NPS
Every agency can tell you what it wrote last month. Very few can tell you what it lost, or why. For HPM Insurance, one of New Hampshire’s largest independent agencies, that question became one of the most important in the business.
The Goldilocks Agency
HPM has grown through nine, ten, eleven acquisitions since 2011, expanding from a small shop into a statewide agency. Its founder, Lyle Fulkerson, came into insurance without an insurance background, which turned out to matter — there was no baggage about “how it’s always been done,” just a direct question of how to differentiate.
The answer, according to April Weismann, EVP of HPM Insurance, HPM doesn’t compete on price, it competes on service and convenience. We are not a family-run corner shop, not a national call center — we are “the Goldilocks of insurance.” Big enough to have markets and technology. Flexible enough that clients aren’t talking to robots.
The Problem With Only Counting Wins
HPM’s old system made it easy to log what producers wrote, and just as easy to never log what they didn’t.
“Anyone can fill in a spreadsheet of what they wrote. What you’re missing is what they didn’t write, because a lot of people don’t put in what they don’t write.”said Weismann. “Nobody wants to write down their losses, but without this information, you are not getting a clear picture.”
The distortion shows up fast in acquisitions. HPM will onboard a new agency, run the numbers, and find a producer with a 100% close ratio. “We find this over and over again, and know it’s impossible,” said Weismann. “We also know reporting has to change pretty quick to get a real understanding of what is going on.”
Every Deal Gets a Card
HPM’s fix: every opportunity gets a deal card in InsuredMine the moment it opens, before anyone knows how it ends. Some become wins, while others are losses, with a reason attached, not a shrug.
“There’s nothing wrong with losing. We don’t all win all the time. But we need to understand: is it an opportunity for next year, or is it just someone wasting our time?”
Because a deal card, once created, doesn’t disappear, leadership stopped asking how much they’d written and started asking the harder question underneath it — the one April kept circling back to:
“Everybody wants to tell the agency owners about what they won” said Weismann. “That’s important, but so is what we didn’t and why.”
Without that answer, leadership was guessing rather than managing — no way to tell whether producers were falling behind, a market was overpriced, follow-up was slipping, or a prospect was simply going to shop every renewal no matter what anyone did. Once every loss had a reason attached, leadership finally had something to work with. The new-business report still needs human review — rewrites can look like new sales, and April is quick to point that out — but the opportunity data tells a different story, capturing everything that entered the pipeline, not just what made it through.
“That’s the information a lot of agencies are missing — not what they wrote, but what they didn’t write and why.”
And because nothing gets deleted, that same data can do double duty: HPM re-engages lost opportunities the following year instead of relying on someone’s memory. “We’ve won policies from that. People are busy and need a reminder about giving us another chance to win their business.” The beauty is that there is no extra effort, since the resolicit happens when we close the lead. The deal card that recorded a loss becomes the trigger for a future campaign.
The Real Efficiency Gain Is in the Interruptions
April is precise about where the time actually goes. It isn’t the big automation, it’s the hundred small stops throughout the day: monitoring an inbox for a returned form, remembering to alert an account rep, manually attaching an email to the management system.
“It’s not the action. It’s the time you had to stop, think about it, do it, and then get back to what you were doing. Multiply that a hundred times a day, and your day is done.”
For a light user, that shows up as fewer manual steps, emails and texts that attach to the AMS on their own. For what April calls her “star student,” the effect compounds:
“It can double their efficiency.”
Why HPM Stayed
HPM signed the same year Vertafore acquired AgencyZoom. April was blunt about why she passed on the name: she’d rather be the priority customer of an independent, customer-focused company than one of thousands absorbed into a much bigger one.
“I need to talk to the person I know will hear me.”
She’s candid about the tradeoff — this isn’t plug-and-play. InsuredMine is a big product, spanning CRM, automation, and communication, and it takes time to learn.
“It’s an investment in time, but the return is much greater than the investment.”
And when something doesn’t fit HPM’s workflow, she says so, and the conversation ends there. No push back. “It’s not being stuck with an off-the-shelf product. InsuredMine is a product and a relationship,” said Weismann.
The Takeaway
Both threads point the same direction: HPM doesn’t win by avoiding friction. It wins by refusing to let friction — a lost deal, a stalled email — disappear without being counted.
Every deal gets a card before anyone knows how the story ends. There’s nothing wrong with losing, as long as you’re the kind of agency that bothers to find out why and learn from it.
