Gut Feel or Good Data? Why Advice Is Slowly Moving Beyond Instinct

A conversation that kept circling back to the same question

I sat down with four people who each see the insurance advisory world from a different angle: Marcel van Dijk from MarshBerry, who spends his days analysing broker valuations and growth patterns; a principal at a Top-10 brokerage, who lives with the daily reality of managing client relationships; Milco Poppe from Yellow Hive, who thinks about marketing and client journeys; and Erik de Voogd, who built and sold a brokerage and now invests in the sector.

I expected the conversation to go in several directions. Instead, it kept circling back to one question: how long can we keep relying on instinct alone?

Instinct has always been part of the craft

Nobody around the table was dismissing gut feel. Far from it. Every experienced adviser has that sixth sense -- the ability to read a client meeting, to know when something is off before the numbers confirm it. The brokerage principal put it well: that intuition is earned over years and it is genuinely valuable.

But Marcel said something that stuck with me. He has visibility across hundreds of brokerages through MarshBerry, and what he sees is a growing gap between how clients behave and how most firms are set up to respond.

Clients research online before they call. They compare. They expect you to know their situation without having to explain it from scratch every time. The old model -- wait for the phone to ring, do a solid job, hope they come back next year -- still works, but the margins for error are thinner.

Marketing moves to the centre

Erik leaned back at this point and said something that I think surprised a few people at the table: "The role of marketing has never been as significant as it is today." Coming from someone who built a successful brokerage without much of a marketing function, that carried weight.

His point was simple. If fewer clients find you by accident -- through local reputation, word of mouth, walking past your office -- then the journey that brings them to your door matters enormously. And most brokerages, he admitted, are not very good at it yet. Not because they lack the intent, but because it was never a muscle they needed to develop.

Data enters quietly, not dramatically

The broker principal was clear that he does not want his advisers staring at dashboards all day. What he wants is for them to walk into a client meeting knowing things they would not have known otherwise. A signal that a client's risk profile shifted. A pattern that suggests someone might be underinsured. Small things, but the kind of things that turn a routine check-in into a conversation that actually matters.

That is how data enters, in my experience. Not with a big bang, not with a transformation programme and a steering committee. It enters as a quiet "did you know?" that changes how an adviser prepares for a meeting.

When instinct and data point in different directions

Milco raised what I thought was the most interesting point of the afternoon. He described situations where an adviser feels perfectly confident about a client relationship -- everything seems stable, the client never complains, renewals happen on autopilot -- but the data tells a different story. Maybe the client has been getting quotes elsewhere. Maybe their business has changed in ways that the current coverage does not reflect.

Those are the moments where data earns its keep. Not by overriding the adviser's judgement, but by prompting a conversation that might not have happened otherwise. And sometimes, that conversation is the one that saves the relationship.

Growing into a new way of working

This was the broker principal again, and I think he is right. The firms that try to impose data-driven working from above -- new system, mandatory adoption, weekly KPI reviews -- tend to get compliance without conviction. The advisers go through the motions, but the insight does not change their behaviour.

What works better, from what we have seen across our own client base, is starting small. One team, a few clients, a handful of signals that prove their worth. When an adviser sees that a data-prompted call actually leads to a better outcome -- a retained client, a relevant cross-sell, a conversation that mattered -- they do not need to be told to do it again. They just do. That pattern has repeated itself in every implementation we have done. The technology is never the bottleneck. Belief is.

Final thought

Nobody around that table suggested that instinct is obsolete. That would be absurd -- and wrong. But there was a shared recognition that instinct alone is getting harder to rely on. Not because advisers have gotten worse at their jobs, but because the context they operate in has gotten more complex, more fast-moving, and less forgiving of blind spots. Data does not replace the human skill. It gives it better material to work with.

Three years into building Onesurance, that is probably the thing I am most certain of. And I say that as someone who built his own career almost entirely on gut feel.