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White Papers

Title: The Need for a Strategic Platform to Grow Producer Networks

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Summary:

Not only do insurance carriers face increasing competition today, they must grow despite the continuing trends toward insurance product commoditization and industry consolidation. Successful carriers, the ones that will grow and acquire weaker competitors, will be those that build and manage the most extensive and effective producer networks.

A key challenge for executives at insurance carriers over the next several years will be to build an efficient process for growing and managing producer networks while also ensuring regulatory compliance. The industry has begun to use the phrase Producer Lifecycle Management (PLM) to refer to this strategic process.

While carriers have long managed their producer lifecycles, only recently have advanced technologies been made practical to fully automate PLM. Within the last 12 months, a few leading carriers have begun to leverage automated PLM technologies to create a competitive advantage.

However, to gain a competitive advantage, these carriers realize that growing producer networks involves overcoming the following obstacles:

  • A highly manual process
  • Non-standard processes
  • Lack of visibility into bottlenecks
  • Poor ability to identify the best quality producers
  • Organizational barriers between sales/human resources and licensing/contracting
  • Silos of producer information spread across several systems, but owned by none
  • Lack of an integrated platform to grow and manage producer assets

In this whitepaper, we will discuss the steps involved in overcoming these obstacles, as well as the elements needed to fully automate the producer recruitment, contract/hiring, and appointment process.

Successful execution toward efficiently growing and managing producer networks will:

  • Improve the producer relationship, essential for gaining producer mindshare
  • Increase revenue by reducing the time it takes to recruit, contract, and appoint new producers
  • Increase the visibility and effectiveness of produce recruiting
  • Reduce paper and labor costs by eliminating rework, double-entry and missing information

By adopting an automated, strategic PLM platform for producer expansion and management, carriers can leverage recent technology advances to achieve their growth goals. A strategic PLM platform delivers more flexibility and responsiveness to the organization's sales and marketing staff while enhancing the capabilities of the contracting and licensing/appointing department to act quickly and decisively to acquire and manage the best producers.