| | AUGUST 20219CIOReviewB2B distribution networks ­ Lincoln Financial Distributors (LFD) ­ in the insurance industry. LFD is comprised of many strategic partners, broker dealers, and over 300,000 financial professionals who provide clients and investors with Lincoln's broad portfolio of retirement and insurance solutions. LFD had the foresight to build out a Data &Analytics (D&A) team eight years ago, to help drive sales effectiveness. Since then, Lincoln's D&A team has been on a journey to build clean, consistent and accurate data for analytics purposes. Partnering closely with Lincoln's IT team, the business revamped its data governance processes to target sales pipeline data as a priority. LFD enhanced key analytics capabilities, working with distribution leaders to create assets for Lincoln's data scientists. LFD's investment in data &analytics paid off this year, as the company faced a new environment: precipitated by COVID-19, the selling environment became completely virtual. Because of its investments, the distribution team was ready to leverage data and analytics to target financial professionals with the greatest propensity to sell Lincoln solutions. The data science team formulated a strategy that resulted in highly-sophisticated predictive and prescriptive models that help businesses personalize their targeting and engagements.What LFD's salesforce ultimately uses is one simple metric that encapsulates the intelligence and predictive power to determine highly personalized engagement prioritization, sales propensity, and cross marketing opportunities. As a result, LFD has witnessed more effective and productive use of its salesforce's time, greater consistency in how it targets and segments financial professionals, an increase in advisor satisfaction, more efficient use of company resources, and an increase in wholesaler capacity ­ all of which drive a great amount of incremental sales.The COVID-19 Black SwanDuring the pandemic, Lincoln's data science team re-calibrated its algorithms to address the unforeseen and sudden change in environment. In this "Black Swan" scenario, the best recourse to address a surprising event with a potentially significant impact was to wait for new data to come in. This is where "small data" analysis became even more critical to the business, as new data was carefully incorporated into Lincoln's models.Lincoln leveraged the opportunity to extend models to include more prescriptive recommendations on how to engage financial professionals in a virtual setting. As a result, Lincoln has found innovative ways to segment advisor engagements based on their affinity to engage in virtual outreach versus in-person meetings.What the Future BringsThe industry depends on the data we have ­ even more so during COVID-19 ­ and is finding innovative ways to get to the right data to reveal the story unfolding, and to surface compelling insights.Lincoln is working on opportunities to leverage new factors to more deeply understand financial professional sentiment using advanced embeddings and "affective computing" methods. Lincoln is also formulating strategies on how to more effectively leverage the data around financial professionals' virtual engagement in a post-COVID-19 world. It's critical to recognize that data has inherent value. Data scientists at Lincoln are continuously discovering more ways to capture that value and apply it to our suite of products and services to better serve our customers for the long-term. Bernard OngJudith Shepherd
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