Assured Partners Insurance Revenue Projections Transformed on Salesforce
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Assured Partners had cultivated a large and unique audience of brokerage business but was not capitalizing on it. BizDev was inconsistent and disjointed - and not supported with the right technology. They turned to Incapsulate for answers and got an intuitive and highly automated revenue infrastructure, freeing up Assured Partners to focus on selling.

CLIENT NAME
Assured Partners
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
PROJECT LENGTH
Over a year
TEAM SIZE
12
TECHNOLOGIES
technology
technology
technology
technology
technology
technology
technology
Founded in 2011, AssuredPartners (AP) is the fastest-growing independent insurance agency in the USA. With offices in 38 states and four countries, AP is one of the largest brokers in the nation. AP has acquired approximately 50 agencies annually in recent years. This rapid growth presented business opportunities and challenges which could be best addressed by implementing a state of the art cloud-based sales and marketing system.
Assured Partners Culture
Fast paced technology focused organization that is rapidly growing via acquisitions. Determined to transform the insurance brokerage space with technology, data and repeatable business processes.
Why Now
Having grown rapidly, the time was ripe for providing the broker community with a best-in-class sales platform and propel them to adopt digital in a big way and help sell more.
Project Boundaries
>$1,000,000
 project
The Project

Core Problems

The strategic objective of Assured Partners (AP) is to offer the best tools and technology for brokerages and their end customers. Having grown through acquisitions, however, 100s of different “producers” (brokerages) were using a variety of different technology and business processes. Moreover, the organization lacked unified reporting and analytics.

Some of the key challenges included ensuring that the system supports disparate agencies that operate in many different regions, sell different products, sell to different markets, and have different business processes. The core challenge was to provide a blueprint that is general enough to work for all but consistent enough to enable meaningful analytics, dashboards, and reporting.

 

Solution Design

The solution was a best-in-class sales & marketing platform that turbocharges sales through the integration of 30 instances of 3 different Agency Management Systems as well as the integration of other key 3rd party data providers across 300 agencies. Codesigned by AP and Incapsulate, this solution brings critical data to 1500 sales producers, sales leaders, and industry specialists enabling them to provide the appropriate coverage at the appropriate cost with an outstanding user experience. Integrations enable producers to have mobile access to their most important data including policies of new business.

Features include omni-channel access, Outlook integration, and dashboards. Key tools included outside of the Salesforce product line were LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoom Info, and MuleSoft. Other tools include Snowflake for data warehouse, Okta for SSO, and Azure DevOps for CI/CD.

 

The Results

With an adoption rate of virtually 100%, 1,200+ producers are using the system daily. This has resulted in increased cross-selling, an improved renewal process, and improved analytics. With a 360-degree customer view, producers can leverage industry specialists and gain deeper insights into the sales process. Improved analytics and dashboards enable sales leaders to better coach emerging producers. Risk is reduced dramatically by retiring systems and reducing technical debt. In addition, the strategy for implementation minimizes custom-coded solutions and other forms of technical debt. Operational expenses are reduced by eliminating duplicate data entry, automating key tasks, and using analytics and insights to focus business processes.

Other benefits include dramatically improved forecasting, a consistent yet flexible sales process, the ability to accelerate the development of new agents, and faster onboarding of new agencies.

Together these result in more sales, better service, and improved operating margins. AssuredPartners expects revenue growth of greater than $1 billion over the next several years while realizing efficiency gains and cost savings.

The Deal Clarity Moment
Aligning on scope is perhaps the most important aspect of any project. Incaspulate has a process to address this challenge, starting with interviewing all key business and technology stakeholders during the scoping cycle. This yields a planning document that contains the major project phases and the high-level user stories - along with assumptions, design notes, constraints, and any non-functional requirements. This document forms the basis for aligning on the scope. Incapsulate does discovery for multiple weeks and compares the scope document with the requirements from the discovery sessions. We align on the comparative analysis and chart the path forward.
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The Moment of Trust
Incapsulate has executed projects for a wide variety of clients in the insurance domain, from carriers to brokers to insurance platform players. This experience showed in our early conversations with AP, where from the very first moment, it was established that we understood the business model. Anecdotes from past projects broke the ice and we quickly came to appreciate what everyone could bring to this project from both sides of the table.
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The Eureka Moment
​​Two particular moments come to mind. One was where AP expressed the desire to sell as a team and our minds quickly jumped to Opportunity Teams and Account Teams.v The other was where AP expressed a conflict: brokers treat their sales data with sensitivity and want to protect it, yet management wants company-wide visibility into that same data. Incapsulate solved this by establishing the sharing model via Salesforce's “Sharing Rules” and modeling the agencies as roles in the “Role Hierarchy”. This quickly solved the issue - giving management access to what they wanted while protecting the brokers from unauthorized sales data access.
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The Red Moment
AP realized they needed to get policy data into Salesforce. The data was not of great quality and needed to tie back to the opportunities created by the brokers upon closure and also to the account. A MuleSoft-based solution was proposed which connected with the client's Snowflake-based data warehouse. Policy data ensured the broker's book of business gets established paving the foundations for the renewal workflow for a later day. An offshore-based data operations team was established to clean data on an ongoing basis ensuring data quality improves progressively.
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The Ribbon Cutting Moment
Given the rollout challenge to over 1200 brokers, we had super champs from the user group and established a great rapport with them. Key to this was having a training ground for the super champs to see the system getting built incrementally and taking this to the broader groups through the sprint demos. Incorporating user feedback meant the implementation team was part of the more prominent family willing to listen and provide value. Post-go-live was handled through a "War Room" setup providing 24-hour support with a hotline for direct conversation with the team to troubleshoot user issues. Users felt cared for during this phase and gained trust in the solution, as we resolved issues with the urgency they deserved.
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The ROI Moment
Since its launch, users have been flocking to the platform. Seeing them manage their business and sales leaders using the system to run their day-to-day operations and making decisions based on real-time data inspires the team as they build out other enhancements. The rollout was phased and having users wanting to be part of the rollout much earlier than their scheduled date only reinforces how well the user community has received the system.
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TEAM
profile pic
Avik Roy
Engagement Manager
Davis Prince
Account Manager
Hema Dalwadi
Delivery Manager
Rupal Panchal
Senior Business Analyst
Sai Pilla
Senior Database Developer
Shubham Shendage
Developer
Vishal Vaghadia
Developer
SaiKrishna Nukala
Developer
Hetvi Shah
Developer
Tejaswini Pathak
Technical Architect
Qamar Islam
Technical Architect
Sushma Tiwari
Senior Business Analyst