Soft Insurance Market Survival Guide

Does the soft insurance market have you concerned? If not, you may want to take a second look. While we all want out of the hard insurance market, we might not want to put our party hats on just yet. Soft market conditions bring new challenges that agencies must learn not just to survive, but to thrive in. 

The independent insurance marketplace has been non-stop — from COVID to the hard market, and now to a softening insurance market. Have no fear, you’re here, and we’re going to outline the game plan we’re providing our consulting clients.

For those of you who may not be familiar, here’s the definition of a soft insurance market:

A soft insurance market is a phase in the insurance industry cycle characterized by favorable conditions for policyholders and increased competition among insurers.

Key Characteristics:

Feature	Description
Lower premiums	Insurers compete aggressively for business, driving rates down.
Broader coverage	Policies often include more inclusions, fewer exclusions, and higher limits.
Flexible underwriting	Insurers are more lenient; easier to qualify for coverage, even for higher-risk clients.
Higher capacity	More insurers and reinsurers are willing to take on risk, increasing available capital.
Profitability pressure on insurers	Combined ratios rise as claims payouts outpace premium income.

Why It Happens:

• Excess capital: Insurers and reinsurers have strong balance sheets (often after years of low catastrophe losses or strong investment returns).
• Low catastrophe activity: Fewer large claims (e.g., hurricanes, wildfires) leave insurers flush with cash.
• Increased competition: New entrants or expanded capacity from existing players flood the market.

In a soft market, a business might renew its property insurance at 15–30% lower premiums than the prior year, with higher limits and fewer exclusions—even if their risk profile hasn’t improved.

Contrast with a Hard Market:

Soft Market	Hard Market
↓ Premiums	↑ Premiums
Lenient underwriting	Strict underwriting
Broad coverage	Restricted coverage
High insurer capacity	Limited capacity

 

Now, we don’t believe in this soft market that the underwriting guidelines will open up like the wild west, but they will start to loosen. This is an opportunity to help your current clients and welcome new clients. 

What Are the Downside of a Hard Market for Independent Agents

• Book size decreases with every renewal (carrier renewal offers will be lower than the current premium).
• Current customers need to be reshopped — as they shop their insurance, they’ll find more competitive premiums.
• Carrier appetites will change, meaning agencies need to shop more carriers, and in personal lines, they’ll need to embrace raters.
  Agents need to focus on increasing coverage and cross-selling to help make back lost premiums.
• Clients need their coverages adjusted due to inflation — the coverage they have doesn’t go as far, and with increased deductibles, policies should be reviewed and updated.
• Clients held on during difficult times — we need to show good faith.
  There will be lots of shoppers in the marketplace. Without a solid sales process and agency standards, agencies may operate in chaos.
  

You may be reshopping the book away:

• Previous Term Premium: $1,000
• Renewal Premium: $900
• Reshopped Premium: $800
  

Moving the client to a lower-commission carrier can cut the agency’s revenue even further.

The bottom line: your agency needs a strategy to master soft insurance market conditions.

Strategy #1: Renewal Reviews & Remarketing

Your clients have stayed loyal during a difficult time. Rates increased at record levels, coverages were cut, deductibles rose, and long-term loyal clients were canceled by carriers for no real cause. This has created major distrust between clients and agents. We need a plan to win back trust, clean up accounts, and improve client coverages.

Your best strategy is to get proactive and make renewal review calls. Renewal review calls are proactive client calls where you review coverage, make recommendations, encourage cross-selling, align coverage to the client’s needs, and rebuild trust. When necessary, you may lean on remarketing, but when doing so, we want the mentality that we need to gain something from the conversation.

Here’s our outline for a renewal review:

• Contact the client upon renewal, offer download, or a set number of days before renewal
• Make 1 phone call and 1 email to the client and then move on

Have a pre-renewal review checklist:

• Review the clients contact information (it’s hard to give WOW service with bad information)
• Ask update questions on the account (occupation, revenue, services, new purchases, confirm mortgage companies). 
• In our Agency Retention course, we cover how to:
  • Review what they client has for coverage
    • Encourage increases to the agency standard
    • If the client has the agency standard recommend increased coverages
  • Share premium decreases this is exciting and may avoid a remarket
    • Note: Always share the total amount decreased it makes it sound larger than the monthly savings
  • Review any discounts that the client may be eligible for 
  • Thank the client for their business
  • Ask for a referral

By doing this, you’ll increase coverage, cross-sell, earn referrals, and hopefully avoid a remarket.
We need to be transparent — many of your clients shopped during the hard insurance market. This means your clients are in your competitors’ databases, being targeted as potential new business.

We also need to become insurance nerdy — really knowing and practicing coverages. Clients need to understand the real risks they face. We now have the opportunity to return to being insurance agents, rather than constantly defending rates.

What Happens When You Need To Remarket

There will be times in the soft insurance market you need to remarket. You must have the mentality that you need to get something from the remarket. 

Here is a a list of ways you can make remarketing mutually beneficial:

• Update contact information – for all insureds
• Get the client on an E-Policy
• Increase coverage
• Increase deductibles – helps with loss ratios!
• Cross-sales
• Move to a better carrier/company 
• Get the client to use a client portal or carrier app (slow down service)
• Move the client to EFT/ACH/Pay-In-Full
• Get a referral

Your remarketing can yield a net positive with the right intention! Check out our Soft Market Series, where we will walk your team through 4 Soft Market Strategies!

Becoming Relentlessly Efficient to Help The Best Clients

Yes, we need to focus on being efficient and effective. New business, remarkets, and service will increase, so if you are already behind, it’s time to gain control of your day. Too many agencies are running incredibly inefficiently. When we add more to the pipeline it will make things harder for everyone. 

So how can we keep up and thrive?

First Call Resolution

First call resolution means completing transactions with the client while they’re on the phone — including documenting everything in your management system. The goal is for the agency team member to handle as much as possible during the call. The key shift is avoiding the habit of jotting notes on a pad to enter later, only to get distracted by another call. That approach leaves too many loose ends — and honestly, it’s doing the same job twice.

Here is how you can move toward first call resolution:

• Ensure your team has 2-3 monitors
• Get the team headsets to make typing and talking easier
• Ask the team to replace notebooks with white boards (you can jot something down, but you need to wipe it clean)
• Identify any forms that may need to be made into fillable PDFs – hint: for quote sheets in Personal Lines they can do direct entry into the rater

Getting the team to practice first call resolution is a game change. 

Client Control

There is a great quote I love to share – you teach people how to treat you. I believe most clients want to be told what to do. We have greater control over our clients than we think. Of course it’s easier to work on new clients and get them into new ways of doing business. But, we will be doing an increased number of remarkets which means we have opportunity. 

Here are some ways we can better control our time by helping clients use more self-service options: 

• EFT/ACH/Pay-In-Full Payment as the primary recommended options
• E Policy – limit mail issues
• Quoting only multiline (why not get another line to quote – we said quote not bind)
• Introducing client portals (hint: instead of emailing documents, put them in the portals)
• Encouraging carrier apps where clients can use them for service
• Client tiers – identifying which clients we may deprioritize
• Understanding that not everyone is qualified for a remarket or a new business quote 

You can control the client more than you think. When we allow clients all the options, we may be hurting our time management. Guide clients toward options that help streamline your work. 

Raise Your Hand

This is a concept we started about 5 years ago. Raising your hand is the process of letting your team know you are slipping behind. Note it should be slipping behind, not buried and struggling to breathe. When you communicate, the team can help and we can reroute work. We need to build back trust with clients and when we don’t communicate we may drop balls. 

If you want your team to get these tips, make sure to register them for our 4-part Soft Market Series. 

Be Ready to Take On New Business

We are predicting the soft market will increase shopping. Too many clients have held on to their current agent and carrier due to lack of other options. That will start changing. 

In addition, you have a whole lead list of great opportunities you could not help based on the market conditions. You need to divide your time between inbound business, saving current accounts and working them, and reaching out to past unsold leads. Sounds exhausting, we better get good at some first call resolution. 

The issue we see is too many agencies have a quote process but not a sales process. 

Here are the key markers of a sales process: 

• Leads are routed directly to a live person for instant help
• Agents have golden hour where they make outbound calls to past leads
• There are clear standards (our favorites are no monoline quotes, current coverage must be present, must believe in the coverage standards you have)
• There is a clear process that generates 2 quote options
• Follow-up is consistent
• We ask for the business on the phone
• Multi-line quotes take priority

You have the opportunity to reject the lowest leads and build your agency on the best leads. In our 4 Part Soft Market Series we will be sharing our best practices for managing new business. 

Conclusion Soft Insurance Market Survival Guide

In the shift from a hard to a soft insurance market, the real winners aren’t the carriers chasing volume — they’re the agencies that treat this phase as both a trust-rebuilding and growth-acceleration opportunity. By mastering proactive renewal reviews, turning every remarket into a net-positive conversation, operating with steady efficiency, and enforcing a disciplined sales process, your agency can secure higher retention, stronger accounts, and a steady flow of ideal new clients. 

The soft market isn’t a party — it’s a proving ground. Execute the strategies above, register your team for the 4-part Soft Market Series, and emerge stronger, more profitable, and ready for whatever the next cycle brings.

🔥 Dive into our latest blog The Soft Insurance Market Survival Guide: Key Leadership Tactics 

🎉 Get our FREE Ultimate List of How to Get Something From a Remarket 

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