Sabine Cain, senior vice president of digital production at Chubb, has worked for the insurer for her entire career. In her current role, she oversees Marketplace, the insurer's online digital platform for agents.
"One of the things that I've learned in this particular role is listening to the agency feedback is critical for us," she said. "There's a lot of assumptions that I think that someone like myself or anybody else who has been in an underwriting role for as long as I have make, so I host office hours every week. I meet with our power users or new users regularly. I attend trainings for people who are going on the platform for the first time, just so I can hear what the questions are and what the objections might be."
Marketplace launched in 2018, and Chubb continues making more types of coverage available through it, most recently adding non-profit company commercial coverage.
"The possibilities are endless, in terms of how we can try to reach the target markets we want to get to," Cain said. She has also steered Marketplace to reach smaller markets within the U.S. that the insurer wasn't serving, like Nebraska and Idaho.
Cain looks at what agents' customers are using the Marketplace platform and how many customers in an agent's territory are using it. She also looks at what quotes they are receiving and whether those quotes are leading to insurance contracts. She then reaches out to those customers to get their views of the Marketplace process, its efficiency and ease of use.
"For those individuals who didn't actually move forward with binding something that they quoted, what was the reason for that? Was the pricing not competitive enough?" Cain asked. "I'm always trying to get a lot of feedback, because I've been very, very surprised. Things that I thought would be the key reason why an agent wants to sell a coverage are not necessarily so. I really learned that listening to what they want is more important than anything, because then it will resonate for them in the sales process."
Managing Marketplace, Cain regularly works with about 150 business development managers and about 700 underwriters. The company expects to have about 5,000 users on the platform by the end of 2025. To manage groups and a client base that large requires a lot of listening, Cain said.
"Being a good listener and accepting feedback and processing that feedback is always something that has been helpful to me when I manage a big team, as well as when I'm trying to influence as many people as I'm influencing now," she said. "Taking away any noise and getting to the heart of what the issue is, always served me well in leadership."
Cain believes authenticity is the most important quality for leadership. "Some leaders are born with it very early on in their career, while others have to develop that because they're too busy trying to leverage what they think is important and what they think that somebody might want to hear, rather than what they necessarily believe," she said. "That's probably the challenge for any leader, is managing to advance your career objectives while remaining authentic and true to yourself."
