The Role Nobody Designed - that agents actually needed#

My first insurance agency was in a building that used to be a candy store in Geneva, Illinois. It was 2011, I had no book of business, and I was learning every single thing the hard way.

One of those things I learned was what my Field Sales Leader was actually there to do.

At the time, I thought the FSL was supposed to be my business coach. Someone who understood my market, could help me build systems, and would walk alongside me as I figured out how to turn a blank agency into something real. That’s what the recruiting pitch implied. That’s what the org chart suggested.

What I got was different. Not because the person was bad at their job — they weren’t. They were smart, experienced, and genuinely wanted to help. But the role they were in didn’t give them the tools, the time, or the mandate to do what I actually needed. Their calendar was full of territory reporting, compliance reviews, and corporate-driven initiatives. The time we spent together was mostly reviewing my numbers against benchmarks and talking about what I needed to do more of.

I didn’t need someone to tell me my numbers were high or low. I was living my numbers. What I needed was someone who could help me diagnose why my close rate was 22% instead of 35%, whether my marketing spend was generating the right kind of leads, and what systems I could actually use to help my agency grow.

That’s a different conversation. And the role, as it was structured, wasn’t designed for it.

This Isn’t a People Problem#

I want to be clear about something before we go further: this is not a criticism of the people in field leadership roles. I’ve worked with FSLs and territory leaders on both the captive and independent sides, and the vast majority are talented, hardworking professionals who care about their agencies. Many of them feel the same frustration from the other direction — they know they could be creating more value, but the structure of their role doesn’t let them.

The issue is the model, not the people.

And it’s not a criticism of carriers, either. The field leadership model evolved logically. When the primary need was product training and compliance oversight, a territory manager who visited agencies, delivered updates, and monitored adherence made perfect sense. When carriers needed better sales performance, adding production targets and incentive structures to the role was a reasonable response.

But the agency landscape changed underneath all of that. Agency owners — especially in the independent channel — increasingly think of themselves as business owners first and insurance producers second. They have access to data, technology, and industry knowledge that didn’t exist twenty years ago. What they lack isn’t information or motivation. What they lack is a thought partner who can help them turn information into strategy and strategy into execution.

The current field leadership model wasn’t designed for that job. And the gap between what the role provides and what agencies need is where value goes to die.

Where the Misalignment Costs Everyone#

Let me walk through what this looks like in practice, because the costs show up in places most people don’t measure.

For agencies: When a field leader’s primary focus is territory-level (average per agency, etc) production, the natural incentive is to spend the most time where the most improvement is believed to be possible — which usually means underperforming agencies. That makes mathematical sense from a territory perspective. But it means high-performing agencies get less attention, even though they often have the highest potential for growth. An agency doing $1.5M that could get to $3M with the right strategic support is worth more to the carrier than moving a $200K agency to $300K. But in the current model, the $200K agency gets more field leader time because the gap to “average” is larger.

I lived this. Starting my first ageny I worked 14 hours a day, 6 - 7 days a week and just inherently I ground my way to good production numbers. My FSL interactions quickly became less frequent even though from the beginning they weren’t very substantive. The result was that the relationship was administrative rather than strategic, and I realized my carrier didn’t have the ability to provide me tactical / on the ground knowledge and training to support my growth.

For field leaders: This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Most field leaders I’ve known didn’t get into the role to manage spreadsheets and run compliance audits. They wanted to help agencies grow. But when you’re managing 50–70 agencies and your evaluation is primarily based on territory aggregates, there’s enormous pressure to focus on the activities that move those numbers in the short term. Deep, consultative coaching takes time — time that competes with reporting, corporate initiatives, and the agencies that are in crisis mode. Many field leaders end up spending the majority of their time on tasks that are important but not high-leverage.

For carriers: The real cost is in what you can’t see on a P&L statement: the premium that was never written because a high-potential agency didn’t get the strategic support to reach its ceiling. The agency that left for a competitor not because of product or pricing but because the relationship felt transactional. The cross-sell revenue that sits untouched because nobody helped the agency owner build a systematic account rounding process. These are invisible costs, but they compound.

**A question worth asking:** If you're a carrier, how much of your field leadership team's time is spent on activities that directly create value at the agency level versus activities that report on value (or lack of it) to corporate? If the ratio is heavily weighted toward reporting, you're paying for oversight when you could be paying for growth.

The Distance Problem#

There’s another dimension to this that’s worth naming: the natural information distance between a carrier’s corporate office and an individual agency’s daily reality.

Carriers set strategy at scale. That’s their job, and they need to do it well. But strategy at scale doesn’t automatically translate into actionable guidance at the agency level. A corporate initiative to “increase bundling rates by 15%” is a perfectly reasonable strategic objective. But for an individual agency owner, the question isn’t whether to bundle more — it’s how to build an account review process that systematically identifies cross-sell opportunities in their existing book, how to train their CSRs to have the conversation naturally, and how to track it without adding another spreadsheet to their already-full plate.

The field leader sits in between, trying to translate corporate strategy into agency action. But the role often doesn’t give them the time or tools to make that translation meaningful. So what the agency hears is “you need to bundle more” — which they already know — instead of “here’s a system you can implement next week that will surface your best cross-sell opportunities and give your team a repeatable process.”

That’s the gap. It’s not about bad intentions on either side. It’s about a role that was built for information delivery in an era that needs consultative partnership.

What Would It Look Like If We Started Over?#

I’ve been thinking about this question for years. Katlyn and I have worked inside carrier-agency structures, built agencies from scratch, developed training programs for agency forces, and seen what actually moves the needle at the agency level. The answer keeps coming back to the same thing:

The field leadership role needs to be redesigned around value creation at the agency level, not territory management at the corporate level.

Imagine a field leader who shows up to your agency meeting and says: “I’ve been looking at your data, and there’s something interesting. Your retention drops significantly for policies bound from online leads versus referral leads. That suggests the online leads are more price-sensitive, which means your quoting process for those leads might need a different approach than what you’re using for referrals. Can I walk you through what I’m seeing and we can figure out what to do about it together? Let’s model out how this changes your agency over the next 2-3 years.”

Compare that to: “Your retention is at 78%. The benchmark is 85%. What’s your plan to close that gap?”

Both conversations are about retention. But the first one creates value. The agency owner leaves with a specific, actionable insight they didn’t have before. The second one creates obligation. The agency owner leaves with homework they probably already knew about.

The difference isn’t the field leader’s intelligence or work ethic. It’s whether the role is structured to enable that first conversation. Does the field leader have access to AI-powered diagnostic tools that can surface those patterns? Do they have the time in their schedule to prepare that kind of analysis? Are they trained in consultative communication that turns data into collaborative problem-solving? Are they evaluated on the depth of value they create or the breadth of territory they cover?

Right now, for most carriers, the answer to all four of those questions is no.

The Agency Success Coach#

What I’m describing isn’t theoretical. It’s an evolution of the field leadership role that we’re calling the Agency Success Coach.

The ASC model doesn’t throw out everything about the current role. It preserves the accountability, the structure, and the carrier’s need for performance visibility. What it changes is the orientation and the toolkit.

Servant leadership orientation. The ASC’s job is to help agency owners build better businesses. Territory results follow from that, not the other way around.

AI-powered diagnostics. Instead of manually reviewing dashboards, ASCs use AI to surface patterns, root causes, and opportunities that would take hours to find manually. They walk into every conversation better prepared.

Consultative coaching. Trained in Socratic questioning and collaborative problem-solving. The goal isn’t to tell agencies what to do — it’s to help them think through their own challenges and build their own solutions.

Coach-the-coach methodology. The highest-leverage move isn’t coaching individual producers — it’s teaching agency owners how to coach their own teams. One ASC who equips 50 agency owners to run effective one-on-ones creates exponentially more impact than one who tries to coach 200 producers directly.

The model respects the reality that field leaders are managing large portfolios. In fact, it’s designed specifically for that constraint — AI handles the diagnostic heavy lifting, coach-the-coach creates multiplication, and structured engagement frameworks ensure consistent quality without requiring superhuman time management.

**The multiplier math:** A typical field leader manages 50–60 agencies. They can't individually coach every producer in every agency. But if they teach 50–60 agency owners how to run effective one-on-ones, set production goals that connect to daily activity, and diagnose their own performance issues — that's not 50–60 coaching relationships. That's 50–60 multiplied by every team member in every agency.

Who This Is Really For#

If you’re a carrier executive reading this, the question isn’t whether your field leadership is “good” or “bad.” It’s whether your field leadership model is generating the ROI it should be, given the talent you’ve invested in and the agencies you’re trying to grow.

If you’re a field leader reading this, the question isn’t whether you’re doing your job well. It’s whether your role is structured to let you do the kind of work you actually want to do — the deep, consultative, agency building work that made you want this job in the first place.

If you’re an agency owner reading this, the question isn’t whether your FSL is helpful. It’s whether the relationship is creating the kind of value that makes you genuinely better at running your business.

In most cases, there’s a gap. Not because anyone is failing, but because the model hasn’t caught up to what all three groups actually need from each other.

That’s the gap we’re working on closing.