A Question Every Buyer-Selection Post Skips
Most content about who should buy outsourced prospecting focuses on whether to buy it at all. A narrower, less-discussed question sits underneath that one: inside an agency, who should actually be the person on the call deciding. VA Horizon sells to the agency principal, not to whichever individual producer would benefit most directly from the resulting meetings, and that choice is not a sales-process preference, it follows directly from where the underlying budget authority actually sits.
What NUPP Is, and Why It Is Tracked by Band, Not by Producer
NUPP, net unvalidated producer payroll, is the standard trade-association measure of what an agency spends developing a new producer before that producer is validated as fully productive. The blended, industry-wide figure held at 2.0% of revenue in 2025, up from 1.9% in 2024, per Big I and Reagan Consulting research cited by The Insurance Dudes. The 2026 Best Practices Study update goes a layer deeper than that single blended number: it reports NUPP by agency revenue band, ranging 0.0% to 1.7% across bands, not by individual producer. That reporting structure is itself informative: the underlying industry data treats new-producer investment as a number an agency’s finance function tracks against its own revenue, the same way it would track any other overhead line, not as a number that lives inside any single producer’s own numbers.
This Argument Already Lives on One of Our Own Pages
VA Horizon’s own page for independent agency principals already makes a version of this point, connecting NUPP to the agency’s own financial statements rather than to any single producer’s desk. That page states the conclusion. This piece is not a repeat of it, it is the reasoning underneath that conclusion, and a comparison that page never makes.
Why This Is an Accounting Fact, Not a Sales Pitch
The distinction matters because the underlying claim does not depend on VA Horizon’s own framing to be true. NUPP is measured and published by revenue band because that is how the industry’s own trade-association research actually tracks it, independent of anything VA Horizon says about it. A producer with the busiest quarter of their career still has no formal claim on that number, and a producer having their worst quarter does not shrink it either. Budget authority over new-producer investment sits with whoever owns the agency’s P&L, because the data itself is only ever reported at that level.
How This Differs From a Solo SaaS Founder or a Single-Operator MCA ISO
VA Horizon serves five other B2B verticals, and in several of them, the buyer deciding whether to fund outsourced prospecting is very often the same person who would personally benefit from the resulting meetings, a solo SaaS founder weighing the spend against their own pipeline, a single-operator MCA ISO weighing it against their own book. In those cases, the buying decision and the beneficiary can be the exact same conversation happening inside one person’s head.
Commercial insurance does not usually work that way. The producer who would take the resulting meetings and the principal who owns the NUPP line on the agency’s books are frequently two different people, sometimes in agencies with a dozen producers and one owner who has never personally prospected an x-date list. Selling the relationship to whichever producer happens to answer the phone risks pitching someone with real enthusiasm and no actual authority to fund it.
What This Means for Who Takes Our Call
None of this is a judgment about producers, who are often the ones most eager for more qualified meetings on their calendar. It is a targeting discipline: VA Horizon’s own outreach is built to reach the person who owns the budget line the industry’s own data confirms sits at the agency level, not the person whose calendar the resulting meetings will eventually fill. A producer who wants this conversation to happen is better served pointing their principal to it than trying to authorize it themselves.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- IA Magazine, Big I and Reagan Consulting Release 2026 Best Practices Study Update
- The Insurance Dudes, citing Big I and Reagan Consulting NUPP data