Inside the shift reshaping carrier relationships

Twenty years ago, a broker sent select carriers an email about what their client needed and waited for carriers to respond. Then there would typically be a series of exchanges of additional information with revised pricing and terms before finally completing the process. Today, that same drawn-out back-and-forth won’t fly. The pace of business has changed, the cost of doing business has changed, and clients expect benefits placement to be seamless, quick, and error-free.

It’s tempting to think that just doubling down on what you’ve always done might make things go faster. But forward-looking brokers and carriers are learning that they can’t solve this independently. They have to solve it together—with shared data, clear processes, and mutual accountability.

Few people are better positioned to speak to this shift than Joe Lennert, our first Director of Provider Partnerships.

With experience in multiple roles as a broker collaborating with carriers, he’s got a unique vantage point on what great partnerships look like, how technology makes them better, and the impact AI will have on employee benefits and beyond. Here’s our Q&A with Joe.

You spent over 20 years at McGriff and predecessor firms on the brokerage side before coming to ThreeFlow. What did that vantage point teach you about where broker-provider relationships consistently break down?

If I look across my entire career as a broker/consultant and agency leader working with carriers, the cracks in provider relationships almost always came from one of four places:

Lack of direction

You shouldn’t just be meeting with a provider every quarter just to meet. I recommend orienting provider conversations around three-ish goals (5 or 6 is too many). That gets both sides talking about what success looks like, and from there, you can develop an actionable roadmap of what needs to be done and who needs to be involved.

Check on progress in every subsequent meeting. If things aren’t going in the right direction, you can intervene right away, rather than waiting until the end of the year.

Lack of quantitative data

Too many broker-carrier conversations are just one side presenting their view and the other reacting to it with very little shared context and data, which leads to misunderstandings and missed opportunities.

For instance, a carrier might look at the Atlanta market and think they’re performing well based on total premium. But maybe Atlanta is your largest market, and what the carrier has in premium is just scratching the surface of what’s available.

Without a combined view of your books of business, you won’t spot those discrepancies and opportunities. With high-quality data, you can guide the conversation and orient people toward results.

Lack of qualitative data

Quantitative data is critical, but a lot of it is backwards-looking. It’s important to also develop a sense of what might be coming through insights on the qualitative side. But that can be hard to nail down.

Most of the feedback I used to get from my teams about carriers seemed too anecdotal and too sporadic. Which was a shame because, for all the lagging indicators we had (placement patterns, book of business, geo analysis), this type of subjective information was a strong leading indicator going into renewals.

So I built a brief survey designed to capture feedback about the carriers. It was short, which meant (1) people didn’t feel like they had to shuffle through past renewal docs, and (2) more people participated and completed it.

That survey helped me gauge the true complexion of these relationships. If the score was positive, I could expect that we’d place and renew as much as we did last year, if not more. A negative score was a signal to start paying closer attention and potentially take action. In most cases, it was an early enough warning to turn things around before the next cycle.

Lack of collaboration

One party can’t be driving everything. To get the best client outcomes, you need engagement on both sides. Both of you have to know what you’re working on, what success looks like, and how you're planning to get there together. That way, you can stay organized, help each other, and move things across the finish line.

Even if you’re a big player, ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ is not a recipe for long-term success. Pay attention to those smaller brokers or carriers. Otherwise, you compromise what could be a mutually successful long-term partnership.

When you imagine a well-designed provider partnership strategy, what does it actually include that most firms are missing today?

There are a few things that separate a good provider partnership from a great one, and not every firm is doing them. To me, these are the biggest opportunities to stand out:

Position for success

The broker’s primary role is to serve the client. Closely aligned with this is maintaining strong carrier relationships. The stronger the carrier relationship, the better the collaboration in support of the mutual client.

When considering this from an agency perspective, it’s understanding the carrier’s goals and working together to position for success. How can you use your data and knowledge of your organization to help the carrier benchmark where they’re at and where they can grow? How can you use your connections inside and outside of your org to help them solve problems?

Eliminate surprises

When you get to the end of the year and tally up the book of business, it shouldn’t be a surprise to either party whether you hit your goals. Sharing data and revisiting goals in every meeting make this avoidable. It also helps soften the blow in situations where things don’t go to plan.

If you’ve been consistently looking at the data, figuring out the best way to achieve your goals the whole year through, you’ve done your part, and your partner won’t walk away feeling like you didn’t engage or help enough.

Be transparent

My peers on the carrier side have often heard me say:

Success comes from both parties working together, communicating effectively, and playing their part. At the end of the day, a broker can only sell what’s sellable. If a carrier hands them a giant renewal their client will never accept, the broker’s not a magician. If there are persistent service issues, or issues with claim payments, the client will expect the broker to find alternatives.

There are many reasons why business is placed or renewed. When both the broker and the carrier acknowledge that and are honest about their role, it makes the relationship feel like a real partnership.

Make it about them

Too many people focus on writing new business and renewing a bunch of cases. Those are obviously important successes, but you want to tie them to the carrier’s company goals and personal goals. Remember, they’re measured on growing your relationship just like you’re measured on placing business.

Lean into that. For instance, when someone would say, “McGriff had a great year,” I’d always flip it: “No, we had a great year. You gave us competitive pricing, strong service, and you paid claims. Clients had no reason to look elsewhere.” Make it a two-party win.

Where does technology meaningfully change the equation in these relationships, and where does human relationship-building still have to do the heavy lifting?

Every carrier has its own way of doing things, its own system. From a broker’s perspective, dealing with different carrier portals and their preferred ways of formatting data is very inefficient.

When I was working at McGriff, I realized we could take a big load off our broker’s plate (and improve our carrier relationships) by using a tool that facilitated this process and represented both sides of the transaction. So we piloted ThreeFlow and a competitor.

What stood out about ThreeFlow was that it made brokers’ lives easier without them having to cede control. Brokers know best what the client will respond well to, what they won’t, how they want to see information presented to them.

ThreeFlow automated the parts that saved them time (while reducing errors), so they could oversee the entire go-to-market process and invest their full energy into their clients and provider relationships. ThreeFlow preserves the collaboration between the broker and the carrier to ultimately deliver the best possible solution for the client.

With 19,000 employers and $3.7B in premium under management (and that expected to double) what does operating at that scale make possible in terms of how ThreeFlow can show up for providers differently?

The more premium we have under management, the stronger our data is, statistically speaking. That means we can go further than, ‘Hey carrier, we can tell you these interesting things about the broker you work with,’ and vice versa. We can start speaking to broader pricing indications, what’s going on at the plan level, and future placement patterns.

And for medical, effectively the main course in an employee benefits meal, this kind of data is extremely valuable. As we develop a critical mass there and collect a greater share of the total placement pie, I think we have a huge opportunity: painting a full picture of the EB coverage landscape.

How do you see provider relationships evolving over the next few years as the market matures?

A wise mentor once told me, “One thousand years ago, people died too soon, lived too long, and got sick. A thousand years from now, people will die too soon, live too long, and get sick.” In less esoteric terms, the needs that insurance exists to address aren’t going anywhere. What is changing—faster than this industry has ever seen—is how we respond to them.

That’s partially due to AI. At ThreeFlow, we’re seeing what that looks like in practice. AI is streamlining the placement process, enabling brokers and carriers to work together more efficiently and get clients better results faster.

On a larger scale, my hope is that AI will dramatically reduce the cost of healthcare. Some people might say that big players will figure out how to charge extra regardless. But the optimist in me feels like there should be a way, as we unlock all of AI’s potential, to lever down the cost of healthcare. If that happens, it would be a tremendous relief to all Americans (especially small business owners) and would serve as a launchpad for the broader economy.

The relationship is the strategy

In a market undergoing drastic changes, provider relationships are the way to drive sustainable growth. Getting them right takes clear goals, accurate data, and genuine collaboration—and ThreeFlow was built specifically to make that possible.

See how brokers and carriers are working better together by scheduling a demo today.