Advisory Tools Help Insurance Brokers Scale Significant Growth. Here’s How.

Brokers want to drive growth and deliver insights. As they move downmarket, the number of customers increases, making those customer-focused insights more of a challenge as their time per customer goes down.

Ineffective processes don’t help.

Most firms are still running uphill with a broken discovery process that fails to identify all of the customer’s needs and misses on growth opportunities.

This isn’t a new problem. It’s more fixable than ever.

Related: how 9Lenses helps insurance companies

Discovery Is Where Momentum Is Lost

Discovery is the linchpin of consultative sales, but in practice, most brokers and producers are forced to rely on informal questions, tribal knowledge, and one-off conversations.

This doesn’t scale. Even your best people can only have so many well-researched, high-quality conversations in a given week!

This is where digital advisory tools come in: they remove friction and subjectivity. These interactive assessments create a simple way for customers to provide updated information and feedback, and then they pair those with internal insights, documents, and training to provide real-time recommendations.

These tools make it easy for a broker to identify gaps and surface additional areas of need without having to run a full diagnostic on their own.

Just as important, they provide a simple handoff mechanism: A benefits advisor can introduce their colleague on the P&C side with confidence, knowing that the client conversation is grounded in real insight, not just a sales pitch.

These tools don’t replace the broker’s role. … they elevate it.

They let brokers show up with expertise from the first meeting. They give clients a sense of structure and clarity. And they turn cross-sell from an awkward internal pass-off into a value-add for the client.

The Cross-Sell Gap

This solution compounds growth when you consider how many clients only ever hear from one part of the business. A benefits client might never talk to the P&C team, or a P&C client might have their health insurance elsewhere.

In one Fortune 500 firm we work with, only 20% of property and casualty clients had health benefits with the same provider. That means 80% were buying health products elsewhere despite already being customers.

That means 80%were buying benefits from someone else, despite the competitive advantage of being familiar with this company as a current customer!

The cross-sell potential is huge, but because these teams typically operate as entirely-separate business units, getting brokers to collaborate across silos in a way that’s natural and removes relationship risk is the way forward.

There’s another key around going downmarket.

Related: how carriers must focus on breaking down internal silos

Going Downmarket Without Losing Touch

Smaller businesses need the most help because they don’t have in-house risk managers or HR specialists. Yet they’re also consumers, so they still expect a modern, digital buying experience.

Brokers and carriers both want to serve this market. But doing it well means scaling what used to be a very hands-on process, from researching the customer to looking over their existing portfolio of products and mapping that to their changing business needs (usually with a phone call).

That’s where technology comes in: it’s not automation for the sake of efficiency, but tools that actually make it easier to be consultative at scale.

By sending an advisory tool in advance of an upcoming meeting, the customer gains immediate value and the broker/producer identifies any new needs or previously-unidentified pain points.

And now, the conversation isn’t about checking in and getting updates, it’s about topics that matter most to the customer.

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about giving your best people better tools.

Carriers Aren’t Adding Value

One of the biggest challenges brokers face is that carriers often default to transactional support. You send over a spec, and they send back a quote. That’s the extent of it.

But when all we get is a document with pricing, we’re left doing all the work to interpret it, align it to what the client really needs, and explain why it matters. And if we’re doing that across multiple carriers? It’s time-consuming and puts brokers in the position of having to guess at the story behind the numbers.

We’re seeing a few forward-thinking carriers start to shift this, but it’s a major gap in the market today.

Wins For Everyone

Here’s what transforming your discovery process – and surrounding processes related to it – provides the growth opportunities you want:

• For brokers: less friction, better client conversations, and more business across your existing book.
• And for the end customer: a better experience with more clarity and more confidence in their decisions.

It starts with modifying your process to bring out the best for your customers.

The tools already exist to support this enhancement to how you do business today … and with 9Lenses, brokers are already using them to turn conversations into consultations that grow accounts.

Get a demo to see how!