How we research and rank
Anybody who’s been selling insurance a while has funded at least one lead account or signed one software contract they wish they hadn’t. We put this site together so agents and agency owners can take a hard look at a lead company, a CRM or a dialer before handing it a card number. Below is how we research vendors and order them on our lists, how pages stay current and how the site gets paid.
What we cover
Our scope is what agencies spend money on to find clients, work them and hang on to them. We hold off on giving a category its own page until we’ve dug into enough vendors to compare them fairly. One vendor gets one profile with all of its products on it and wherever that vendor turns up in a category, the link takes you back to that same profile.
How we research a vendor
Research starts at the source. We go through the vendor’s pricing, plans, terms, help center and product pages first, then layer in public data and what we know from experience, and we’ve been working with agents and agencies since 2008 so there’s a fair amount of that.
How we order vendors
There are no star ratings or scores on this site. Agencies are too different by line, size and sales model for a single number to tell you who fits yours.
Still, a list has to start somewhere, so the default order comes from trust factors that matter to just about every buyer. We check whether the vendor publicly discloses what you need to decide (pricing plus its return and contract terms), how long it’s been in business and whether we can verify its legal entity, and how open it is about pricing counts as well. Those factors get adjusted as better data points turn up.
Objective signals get the weight because they’re hard to game. We still read what agents say and what’s out there on the web and we talk to our peers in the industry, reviews just don’t set the order because they’re easy to manipulate and rarely apply to every buyer the same way.
You can reorder any list by filtering and sorting it down to the vendors that fit your agency, and our “Best for” pages spell out what a vendor had to meet to land on them.
How we make money
Referrals help cover some of our expenses. When a vendor on our lists has a referral program we may use an affiliate or referral link for it, though that link has zero say over the default order, over which vendors get listed and over what we write about them.
A vendor can’t pay to change our coverage or jump ahead in the default order either. If we ever sell paid placement you’ll see it clearly labeled right there on the page.
Calculators and figures
The calculators use fixed formulas and every page spells its formula out in plain text. Vendor-published inputs such as price per lead or a monthly plan price come straight from the vendor, dated. The inputs that are about your agency, close rate and commission mostly, start blank on purpose since nobody knows those numbers better than you do.
Keeping pages current
The last updated date on each page changes when the content changes and that’s it, no bumping dates to look fresh. It lines up with the date in the page’s structured data and in our sitemap, and if a page has gone through significant changes you’ll see a revision history at the bottom with the newest on top.
Hear that a vendor changed its pricing, plans or terms and we’re back on it to recheck, and every profile cycles back around for another look over time regardless.
Corrections
Mistakes happen and we’d rather hear about them than not. Every vendor profile ends with a “Correct this listing” link, or you can email corrections@insuranceagencytools.com, tell us what’s off and if you know where the correct information is published point us to it. Every report gets checked against the vendor’s own published sources, confirmed errors get fixed and the significant ones go in the page’s revision history.
Vendors can claim their listing and send updates straight to our editors. Claimed or not, every change gets the same review against published sources.