Effective crisis communication planning takes the confusion and panic out of a crisis and replaces it with accurate, clear information and reassures that help is on the way.
In my last article, we covered the role of the salesperson in the underwriting process and the important documents we need to gain from prospective clients to effectively underwrite them for a proposal. In this article, we are going to talk about something very exciting - your proposal request form. Don’t go too crazy on me, because this is a very important document to effectively build your business case.