In this episode of Power Producers, David Carothers sits down with Alan Versteeg from Growth Matters International, bringing in fresh perspectives on sales from outside the insurance industry. Some of the best sales strategies come from those who aren’t in the daily grind, and Alan delivers just new ideas, different approaches, and a mindset shift that can elevate any producer’s book of business.
Alan shares how his early failures in sales came from treating it as a job rather than a craft. Success came when he started studying sales as a profession, starting with psychology.
David and Alan discuss the mistake of promoting top sales producers into leadership roles without proper training. Sales leadership requires an entirely different skill set.
Successful salespeople don’t push products—they shift mindsets. Instead of focusing on price, they educate and guide prospects toward long-term solutions.
Alan emphasizes that confidence in sales starts with belief in what you sell. When you have conviction in your value, persuasion comes naturally.
David warns that many producers fail because they don’t consistently prospect. A strong pipeline prevents reliance on hard market conditions for success.
Many sales teams underperform due to weak leadership, not lack of effort. Sales managers should focus on impact, not just numbers.
Sales isn’t about transactions—it’s about trust, conviction, and long-term impact. Treat it like a profession, invest in leadership, and success will follow.
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The commercial insurance world isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s unpredictable, chaotic, and constantly demanding producers to manage competing pressures—client needs, renewal deadlines, life events, prospecting goals, and agency responsibilities. And if you’re a middle-market producer, multiply that by ten.
In the middle market commercial insurance space, the role of the producer has never been more critical—or more misunderstood. Too many producers still view their job as selling policies instead of what it truly is: protecting the assets and livelihoods of the businesses they serve.
The middle market rewards depth, not breadth. Yet many producers still approach it like a volume game, quoting everything that moves, chasing price, and hoping activity turns into production. From the outside, it looks like hustle. From the inside of the underwriting and wholesale world, it looks like noise.
Personal lines has quietly become one of the most competitive segments in the insurance industry. Agencies that once dominated their local markets are now fighting to differentiate themselves against direct writers, digital-first carriers, and large brokers with massive content machines.
The cyber insurance market has always been unpredictable. Over the past decade, we’ve seen it move from an emerging line of coverage to one of the most volatile, swinging rapidly between soft and hard market cycles. But today, cyber has entered one of the softest markets in recent memory—and that presents a rare opportunity for both agents and clients.
For most of my 20-year career, captives felt like something reserved for the insurance elite—the jumbo accounts, the Fortune-level operations, the companies with multimillion-dollar manual premiums and entire departments dedicated to risk management. If you had asked me ten or fifteen years ago whether a $250,000 account was a legitimate captive candidate, I would’ve laughed. I thought captives were reserved for companies so complex and so large that the only rational way to insure them was to build an insurance company around their risk.
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