How one brokerage is overcoming data delays

Zac Sutherland transformed his fifth-generation brokerage’s sales outputs and strengthened his insurer partner relationships using one tool — data. 

Sutherland, who’s president at Sutherland Insurance, found that pulling production reports from his BMS often didn’t provide the data on the brokerage’s macro trends that he needed to manage his operations effectively.  

“How do you run a business that’s sales-driven when the salespeople don’t know their information? Or they get it a month after, when you can’t do anything about it?” he asks.  

“We spent hours and hours manipulating that data, just to get answers that are 30 days old,” he adds, “and that really frustrated me.” 

Using YouTube tutorials, Sutherland created a visual dashboard on Microsoft Power BI to aggregate his team’s numbers in real-time, rather than at the end of every month. It works by taking the BMS’ production report and filing it in what Sutherland calls an “Excel skin on steroids.” 

The change was transformational, he says.  

Better data, better sales 

One of the first dashboards he created was a bar graph that showed how many policies the brokerage wrote each month. 

Based on that, he discovered the brokerage wrote half the amount of the policies in the winter than in the summer. 

“My father [Sutherland Insurance’s former president] at the time absolutely knew, based on his instincts, that we were seasonally busy. But until he could visualize it, he couldn’t actually make a business decision,” Sutherland said.  

“For a heavy PL broker as are, we were like, ‘Okay, why don’t we just get somebody to service in the summer and underwrite in the winter, and then we’ll be balanced out?’”  

Since then, the brokerage has been able to continually develop its dashboard, look at overall sales and commissions year over year, and use those numbers to grow organically. 

“We put out a goal of 15% organic [growth] throughout the whole year. And we’ve never done more than 12 on an annual basis. And growing as much as we have in the past few years, the percentage goals get harder and harder,” he said. “So, I laid it all out and reverse-engineered a new business goal, a retention goal, or rate goal…And we’re currently sitting at 16.7%. 

“It’s really allowed us to kind of capitalize on what we have existing and then grow truly organically, just by providing a little bit of motivation and a little bit of information [to staff].” 

The dashboard also categorizes sales targets: if they’re above their goal for the month, it’s green; if they’re below for the month, it’s red; and if they’re within 60% to 80% of their goal, it’s yellow. 

Instant trend detection 

One of the most useful cases for the dashboard, Sutherland says, is business development with insurer partners. 

The brokerage’s dashboard can track policy growth and policies in force (PIF) per line of business, and they are able to compare that data with an insurers’ competitors. This is something that markets are finding very valuable, Sutherland says. 

“In the past, they show up dropping stack paper on your plate and go, ‘Hey, this is how we think we’re doing,’” he says. “Now [I can say], ‘No, this is exactly how you’re doing against your competitors and what’s going on in the market.’” 

This robust data is also helping the brokerage solve problems that would otherwise take months to spot and address.  

“I had a market come through and I picked out within a month that we’d just completely stopped writing homeowners with them,” he says. “We went from selling, [say], 50 homes a month to zero; there’s something dramatically wrong here.” 

When Sutherland told the carrier, they identified there was an issue with postal code rating in the brokerage’s territory and fixed it right away.  

“In the past, I don’t know how many months that would have taken them or us to even recognize that,” he says. “That has been a game changer for…my partner relationships and to be able to hold each other accountable, and not just rely on their information, but also give them valuable feedback.” 

Feature image by iStock.com/LaylaBird