For years, health plans have relied on systems to manage distribution that were never designed for it. Sometimes those systems were off-the-shelf CRMs. More often, they were homegrown combinations of spreadsheets, legacy tools, and heavily customized software stitched together over time. These systems became the center of the tech stack not because they were the right fit, but because they were the only options plans had.
In practice, this looks the same almost everywhere. Core systems are pushed beyond their original purpose to support distribution, spreadsheets end up covering what those systems can’t, and teams spend more time reconciling data across tools than actually running the business.
At some point, the industry had to step back and acknowledge the obvious.
Distribution isn’t a CRM problem. It’s an operational infrastructure problem.
And that’s why so many health plans are now rethinking the role of CRMs, especially when it comes to paying commissions and gaining visibility into their agent broker network.
CRMs Worked Until Distribution Became Too Complex
When distribution was simpler (fewer products, fewer partners, less regulatory pressure, etc.) CRMs could keep pace. Health plans had the ability to track contacts, activities, and a few commission rules.
But the industry doesn’t look like that anymore.
Today’s distribution models span:
- Multi-level hierarchies
- Dynamic commission schedules
- Diverse FMO structures
- Complex appointments
- Agent certification cycles
The moment distribution became a multi-team, multi-workflow, multi-system operation, CRM cracked under the weight because it was not built for it.
The Problem Is CRMs Can’t See the Whole Picture
The problem with CRM-centric stacks isn’t that CRM is bad technology. It’s that CRMs only see the world through one lens: the individual record. Sales distribution doesn’t live at the record level. It lives within the relationships between records, so health plans can understand:
- Who rolls up to whom in a commissions upline
- Which products a broker is eligible to sell
- Where an appointment changes a commission rule
- How one downline shift affects the entire hierarchy
A CRM can’t see those patterns because it isn’t built for relational logic. So the moment distribution expands beyond a simple book of producers, everything falls apart, causing:
- Ops to build workarounds
- Finance to build parallel systems
- Compliance to build its own source of truth
- And Sales to keep insisting the CRM is “mostly right.”
The system doesn’t break all at once. It breaks in small ways that snowball over time until the cost of maintaining accuracy exceeds the cost of modernizing completely.
Distribution Isn’t “Sales Data”
This is the shift that’s happening across the industry: Plans are recognizing that distribution isn’t a sales function that happens to touch operations. It’s the operational backbone that growth depends on.
Distribution is where the integrity of the entire downstream ecosystem is established: eligibility is defined, compliance is validated, revenue is tracked, and the agent broker experience is shaped.
Once a plan sees distribution this way, the CRM stops looking like a hub and starts looking like a spoke. CRMs still have a place, but they can’t serve as the central system that coordinates contracting, onboarding, commissions, hierarchies, compliance, and enrollment insight.
Those functions need their own home.
Health Plans Are Rebuilding Around Purpose-Built Sales Distribution Systems
When plans shift away from CRMs as the center of their stack, the difference is immediate.
The conversation changes from:
- “How do we customize this?” to “What can we automate?”
- “Where did this go wrong?” to “Where is the bottleneck?”
- “We think this is correct.” to “We know this is correct.”
The common thread is clarity. Plans stop managing around their systems and start managing through them.
Where Abacus Fits Into the New Model
The plans that adopt Abacus aren’t replacing their CRMs. They’re re-centering their infrastructure around a system that actually carries the operational load.
Abacus becomes the engine where:
- Contracting is structured
- Onboarding is automated
- Hierarchies are represented accurately
- Commissions run cleanly
- Compliance gets real audit trails
- Every team works from the same truth
CRMs still play their role around pipeline, communication, and agent engagement activities but are no longer forced to solve problems they were not built to solve.
The result is a system that reflects how health insurance distribution truly works, not how teams have had to work around technology. This shift is what creates predictable, profitable growth.
The Bottom Line
Health plans aren’t abandoning CRMs. They’re evolving past the idea that CRMs can hold an entire distribution ecosystem together.
That’s why Abacus is becoming the new center of the distribution tech stack.
👉 If you’re ready to see what distribution looks like when the system is finally working for you I’d be glad to show you.
