Making the Case for Investing in Your Distribution Channel Management

This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.

When your team has come to the conclusion that your current vendor, process, or (let’s be honest) spreadsheet isn’t working, you need to get buy-in across your larger organization. Easy, right?

If you’re the one responsible for any variation on the themes of streamlining your producers’ onboarding, licensing, carrier appointments, or sales territory assignments, then articulating the value of AgentSync and its distribution channel management (DCM) solutions to other organizational stakeholders is the next hurdle to your future state.

For step-by-step help on making your case, download the guide.

Who does DCM benefit?

You. Better distribution channel management benefits you. But coming out and saying so right up front is likely not enough to get the broader organization on board, especially if you’ve historically managed your distributors and downstream producers on spreadsheets. Your organization may see your distribution channel management as a zero-cost solution. You know that it’s not.

You know that every day that you bootstrap your producer licensing could be the day that a license lapses and costs you $20,000 in state fines and even more in reputational cache. It could be the day that slow onboarding funnels a $5 million policy to your competitor.

While the daily change to your workflow will be most visible to you and your team, the drudgeries of change management and upgrading critical aspects of your fundamental business architecture will be beyond your control. Implementation is no wave of a magic wand (we wish). You have to make the case that AgentSync and its transformative distribution channel management solutions will deliver to your business well beyond the convenience of freeing up your team from hours of typing (and retyping and retyping) to fact-check NPNs by hand.

Download our guide to make the case for AgentSync at your organization

Defining and scoping the problem

If you’ve recognized your business’s need to handle producer data better and to implement AgentSync as your DCM solution, you know you need to get other stakeholders on board (the kind of stakeholders that have the authority to cut checks and affect change management). Part of that is going to be getting everyone to agree on the problem.

It can be easy for agencies and carriers to become complacent with regulatory risk as the cost of doing business, although we’d argue the penalty isn’t the real pain. But slow onboarding processes can cost you millions of dollars as producers funnel business to agencies or carriers they already have contracts with. After all, just because you can’t pay a producer yet doesn’t mean they don’t want to get paid – they aren’t waiting for you to process their paperwork before placing business for their customers. Especially with an industry driven by independent agents, slow onboarding is a risk to your competitive edge, and poses the risk of churning an agent altogether.

Your ability to visualize who your producers and distributors are and where they are licensed or appointed is critical to your compliance, sure. But it’s also a critical part of evaluating your overall distribution, and the effectiveness of your various regional investments. Knowing who you’re in competition with for your producers and lines of authority is data that can make or break a distribution strategy for new products in a given year.

Download our guide and figure out how to get your other organizational stakeholders to agree on these problems and more.

How to solve your pain points with AgentSync

Your stakeholders will have real concerns about any new tech they evaluate, and it’s not just about getting a favorable ROI – it’s also about the total cost of ownership for a given technology. It’s one thing to make a significant initial investment; it’s another to realize the most of its potential with integrations, automations, reporting, and actual adoption across the business.

Making the case means being able to answer questions about these pain points and more. Empower yourself to make the case for AgentSync at your business and transform your total distribution channel management today. Download the guide.