Season 4 Episode 13
Andrew Filar On Performance Marketing in Insurance: Lead Quality, Compliance, and AI in 2026

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport Podcast, host Tim Finnigan sits down with Andrew Filar, Co-Founder and CEO of Next Call Club, to unpack what’s really happening inside the insurance lead economy — and why the old “buy more leads” mindset is quietly costing agencies their profitability. Andrew traces his journey from cold-calling commercial auto prospects at a State Farm office to running one of the largest Allstate scratch agencies in the country, and finally to building Next Call Club, an aggregator-plus-consultative-partner model designed to help agents hit real cost-per-acquisition targets.

The conversation moves fluidly between market structure, consumer behavior, and operational execution. Andrew explains how the industry has swung from consolidation to fragmentation, why niche publishers charging $30 a lead often outperform $6 leads at scale, and how TCPA volatility, AI screening, and consumer skepticism are reshaping outreach. He and Tim also dig into the psychology of sales-driven organizations that optimize for the seller instead of the consumer — and what happens when agencies match the wrong labor to the wrong lead tier.

By the end, Andrew lays out Next Call Club’s dual-customer model: serving both the agents buying leads and the publishers generating them, closing the feedback loop with result and reject data so quality compounds over time. It’s a candid, practitioner-level look at how modern performance marketing actually works in a regulated, consumer-fatigued environment — and a reminder that in lead generation, differentiation beats volume every time.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• The Industry Is Fragmenting Again — And That’s Good News For Buyers Who Know What To Look For.
  
  Andrew traces a clear pendulum swing in the lead ecosystem: heavy consolidation in the late 2010s and early 2020s (Bankrate, All Web Leads, DMS-era Underground Elephant) followed by a new wave of fragmentation driven by niche publishers who focus on a single, high-quality channel. These smaller publishers may charge $30 for a lead instead of $6 or $8, but the cost-per-acquisition math often works dramatically better. For mid-market marketing leaders in financial services and insurance, this means the era of “one lead partner, one price point” is over — sourcing strategy now requires diversified relationships and a willingness to pay more per lead when the intent signal justifies it.

• Cost Per Lead Is A Vanity Metric. Cost Per Acquisition Is The Only Number That Matters.
  
  One of Andrew’s sharpest arguments is that lead price in isolation tells you nothing. What matters is the full economic picture: lead cost + labor cost + conversion rate = true CPA. He shares a striking example of a client insisting on premium $25–$30 leads (with 40–50% quote rates and 10% sold rates), then routing them to $5-an-hour offshore telemarketers. “It doesn’t make any sense to send your most expensive lead to your cheapest labor.” For performance marketers and acquisition leaders, this reframes the entire vendor evaluation conversation — the question isn’t “what does a lead cost?” but “what does a customer cost, end-to-end, and is my labor tier matched to my lead tier?”

• Consumer Intent Is Now Measurable — And It Should Dictate Your Outreach Cadence.
  Andrew makes a compelling case for using behavioral signals (like time-on-form data from tools such as Jornaya/ActiveProspect) to determine not just whether to buy a lead, but how aggressively to work it. A consumer who spends eight to nine minutes filling out a form entering cars and driver info is a fundamentally different prospect than one who clicks through in 90 seconds. Speed-to-lead still matters, but dialing patterns, channel selection, and persistence should flex based on measured intent. This is the practical application of “behavioral intelligence” that separates modern acquisition programs from spray-and-pray legacy models.

• The Compliance Environment Is Fragmenting Alongside The Market — And It’s Exhausting.
  
  Between federal TCPA, state-level TCPA regimes, the one-to-one consent rule that consumed the industry before being vacated at the eleventh hour, and ongoing debates about whether a text now legally counts as a “call,” compliance overhead has become a full-time strategic discipline. Andrew and Tim both note the hundreds of hours and dollars the industry poured into one-to-one consent readiness — work that ultimately didn’t ship. For regulated marketers, the takeaway is that compliance can no longer be a reactive function; it has to be architected into vendor selection, consent capture, and outreach cadence from day one.

Episode Highlights

The Accidental Career: From Serving Tables to Cold-Calling Commercial Auto
~00:02:32
Andrew describes stumbling into insurance almost by accident — a finance degree, no internships, a friend at State Farm, and a promise to himself to give it a year before quitting. The first six months were cold-calling businesses for commercial auto insurance. It’s a candid moment about how hard early-career grinding actually is, and why “hard is relative” once you’ve done the truly hard thing.

“I made a promise to myself I’d give it like a year, and I said, if I give it a year and I’m still hating it, I’ll do something different.” — Andrew Filar

The “$250,000 Card” Moment That Changed Everything
~00:05:15
When Andrew moved to the largest Allstate captive agency in the country, his boss handed him a card with $250,000 pre-loaded for internet leads and told him to “figure it out.” That moment kicked off Andrew’s realization that “not all leads are created equally” — the same channel that had produced 100+ policies a month at his prior office was producing garbage results here. It became the seed of everything he’d later build.

“I’m 22, 23 years old. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, figure out internet leads.” — Andrew Filar

The NSA-Level Moment at LeadsCon 2015
~00:06:20
Andrew recounts visiting Jornaya in Philadelphia and being shown, for the first time, a full session replay of a consumer filling out a lead form. It was the moment lead generation stopped being a black box for him — and set him on a decade-long path of using data to solve the “not all leads are equal” problem he’d been living with as an agent.

“We sat in the room and they talked about how they had a full replay of how every single consumer who would fill out a lead… We were like, ‘This is NSA-level stuff.'” — Andrew Filar

Don’t Send Your Most Expensive Lead to Your Cheapest Labor
~00:19:35
The single most quotable operational insight of the episode. Andrew describes a client who bought premium leads with 40–50% quote rates and routed them to $5/hour offshore telemarketers — and why that mismatch guaranteed the program would fail. It reframes lead buying as a systems problem, not a procurement problem.

“It doesn’t make any sense to send your most expensive lead to your cheapest labor.” — Andrew Filar

Aggregator, Reframed: Being “Glinda, Not the Wicked Witch”
~00:22:00
Andrew addresses the elephant in the room — that “aggregator” is a dirty word — and lays out Next Call Club’s dual-customer philosophy: serve the publishers with clean feedback loops and serve the agents with consultative depth. It’s a masterclass in how a business model traditionally viewed as extractive can be repositioned as additive.

“We try to think of ourselves as the benevolent, the good aggregator… We’re not the Wicked Witch of the West, we’re Glinda.” — Andrew Filar

The Closing Reflection: Everything Takes Longer, But Can Be Bigger
~00:27:08
Tim closes by asking what Andrew would tell his college-age self. The answer lands with quiet weight — a “My First Million” quote Andrew keeps returning to about the asymmetry of entrepreneurial timelines and outcomes.

“Everything takes longer than you think it will, but everything can be bigger than you think it can be too.” — Andrew Filar

Top Quotes

Andrew Filar [~00:00:00]
“Instead of thinking about how the consumer wants to interact with you, you’re thinking about what is the best way to get a consumer to the result that I want them to get to.”

Andrew Filar [~00:03:45]
“I made a promise to myself I’d give it like a year, and I said, if I give it a year and I’m still hating it, I’ll do something different.”

Andrew Filar [~00:06:30]
“We sat in the room and they talked about how they had a full replay of how every single consumer who would fill out a lead. We were like, ‘This is NSA-level stuff.'”

Andrew Filar [~00:8:00]
“It’s not about doing this or that. If you have two or three different things that you can combine to create a unique combination, that becomes a really good value proposition.”

Tim Finnigan [~00:9:15]
“It’s good to have a bad experience so you know, like the next one, you’re like, ‘Wait a second, I’m in a really good spot.'”

Andrew Filar [~00:12:30]
“Competition’s good for business. It’s a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Andrew Filar [~00:14:30]
“Did E-Trade and Charles Schwab kill the financial advisor? No. There’s a lot less of them, but you’ve got to be better and you’ve got to have a real value proposition.”

Andrew Filar [~00:19:35]
“It doesn’t make any sense to send your most expensive lead to your cheapest labor.”

Andrew Filar [~00:22:15]
“We try to think of ourselves as the benevolent, the good aggregator. We’re not the Wicked Witch of the West, we’re Glinda.”

Andrew Filar [~00:27:32]
“Everything takes longer than you think it will, but everything can be bigger than you think it can be too. Keep dreaming and they’ll all come true.”