What competitive trend will disrupt your insurance agency in 2019?

There are many opportunities and challenges for your insurance agency in the coming year. Agency leadership needs to take a more active role in deciding what business your agency pursues to be successful. Proactive agency leadership is a trend that will not go away!

You can read about the first three trends here. Today we are going to talk about two different opportunities to take your insurance agency to the next level in 2019.

The fourth trend is insurance and financial services sales and business development is changing. Are you leveraging new client acquisition strategies to build a more profitable business? How will your commercial lines professionals do when people are no longer answering their phones? Even if they are answering the phone what happens when these boomers retire?

How well have your older agents done when it comes to finding new customers for your agency? Customer turnover is real. How does an aging producer deal with new customers who have more information at their fingertips than the agent?

Many senior agents have deeper relationships with their long-term clients. In many cases they can be the best champions for your new products and services that are designed to complement their retirement choices.  For example their insurance needs may include motor homes or scooters.

New potential customers are even more price sensitive than earlier generations. How do your agents create new value for price sensitive consumers who are always on and always looking for the best deal on their mobile devices?

Younger agents have less experience but may have stronger social networks they can leverage to increase sales. The challenge I’ve found is they have strong primary networks, and they are struggling to expand their customer network outside their current first level network contacts. Experienced producers can help mentor your newer producers.

They need to become more effective at digital prospecting and referral processes. They need to nurture their networks to produce revenue and growth as their network’s needs increase.

The fifth trend is increasing and accelerating competition. I’m sure you’ve noticed all the competition for your best clients. Insurance faces many traditional competitors, this isn’t a new trend to most insurance leaders. Insurance has always been attractive field for new business models and way of doing business.

We’ll probably see some early Fintech and Insurtech organizations fail in 2019. I’ve already heard from several executives that they knew this was going to happen and why. The problem is that many owners of insurance agencies see this an indicator that things will return to normal, as it was in the past.

Insurance faces fierce competition in the coming years not only from new entries into the market because of the escalating costs of health insurance but disruptive competitors such as autonomous vehicles. The industry may not be as cool as emerging technologies, but financial services is an attractive market compared to returns in more traditional manufacturing industries.

As banks fight for their lives they will enter the insurance markets in new ways to continue to erode Insurance profits. They have similar clients to you and they are trying to uncover new opportunities for profits in their customers as technology continues to change how we do banking. This trend will not be going away any time soon.

In the past several years we’ve started to see bank and other technology businesses get more involved in selling insurance and financial products to their customers. We will share several perspectives on this in a future blog.

I also received several notes on where commercial insurance fits into your future product mix. This is such a critical element of success for independent insurance agencies and brokerages. I will share this on our next blog. I think you might find my perspectives different than what you hear from other industry insiders because of my work in Fintech and advanced predictive analytics.

Finally, I see one stealth competitor entering your market who could disrupt and transform insurance over the next years. It’s Amazon! They have already shared their interests in transforming the financial services markets the way they have done traditional retail.

They are already investing significant resources to find their best entry point into financial services and they play the longer game well.  How do you beat them before they start playing in the hearts and minds of your customers?  Stay tuned to find out!

See you next week.