How life carriers can optimize agent productivity

LIMRA and Boston Consulting Group partnered to study top performing life insurance agents across all distribution channels while identifying premier carriers based on established benchmarks.  The results of the study will be presented during the session “Strategizing Growth and Life Insurance Productivity” at the LIMRA Annual Conference.

Bryan Hodgens, LIMRA and LOMA corporate vice president, is one of the session presenters, along with David Cockerill, BCG managing director and partner, and Lisa Todd, MassMutual head of life and disability insurance.

“We wanted to get a sense of what are the key distribution priorities, from a carrier's perspective, to try to drive more life insurance sales,” Hodgens said of the research. Carrier executives were surveyed, along with agents, to get their insights on productivity and sales growth. He ran down some of the themes that came through in the research.

1. Productivity is a top priority for carriers, Hodgens said the research revealed. “It's something that carriers are putting at the top of their list of where they're going focus their efforts moving into next year as well,” he said.
2. Business goals. Carriers are translating their business goals into key performance indicators they can use to assess the productivity of their financial professionals, Hodgens said.

“As we did this study, we looked across multiple channels in which agents sell life insurance,” he said. “We looked at the agency building channel, sometimes referred to as the career channel. We looked at multiline agents and we looked at independent brokerage. Those three channels together represent about 85% of the life insurance sales sold by those types of agents.

3. Agent productivity. Financial professionals in the top 25% are twice as productive as the median across all channels, with top-performing agents being particularly productive, the research found.

“We’ll discuss some of the things top-performing agents are doing versus what their peers are doing across different channels,” Hodgens said. “We’ll also share some thoughts around a systematic approach needed to improve. We learned what is needed to improve distribution productivity and we’ll get into what that means for carriers – either investing in sales support or investing in customer-facing technology.”

4. The impact of experiences on productivity. “We’ll discuss the concept that productivity requires tailored experiences, tailored channel strategies – it’s not a one size fits all approach,” he said. “You have to think about the type of agent working in each channel, and how you tailor your delivery and your support of that agent for that channel.”

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