As we continue our series on being a five tool player, number four is you have got to have a digital presence. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. I will give you five things that you need to be doing to be a five-tool player in the digital world.
If you’re going to be a five-tool player, you have got to have a digital game, and it is so easy to do. There are so many tools and resources that make it to streamline this stuff with no issue at all. The number one thing you have to do is video, just like this. You’re watching me, so people will be willing to watch you. But it’s easy to start with video because everything else can build from that. Doing a quick video every day about a topic relevant to the questions asked by your clients and prospects is the backbone of a solid strategy for digital marketing from now on.
Number two is you’ve got to blog, period. Blogging gives those anchor text and keyword triggers for Google to crawl your website and help you rank, but more importantly, answer the questions people want to have answered. In his book, They Ask You Answer, Marcus Sheridan gives you a blueprint for a perfect playbook for creating content. Using sites like answerthepublic.com, you can find out those questions your clients and prospects are asking and then craft a strategy to answer them. More importantly, here’s a tip: put a pen and a piece of paper next to every single person’s desk in your operation that talks on the phone, and any time they hear the same question twice, write it down. I stole that from my man Bradley Flowers. Awesome idea.
You know, writing a blog, according to my friend, Ryan Hanley, is like hiring a salesperson to work for you on the internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The number one thing I hear is, “I don’t have time to write.” Well, guess what? You just shot a video. Take that video, flip it over to a transcription service, have them bring it back to you as a Word document, run it through Grammarly, clean it up, and publish it as a blog post. Now you have a blog post with a video embedded into it that you can put the video on YouTube, the blog post on your website, and people can pick and choose if they want to watch or if they’re going to listen.
The third thing you can do is you can podcast. I know it sounds crazy, but if you develop a business leaders podcast just featuring businesses in your area, it doesn’t have to be about insurance. You’re going to break down all of the walls you would typically have to climb in a first appointment. Think about how much rapport you can build by interviewing somebody about their business for 30 to 45 minutes. I can promise you, it does wonders, and it guarantees they’re going to take your call every time you call them in the future if you do it the right way. It’s not about insurance. It’s not about risk management. It’s about them, their business, how they built it, what mistakes they made, what’s made them successful, and I like to slide in a little something called, as a business owner, what keeps you awake at night? That’s the only risk management angle that I have in that.
The fourth thing you can do is webinars. Webinars are extremely powerful because you can market them to be live, you can record them, and then you can host them on your website with an exit intent pop out that will have people register to watch that content for months, if not years, down the road. When COVID hit, I did a webinar on reducing your workers’ compensation costs. And I’ve had thousands of people view that, and we have written a ton of business because we did that webinar. It wasn’t salesy, it was a hundred percent informational, but because we recorded it, we got way more mileage out of that content than if we had to keep doing it over and over and over again. Plus, people can receive that information where they want to receive it, not where I want them to hear it.
The fifth thing that you can do is use digital presentations. I have a website that Advisor Evolved powers, and we have a native quote vids platform there that we can use to do video proposals. Not only can we attach a PDF of the actual paper proposal so that they can pull it up and walk through it, but they can see me talking about it on the screen. If they have questions, they can click a button and immediately go to my calendar embedded on that page and schedule time to talk on the phone. Again, it’s about giving people the information they need but allowing them to receive it on their terms and not the terms that we dictate to them. If you can do those five things, my goodness, you’re going to kill it in commercial insurance.
For years, commercial insurance producers could survive by being good enough across a wide range of industries. They could write a little construction, a little manufacturing, a little hospitality, and a little habitational business and still build a respectable book.
The commercial insurance industry is in the middle of a quiet evolution.
While most conversations still revolve around premiums, deductibles, limits, and carrier appetite, a different category of risk transfer has been gaining traction beneath the surface—parametric insurance. It is not new, but it is finally becoming accessible, relevant, and actionable for middle market producers who are willing to think differently about risk.
In a recent episode of the Power Producers Podcast, I sat down with Brian Thompson from Descartes Underwriting to unpack what parametric insurance actually is, what it is not, and why producers who ignore it may be leaving their clients—and themselves—exposed.
This article breaks that conversation down into practical, producer-friendly language and shows how parametric insurance fits into modern middle market risk management.
The last several years have reshaped the landscape of property insurance across the country. While most national carriers have retreated from coastal states, wildfire zones, and other catastrophe-exposed regions, a handful of disciplined players have taken the opposite path—leaning into difficult markets with a strategic, data-driven approach.
For most entrepreneurs, the decision to start a business is rooted in the promise of freedom. Freedom from a boss, freedom to control income, and freedom to build something meaningful. Yet for many business owners, particularly in service-based industries and middle-market companies, that freedom slowly erodes. What begins as ownership eventually turns into obligation, where the business demands constant attention and the owner becomes the single point of failure.
The insurance industry is full of shortcuts. Some producers look for ways to streamline the quoting process, others avoid hard conversations with clients, and many rely on endorsements or extensions because they are “easier” than diving into the details. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in the world of cyber insurance.
Too many agents assume that a cyber endorsement on a BOP or commercial package policy is “good enough.” It isn’t. In fact, treating a BOP cyber extension as a replacement for a standalone cyber policy leaves clients dangerously exposed, puts producers at risk of losing accounts, and opens the door to costly errors and omissions (E&O) claims.
Cyber threats evolve faster than any other area of risk, and endorsements simply can’t keep up. If producers want to protect their clients and themselves, it’s time to understand why standalone cyber insurance is non-negotiable.
In the middle market, producers don’t lose because the competition has better pricing.
They lose because the competition understands people better—their motivations, their fears, their priorities, and what makes them say yes.
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