4 Strategies for Navigating Insurance Partner Management

Insurance is a business built on relationships, and that’s true even at the corporate level. Agencies, carriers, and producers work hard to recruit and retain good business partners, and to be good business partners in return.

But being a good partner and checking in on whether you have the right partners in place in your distribution channel has changed a lot since the days of handshake agreements and captive agency relationships. Instead, carriers may have hundreds of downstream distributors, and each agency may have relationships with dozens of carriers in just a single line of authority.

How can a business cut through the noise to understand the value they bring to their partners, evaluate which relationships are driving their business forward, and ensure a mutually beneficial and frictionless relationship?

In the modern world, it pays to have a modern infrastructure. Before you invest in a new partner management solution, it helps to understand what aspects of your current partner management are in need of a glow-up. 

Following are four things you should look for to make your partner management easier and more productive today.

1. Complex hierarchy structures matter

If you’re currently using a tech solution for your partner management, chances are you often have to shoehorn your own organization and your partners’ relationships into two-dimensional flowcharts. But that’s not how insurance distribution works. Carriers might use MGAs to distribute their products, or they might work with an FMO that contracts with a hundred downstream firms, each with their own relationships, preferences, downlines, and commission structures. You need a solution that can accurately articulate the hierarchies and relationships that connect you, your business partners, and their business partners.

For agencies, working with a tech solution that forces them into a flat hierarchy management means their staff must also maintain a database of detailed instructions for who runs a downstream firm, how many downlines they have to maintain in their contract, and details for where these hierarchies overlap or intersect in different regions. 

For carriers, having only a 2-D understanding of your business partners in your management system means more pending commissions, more “return to sender” notices, and less understanding of who in your distribution chain plays a crucial role in selling your products, and who’s more trouble than they’re worth.

???? Stop working with partner management systems that force you to pretend your distribution looks like a paper-drawn circuit board. At AgentSync, our structure allows carriers and agencies alike to build partner hierarchies that can look one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. By capturing the full range of complex partnerships and how they change based on line of business or region, you can more accurately understand your business structure, your commission payments, and your most important contacts.

2. Bulk data ingestion provides transparency and easy M&A cleanup

Some of the most frustrating aspects of successfully executing a merger or acquisition are in the administrative lift. Who keeps what appointments, who’s licensed where, who already had a contract with you through a different relationship… The sheer lift of information is, simply put, a pain.

If you work with a solution that can handle bulk data ingestion and that synchronizes data with the industry source of truth, the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR), you can cut the administrative load to a fractional size regardless of whether you’re the business doing the M&A or whether the M&A activity affects your upstream or downstream partners.

For a business undergoing the M&A yourself, within minutes of uploading your new acquisition’s distribution data, you’ll have a transparent look at the scope of their sales pipeline, how tight their previous compliance and administrative processes were, their relationships, and the risks and benefits you’re taking on. 

If you’re a carrier or upstream agency whose downstream partners are going through this M&A process, it’s equally advantageous to have a partner management solution that allows for bulk data ingestion. This means being able to easily issue contracts to new agents, apply for new appointments without overlapping and double-paying for already appointed agents, and verify that your new downstream partners have the proper licenses without having someone on staff hunt down every single new agent’s data. 

3. Unlock your business data for key insights into your partnerships and competitive intel

Who else does your top-performing agent work for? Which carriers have appointments with your best producers in the states you want to expand into? Are your most expensive partners also your most profitable partners, or do you have whiny, high-touch business partners that offer little in the way of distribution value? 

The answers to these questions can seem impossible to obtain without the assistance of some competitive intel sleuthing, cross-referencing 20 spreadsheets, and hours of weekend analysis. But this data is actually widely available in your own system if you work with a platform that synchronizes data with NIPR. 

By working with a platform that integrates your partner data with your other systems, like commission payments and client relationship management tools, these reports become at-your-fingertip intelligence. Don’t just guess at which of your partners is worth the investment – know. After all, you’re not really engaging in partner management if you can’t manage – or even view – the data you have in your own systems about your partners.

4. Portals for superior management

A massive part of successful partner management is maintaining a stellar reputation and constantly reducing the friction in your relationships. But, similar to the administrative lift required when your partners engage in M&A activities, daily data management can be a huge impediment to your relationship. 

By empowering your partners with custom portals that integrate producer profiles with the industry source of truth, you can reduce friction and administrative lifts.

For instance, if an agent at one of your downstream partners moves, they may have to submit that address change to their state or to NIPR, and they could have to send in their address change to each of the various teams at your organization. Worse, they might only notify one of the teams you work with, and you may end up with bad data living in different parts of your business – disparate addresses in your CRM and your commissions payment system, for instance. With portals that integrate producer data across the entire business, your agent has a single point of contact for your business, allowing them to own their data, and to even push it to NIPR and their state via your portal.

This not only reduces friction with your partners, puts them in control of their data, and reduces your administrative load, it also positions your business as the highly sophisticated partner you are. 

The future of partner management

Managing the diverse partnerships of your business and evaluating what – and who – is working best for you is an essential piece of maintaining an efficient business that can intelligently scale up and down in response to shifting market conditions.
AgentSync is the leading edge of partner management, allowing you to unlock your own data for better business decisions, to reduce friction with your distribution partners for an unbeatable reputation, and to ensure you have integrated and automated constant compliance. If you’re interested in seeing how we can help you meet your partnership goals, schedule a demo today.