Programbusiness.com: A Portal into the World of Markets

If a man speaks in the woods, and no one hears him, is he still wrong? Well, if I were the man, then the answer would be a resounding, “Yes.”

Let me start from the beginning. I receive an e-mail about a portal called programbusiness .com (www.programbusiness .com). With all of the tech industry upheaval as of late, I’m beginning to think that I smell a “dying dot-com” story. So I do some research. I go out and test the site to see how it’s linked to the web. It isn’t pretty.

Out of the 1.32 billion web pages out on the Internet, programbusiness.com is linked to by only five pages-four of which are pages that are using Barry Klein’s “Ultimate Insurance Links.” I look at the actual programbusiness.com site and there are only four vendors/consultants in the directory and only 22 agency storefronts. The site is looking more and more like that falling tree in the forest that no one hears make a sound.

I could not have been more wrong.

Talking with President Jeff Neilson and going on a “virtual tour” of the site and its features, I realized that I had been looking at it from the wrong perspective. While there are a number of sites and products out there that offer similar services (MarketScout, SP Markets and even our own InsuranceJournal.com), program business.com puts a lot of power in a single site-for wholesalers, MGAs, brokers and agents.

Backed by data and databases
Part of that power comes from leveraging the databases and capabilities of the Neilsons’ other venture-National Marketing Services (NMS). This includes one of the most comprehensive lists of insurance professionals in the industry, plus their e-mail addresses. Add in that NMS call center personnel are actively updating this information in real time, and you’ve got a pretty good head start in finding what you need.

This in itself is a boon. If you have ever purchased a list before, you know that most lists you get aren’t exactly clean. Information is convoluted-area codes change, people move onward, upward and outward, and agencies merge, dissolve or disappear. That’s because for many of these lists, it is the responsibility of the end user to make the changes.

For agents, programbusiness.com offers the ability to navigate through the wholesale community to locate markets, find programs in specific industries and potentially lock down those hard-to-place coverages. Indexes can be searched by key word, coverage, program or by business name or state.

Creating partnerships
Agents can also find a wealth of other tools. Besides searchable indexes or links to important insurance sites, there are beneficial partnerships. One is a partnership with Zapdata.com where agents can buy their own lists of groups for targeted marketing to end users. Programbusiness.com’s deal with Businesscreditusa.com allows users to purchase cursory credit ratings and reports for only $3.

Much of the site’s functionality, though, rests on the storefront side. Storefront owners-mainly wholesalers, vendors, and consultants-can selectively send e-mail blasts and fax blasts (using PDF files) out to different segments of the 40,000 top North American agencies to market their programs and products.

Storefronts can also be customized to link to submission forms, websites or other contact means, and administrative tools provide easy updating of information or access to storefront traffic statistics.

Sign language in the dark
So the site is feature-rich. But somehow, I kept returning to the fact that the site had minimal storefronts, minimal links and probably minimal traffic. I called one of the storefronts to confirm my suspicions, and the gentleman referred to the site and the services as being similar to understanding sign language in the dark. For it to be really useful, you need light with which to see it.

The light, it turns out, is the 36 newsletters a year that programbusiness.com sends out to its subscribers, generating a ton of traffic. The newsletters provide links into the site-to articles, resources and storefronts-generating business for programbusiness.com and business for storefronts and agents alike. According to Neilson, the site has already been hit more than 350,000 times in 2001 with sessions averaging 20 minutes.

However, it’s not a traditional portal. Sure, you can customize it somewhat, but it’s not an Excite or Yahoo. Neilson agreed that this is not a site that agents will be making their homepage. However, he believes that this site will be bookmarked and visited frequently.

Building a base
Listening to Neilson talk, it’s obvious that he’s very optimistic about the future and success of programbusiness.com. I liken his enthusiasm to the way that insurance professionals build and broaden their customer base by bringing features, products and functionality proactively to the customer or prospective customer-in this case, it’s to their desktop inbox and browser screen.

That’s not to say that there won’t be some challenges. Programbusiness.com has to deal with its share. The vendors’ directory needs to be beefed up. More storefronts are needed and they come with price tags. They must walk a fine line to prevent “over-featurizing” the site while keeping the personalization.

But for what insurance professionals are facing these days, sites and services like programbusiness.com are way past due. Whether it’s programbusiness.com or another, the point is that these sites will become necessary for new business to be written. Not to take advantage of the many services offered by a site like programbusiness.com would be like I was earlier-wrong.

Tech Talk is a regular column designed to examine and explain new technology and how it applies to the insurance industry. To comment on this column, please send e-mail to ijwest@insurancejournal.com.

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