Look, if you’re a producer and you’re out there offering good customer service, I hate to rain on your parade, but your book is at risk. Do you think I’m crazy? You think you got the best customer service in the industry? I’m going to tell you otherwise! Read on!
Listen, I know you think I’m nuts, that if you’re giving customer service that you’re destroying your book. You have to understand my perspective. Customer service is the expectation. It doesn’t differentiate you from anybody. To be different, you have to do whatever it takes to provide an awesome client experience. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, I can give you several examples. Customer service is getting certificates turned around in a timely fashion, “We’ll get you your certificate in the next 24 hours.” “We’ll get your certificates in five hours or less.” Whatever your stick is. An awesome client experience? “We offer our clients a self-service portal where you’re able to get your certificates of insurance in real-time. You can have them in your customer’s hands faster than you can type an email and send it to our firm requesting it. We do this because we understand exactly how important certificates are here.”
Do you want another example? Let’s talk about audits, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to negotiate your audit as best we can. We’re going to be here for you to make sure that you’re prepared for it, and then we sit with the auditor when they audit your policies.” Great. Guess what? They’re still going to owe money at the end of the year. What did you do proactively? Maybe that’s posturing for customer service. Real client experience is: “Yes, one of the things we do (because we understand that audits are such a problem with people in your industry) is: my firm has created a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet provides a place where you can key in your sales or payroll every single month, and it’s going to compute your actual insurance cost for that month. Not only does it let you know if you’re trending higher or lower than what you’ve projected, but you can also use it on a job by job basis as you’re bidding to make sure that your insurance cost is not going to lead to you not being as profitable as what you would like.”
See people; you have to realize something. We sell insurance, right? That’s what we fundamentally do. How do you differentiate yourself? “I’m going to sell insurance for you, real good man.” No, that’s not how you do it. You have to think outside the box. You have to come up with new ways of doing things, to provide that awesome client experience. That’s going to differentiate you from everybody else. Otherwise, you’re not solving problems. You’re hocking products, and that’s what insurance salespeople do. We don’t want to be insurance salespeople. We want to be producers, and we want to focus on things that other people aren’t. Just like we talk about total cost of risk when it comes down to discussing the numbers, we don’t want to provide customer service. We want to provide an awesome client experience. I know there are a lot of you out there that follow this content that are doing wild stuff right now, which makes your agency stand out.
I’d love for you to shoot me messages and let me know the things that differentiate you in the marketplace. Because right now, I can assure you Amazon and Google are working very, very hard to provide an awesome client experience when it comes to insurance transactions. See in their mind it’s a convenience. They want people to click a button when they’re in buying soap and toilet paper, and they want to offer you homeowner’s and auto’s quotes. And all you got to do is click to look at them, and click to buy. They’ve got your payment information, and they have your family’s information, they know everything they could know about your household. The one thing they can’t do is they can’t follow up. They can’t provide awesome client experiences after the fact. Take the time, invest some time right now to determine what’s going to make your company’s client experience so fantastic that everybody raves about it and refers you to all of their friends and colleagues. If you can do that, if you can dedicate that kind of time, you’re going to kill it, Commercial Insurance.
In the commercial insurance world, most producers are laser-focused on finding the best premium and coverage from traditional carriers. But there’s a powerful alternative that can help the right business owners keep more control over their risk, retain underwriting profits, and create a long-term competitive advantage.
In today’s competitive insurance marketplace, middle-market agencies must leverage every available advantage to win and retain business. One of the most underutilized yet powerful resources at an agent’s disposal is the wholesale market. By establishing strong partnerships with wholesalers, agents can access capacity, expertise, and proprietary programs that are often unavailable through direct channels. However, success in the wholesale arena requires more than simply submitting risks and hoping for the best.
In the fast-paced world of commercial insurance, where every hour counts and every interaction matters, producers and agency owners are turning to artificial intelligence not as a replacement for human connection—but as a force multiplier. AI tools like ChatGPT are no longer just novelties or futuristic concepts. They are strategic business assets, helping commercial producers streamline workflows, scale personalization, and reclaim valuable time.
Most commercial insurance producers fail not because they lack talent, but because they lack a plan. They enter the year with vague production targets—usually handed down from management—and hope that pure effort or luck will lead to success. But in the middle market, hope is not a strategy.
If you want to build a book of business that produces consistent results and long-term revenue, you need to think like a business owner. That means developing a business plan that is personal, measurable, and rooted in data. In this post, we’re going to show you how to reverse engineer your sales goals, simplify your sales pipeline, and build a weekly rhythm that supports growth without burnout.
When it comes to retaining large, high-value clients in the middle market, captive insurance should be one of the first solutions every producer considers. Yet many agents avoid the topic entirely—often for reasons that have less to do with the client’s needs and more to do with the producer’s own hesitations.
The truth? Failing to offer captives could cost you a $300,000 revenue client overnight. And in today’s competitive market, someone else will step in and take that account if you don’t.
In this post, we’ll break down the three biggest mental roadblocks holding agents back from selling captives, show you how to address them, and explain how to position yourself as the quarterback of the client relationship—while increasing your value and your compensation.
Middle market insurance producers face a “sleeping giant” opportunity in professional lines—namely cyber insurance, management liability (Directors & Officers and Employment Practices Liability), and broader professional liability coverages. Too often, these critical products are treated as afterthoughts, tacked onto a renewal packet rather than leveraged as strategic revenue drivers and client-retention tools. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore why professional lines deserve your full attention, how to overcome common obstacles, and which actionable strategies will unlock growth across your book of business.
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