Transom Consulting: Insurance carriers have a long history of tweaking their field organizations and compensation plans to make the captive agent channel more effective and efficient. But the stakes have become higher and the moves bolder in the last several years. Faced with stagnant agent counts, declining agent productivity and elevated expense ratios relative to direct players, carriers are taking sweeping action to ensure the continued viability of the agent channel. From Allstate to Farmers to numerous regional carriers, timid steps have given way to massive reorganizations and wholesale redesigns of compensation programs.

As we advise executives at national and regional carriers active in the agent channel, the most frequent question they pose to us is: “How do we know if it’s time to go big (or go home)?” Although good agents tend to welcome change that makes a carrier more competitive in the marketplace, others may resist it. For the insurance distribution executive, agency transformation is difficult, time-consuming, risky and potentially controversial.

We’ve laid out a set of diagnostic questions that executives can ask themselves to determine whether the juice is worth the squeeze and whether the time for real transformation has arrived.

To gauge whether a large-scale reorganization is worth pursuing, ask

yourself the following six questions:

1. Do your field leaders have multi-channel or multiproduct responsibility?

If they don’t, you are behind the times. Other carriers are aggressively breaking down channel and product silos in their field leadership. Whereas previously only top agency executives were responsible for decision-making across channels and products, more recently middle management such as directors and AVPs are being deployed across multiple channels (e.g., exclusive agent, independent agent and retail) and products (e.g., auto, home, life, commercial and financial services).

This deployment is not only more efficient but also more effective. It increases channel and product coordination, allows field leaders to optimize across channel and product efforts and eliminates counterproductive competition for agent attention. It also provides an abundance of career path options for leaders on the rise.

2. Are your district or agency managers able to focus on coaching and sales performance management?

The days of “jack-of-all-trades” district and agency managers are numbered. Historically, these managers were expected to recruit agents, train them, provide them with marketing support and coach them on sales. In an optimized field organization, these managers are liberated from lower-value recruiting, training and marketing duties so they can focus on their core competency of sales management and sales coaching. This shift is enabled by centralizing recruiting, training and marketing functions at home office through centers of excellence that support the field.

3. Are your spans of control current relative to best practice?

The rules of thumb are changing. While carriers used to assign one agency manager for every 20 to 30 captive agents, new guidance is 40 or even more. This evolution is based on analytics that reveal a lack of correlation between coverage and productivity: Fewer agents per manager doesn’t necessarily lead to more production.

We are aware of carriers pushing the envelope even further, such that the average manager span of control will grow significantly over the next two years. Increasing familiarity with video-based technology and virtual meetings in the context of COVID-19 will only accelerate this trend as “windshield time” constraints become less relevant.

The move toward larger spans is happening at the director and AVP levels, too. In lockstep with their increasingly cross-channel and multi-product approaches, carriers are rolling up more and more premium and agent count to these field leaders.

4. Is your field leader compensation sufficiently variable and tailored geographically?

The emerging best practice is for nearly half of field leader compensation (for director roles and above) to be variable. Those with a significantly smaller variable portion may fall into maintenance mode rather than gunning for growth.

Ideally, variable compensation is paid through periodic (e.g., quarterly) bonuses based on the performance of the field leader’s geography relative to targets. Avoid making field leader bonuses a function of individual agent outcomes, lest they spend too much time catering to low performers.

Target-setting for bonus purposes should be driven by an analytically savvy team at the home office and should reflect differences between growth markets vs. mature markets in the weighting of various criteria in the bonus formula.

5. Are there more than three or four layers separating your top distribution executive from your agents?

More organizational distance between your top distribution executive and your agents generally means less clarity of field roles, less accountability for outcomes, slower issue escalation and resolution and reduced visibility for top field leaders.

The ideal number of layers in your field organization depends on how many channels you have – you can imagine a carrier with EA, IA, retail and direct requiring more layers compared with a carrier that is agent-only. It depends, too, on the geographic scope and amount of premium overseen by the distribution function, with smaller, regional carriers often requiring one less layer relative to large, national players.

Right-sizing layers is a powerful reorganizational tool that not only reduces unnecessary expense but also streamlines field effectiveness when done right.

6. Are your field management roles consistent across your geographic footprint?

Some carriers have extensive geographic variation in field roles across states or regions. This can result from mergers of carriers with different field structures, or from a well-intentioned effort to empower local leadership to experiment with new or modified roles. In the long run, though, this variability muddies the waters and harms field effectiveness by undercutting role clarity and accountability.

Field reorganizations represent an opportunity to clean up the proliferation and inconsistency of roles by standing up an optimal set of standardized roles in all geographies. Although the allocation of time to various activities within the role description (and, by extension, the relative weighting of criteria for bonus determinations) may rightly vary to reflect geographic nuances, the roles themselves should be uniform in all locations.

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If you answered “no” to at least two of the previous questions, you are likely to unlock significant value from a larger-scale transformation of your agency management structure. If you answered “no” to three or more, it’s definitely time for change. Like going to the dentist, the longer you wait, the more painful it will be.

Even if you answered “yes” to every question, your work is not done. Leading carriers regularly revisit these topics and perform at least bi-annual check-ins of field structure effectiveness in the spirit of continuous improvement. They do the organizational equivalent of flossing, brushing and occasionally undergoing a corrective procedure to keep things healthy.

Pivoting to agency compensation, consider the following four questions to find out how much room you have to improve your agent compensation plans:

Source: Insurance Thought Leadership