When Britton Johnson founded Voluntary Insurance Partners, he did so with an uncompromising vision: to establish a truly agent-first model in which the organization’s operational framework empowers, coaches, and elevates the individual representative in the field. In the B2B commercial insurance sector, transactions are personal, rooted in trust, longevity, and professional credibility. As Voluntary Insurance Partners entered an era of rapid growth, expanding its distributed footprint across territories, the core operational challenge became clear. They needed to arm their growing mobile sales force with an immediate competitive edge, signaling trust and credibility from the first point of contact.
“Quite honestly, as I’m growing, I didn’t have the infrastructure to be able to change everybody’s cards every week and spend the time going to print. I just didn’t meet today’s standards.”
Field sales agents require immediate, frictionless tools to establish their personal brand and corporate authority during prospect interactions, field drops, and formal presentations.
Voluntary Insurance Partners recognized that they needed a system that could help them maintain their competitive advantage at the speed they required, provide visibility into who was prospecting, and ensure their agents showed up in ways that built trust in a tough market, all while seamlessly integrating with their enterprise technology stack.
In pursuit of a digital solution, Voluntary Insurance Partners initially selected a competitor and deployed it across their national sales team. However, the platform quickly fell short of enterprise expectations.
“We tried a HiHello competitor prior. It was clunky and tried to sell a CRM that we didn't want or need.”
The transition to HiHello happened organically. While Voluntary Insurance Partners was evaluating new replacement vendors, sales representatives within the organization had already discovered and adopted HiHello independently.
“A couple of my guys on my team had been using HiHello prior and liked HiHello a lot. When I saw it, I was like, ‘Wait, you can do this?’ In fact, I was so happy with HiHello versus the competitor, I paid for half a year of that other tool for my team to scrap it. I thought this made more sense for our people, and by golly, it's worked pretty well.”
In field sales, an agent has only a few seconds to establish trust and authority. Voluntary Insurance Partners configured their HiHello cards to serve as dynamic credibility profiles, building trust as a core competitive advantage. In a crowded B2B market, showcasing individual achievements alongside corporate backing gives business owners and HR executives immediate peace of mind that their employees’ benefits are in capable hands. Beyond basic contact details, each card features direct links to prominent corporate achievements and national media features, including recognition in Forbes, Fortune, and Time. By embedding these elite third-party validation markers directly onto the card, Voluntary Insurance Partners could visually demonstrate their market leadership the moment an interaction begins.
“I like HiHello a lot. There are definitely some great, powerful applications to it.”
The digital business cards are tightly integrated with the organization’s internal awards and recognition systems to create immediate credibility for the individual agent. Top-tier producers who qualify for the elite Founder’s Circle or Lifetime Partner status receive an achievement badge displayed directly on their digital business card. This ensures that the moment an agent earns a new credential or achievement, it is reflected on their card instantly, allowing them to always show up in the best possible light.
“HiHello is another tool that we have in our repertoire to show potential customers that you're not dealing with some rookie here. They're dealing with someone that's seasoned in the business and is pretty darn good at it.”
This commitment to immediate credibility extends beyond face-to-face interactions. Voluntary Insurance Partners standardized a professional email signature across the organization. Because these signatures link directly back to each agent’s digital card, any new achievement, media feature, or updated brand content appears dynamically in every email thread. This ensures that buyers always see the most current, authoritative version of the agent’s profile, while allowing the company to actively track engagement with those digital touchpoints and provide an easy way for recipients to save the agent’s verified contact information.
They also extend that same real-time credibility straight into physical field engagements. The company prints personal HiHello QR codes directly onto specialized Partner Prospecting Proposals and enrollment flyers used for localized field drops. This gives prospective clients an immediate connection back to the agent’s full corporate profile, calendar links, awards, and press clippings, long after the physical document is left behind.
To ensure maximum adoption, Voluntary Insurance Partners embedded HiHello directly into their internal onboarding process. On day one, when an agent joins, they receive their HiHello Digital Business card and their Automated Email Signature through HiHello’s native Google Workspace integration. This allows agents to start selling without hesitation and drives widespread adoption, which turns daily prospecting activities into a clear stream of actionable data.
“We actively analyze engagement. Our HiHello leaderboard surfaces our top prospectors as well as the operational gaps in the field.”
By analyzing engagement analytics and performance leaderboards, sales managers can objectively track prospecting volume across different regions. This transparency allows leadership to quickly spot usage gaps, pinpoint underperforming territories, and step in with proactive, targeted sales coaching. This gives Voluntary Insurance Partners the visibility needed to maximize performance, so much so that their agent engagement continues to rise year over year.
By partnering with HiHello, Voluntary Insurance Partners has established a scalable blueprint for modern enterprise sales enablement.
“I would unequivocally recommend HiHello. Their exceptional service, deliberate willingness to innovate technologically, and forward-thinking product roadmap are what truly separate HiHello from the rest of the market.”
Voluntary Insurance Partners (VIP) is a leading provider specializing in the end-to-end strategy, implementation, and service of group voluntary benefit offerings. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, VIP collaborates with brokers, employers, and professional partners to deliver tailored, affordable benefit solutions. Their comprehensive service portfolio includes life, disability, and critical illness insurance, alongside dental, vision, telehealth, and payroll/HR services. By leveraging proprietary technologies like ExpressEnroll, which enables remote enrollment in under five minutes, and a dedicated Service App for employee support, VIP simplifies the complexities of benefits management for organizations across the country.
Voluntary Insurance Partners didn’t just roll out HiHello; they built it into their sales motion, and prospect engagement followed: median card shares per agent rose 34% year over year.
Agents continue to sell the way they always have, relationship-first and people-driven. Now they have a way to turn those connections, whether digital or physical, into data: of the nearly 2,000 prospects they've captured, 39% came from scanning paper cards.
Email signatures became Voluntary Insurance Partners' biggest source of card views, over 50%, proof that prospects engage with the card directly. And because the card is dynamic, what those prospects see is always up to date, so an agent's credibility counts the moment it's earned.
