Meet Mark, Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Mark leads sales and marketing at a regional insurance company. He manages a team of sales reps and agency relationship managers, reports to the CEO, and is responsible for the company’s growth targets every quarter.
Grow premium. Keep combined ratios healthy. Maintain strong agency relationships and make the marketing budget earn its keep. On paper, straightforward. In practice, anything but.
Mark Carries the Weight of Growth
Mark is good at his job. He has been doing it for years, but lately, he has started to feel like he is running a race without being able to see the track.
His mission: help the sales team focus only on in-appetite business, measure what works, and make every agency relationship count.
Mark’s Reality: The Week That Made It Clear
It started on Tuesday. Mark’s team had just wrapped up a regional marketing campaign targeting independent agencies in three states. Four weeks of effort. A solid budget. A lot of optimism.
When he asked how it performed, no one had a clear answer. Submissions were up, but so were the ones that didn’t fit appetite. The sales team had worked twice as hard as usual and had very little to show for it. His field marketing manager pulled together a report, but it was stitched together from three different systems and took two days to build. By the time it landed on Mark’s desk, it was already out of date.
That same week, an agency consolidation closed that Mark had been watching for months. Two agencies they had worked with for years had merged. He knew this was an opportunity to capture the combined book of business, but getting the data transferred was a mess. His team spent days manually importing policy records, cross-referencing information, and chasing down missing details. By the time everything was in order, nearly six weeks had passed. Other carriers had already moved in.
On Friday, one of his top agency partners called. She wasn’t upset, but she was direct. Her team had submitted several submissions over the past month, but their turnaround was slow. She was starting to route her commercial lines business elsewhere. She liked working with Mark and his team, but she needed a carrier partner who could keep up.
Mark knows his team works hard. The problem was that hard work without the right information behind it was no longer enough.
The Challenge: Chasing Growth Without a Clear View
The challenge was not effort. It was visibility. Mark managed a network of hundreds of independent agencies writing business across multiple lines. Still, he had no clear picture of his organization’s competitive position, which agencies were growing, or which submissions would fit his appetite.
His sales team worked on instinct, calling the agencies they liked and pitching products they believed were the right fit. Without real data, they couldn’t tell what was working until it was too late.
Underwriting appetite lived in the underwriting department, not in the field. His organization spent time quoting business that they would never bind, frustrating everyone and quietly eroding the relationships Mark had spent years building.
Why Fixing It Is Harder Than It Looks
Mark had spreadsheets, dashboards, and quarterly summaries. What he didn’t have was a single, reliable view of what was happening in real time.
He couldn’t see which agencies were sending the best business, whether a dip from a key agency meant trouble, or whether a marketing campaign had moved the needle.
Campaigns ran. Results were murky. Spend got justified by feel, not fact.
The Solution: A Clearer Picture, Sooner
Mark knew the answer wasn’t to work harder. He needed better information, earlier, in a form his team could use.
He needed to know which agencies were most likely to send in-appetite business, so his team could focus their energy where it mattered. He needed appetite guidelines automatically available to agents, billboards advertising his organizations risk appetite embedded directly in their management systems, so that out-of-appetite submissions would stop. He needed book transfers to move in days, not weeks. And he needed to see what his marketing campaigns were doing, not six weeks after the fact, while there was still time to pivot.
Most of all, he needed his organization to feel like a partner — one that made agents’ jobs easier, not harder.
A Giant Win for Mark and His Team
Six months later, Mark’s Mondays look different.
He starts the week with a clear picture of which agencies are growing, which are writing in-appetite business, and where competitors are gaining ground. His sales team doesn’t guess who to call first. They know.
Appetite guidelines are embedded in the tools agencies use to quote. Out-of-appetite submissions stop before they reach underwriting. The relationships that were fraying have stabilized because agencies now see his organization as easy to work with and consistent.
The last agency consolidation moved in four days, not six weeks. Revenue started almost immediately, and the relationship with the newly merged agency was solid from day one.
Marketing is no longer a guessing game. He can track agency share of wallet, monitor how campaigns affect submission patterns, and shift budget mid-flight. He walks into leadership meetings with a real-time view of where the business is coming from, not a report that took three days to build.
His team is not working harder. They are working better.
Mark Made the Right Choice
Mark’s organization chose Ivans® as their insurance technology partner. By implementing a modern tech stack, they get what they’ve been missing: real data, in real time, built specifically for how insurance carriers and independent agents work together.
Ivans Marketing Insights™ gave Mark’s team detailed visibility into in-force policies across thousands of independent agencies, including competitive positioning, product mix, and profitability by agency. For the first time, his sales reps could join a conversation knowing exactly what the opportunity looked like and how they measured up.
Ivans Distribution Platform™ put Mark’s underwriting appetite directly into agency workflows, including raters and management systems, so they could see what would and would not be eligible before they spent time quoting it. Out-of-appetite submissions dropped. Conversion rates rose. Agent frustration, on both sides, started to ease.
Ivans Bookroll™ streamlined book transfers with an automated process that applied appetite criteria to individual policies as soon as a book of business changed hands. What used to take weeks now takes days. Revenue starts sooner, and relationships stay intact through the transition.
Ask Kodiak® made appetite searchable in real time across digital channels for agencies, reducing the back-and-forth that used to slow everything down and positioning Mark’s organization as a partner they could rely on.
And throughout, automated data exchange kept policy and claims data current in agency management systems without manual re-entry, cutting administrative burdens while giving Mark’s team cleaner, more reliable data to work with.
That insurance agent who called on a Friday afternoon, the one who said she was starting to send her business elsewhere, is now one of Mark’s top partners. She recently told him that his organization is her preferred market.
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