The Waning of Relationship-Based Product Marketing

Last week’s Novarica Insurer Town Hall presented a slightly different perspective from past sessions. Four young independent agents gave us their thoughts on a wide variety of topics, including insurer relationships, portals, management systems, mobile, and the effects of the pandemic.

When discussing how COVID-19 lockdowns have affected agent business, one comment about insurer marketing field representatives stood out to me in particular: “They left us alone and didn’t come in for marketing visits, which gave me a lot more time to sell insurance.”

All humor aside, as insurers think about what business will look like in a future “normal,” they will need to work with agents who have perhaps become used to the different kinds of marketing and communications channels that characterized the agent-insurer relationship during the pandemic. Instead of a cohort of field representatives with large travel budgets driving to agent locations for long meetings, the new marketing landscape might be characterized by the following:

  1. Marketing will continue to be virtual and digital: Even if the marketing field force gets the green light to travel freely, agencies who have seen an uptick in sales because of reduced insurer marketing activities might not be willing to return to the same level of in-person marketing. At the same time, insurer field forces have discovered an increase in productivity and connectivity during the pandemic, holding many more virtual meetings with agents in a given week in the absence of intense travel.
  2. Insurers will increasingly provide self-service, on-demand access to insurance product information. Now that agents have become more used to the speed of digital sales channels, they will need to have instant access to product information and quoting platforms to a greater degree than they did before. Agent portals and data transfer into agency management systems will become table-stakes. As one of the agents at the Town Hall put it, “You shouldn’t have to spend time searching for what you need—information should be right at your face.”
  3. Insurance marketing representatives will need to sell experiences rather than products. Agents in a fast-paced, digitally-enabled business environment, who perhaps do not have deep relationships with insurers, will be more likely to shop for products among multiple insurers. They will select insurers that provide them with the most positive, seamless experiences—these require full compatibility between insurer and agent technology, omni-channel flexibility, and a transparent, two-way data stream.

The agents in the Town Hall still expressed the need for insurers to foster good relationships with agents, and that face-to-face was still an important way to build those relationships—but a new balance will have to be negotiated. The effects of the pandemic are not an interruption of business-as-usual. Rather, they require insurers to evolve business practices as a whole. Intense, relationship-based product marketing will shift to accommodate the flexible, fast-paced, and omni-channel sales environment to which agents are adapting. Insurers who are only waiting to return to their travel itineraries may find themselves with many fewer destinations on their maps.

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