Cohen Advisory

Who I help

I work with executives who are accountable for revenue performance across distributed, semi-independent sales forces in regulated industries. That includes IMO and FMO owners, carrier distribution and field productivity executives, and leaders at RIA aggregators and wealth management consolidators. The common thread is organizations where revenue depends on making hundreds or thousands of agents, advisors, or producers more consistently effective and where conventional sales management approaches don't work because you're not dealing with traditional employees.

I'm most valuable to organizations with at least several hundred active producers and enough scale that improving performance by even a few percentage points represents significant revenue.

What I do

Most organizations with distributed sales forces, like insurance carriers, IMOs, and RIA aggregators, face a version of the same problem. Their revenue depends on the performance of hundreds or thousands of semi-independent agents or advisors who they can recruit and support but can't truly manage. When performance is inconsistent, the instinct is to recruit more people or buy more practices. But recruiting your way out of a productivity problem is expensive, temporary, and masks what's actually broken.

I build the revenue productivity infrastructure that makes distributed sales forces measurably more effective. That means designing the systems, workflows, and tools that change agent behavior at scale — and doing it in a way that works in regulated, relationship-driven environments where most conventional sales approaches don't apply.

The work typically focuses on three things:

Agent Ramp & Onboarding

Structured programs that reduce time-to-productivity for new agents and cut early attrition.

Selling Systems & Conversion

Workflow design, CRM configuration, and digital selling infrastructure that make consistent execution possible.

Pipeline Visibility & Coaching

Reporting frameworks and coaching infrastructure that give leadership leading indicators and give agents accountability.

I treat these as a single system because improvements in one area carry through and compound in the others. This approach can create a large, positive flywheel for your business over time.

When to call me

Every organization I work with is different, but the underlying problems tend to show up in predictable ways. Reach out if any of these sound familiar.

Common signals:

New agent attrition is higher than expected.

Leadership has no real visibility into leading indicators; you see production after the fact, not pipeline.

You've invested in sales tools but adoption is inconsistent and behavior hasn't changed.

Coaching happens informally if at all, and there's no systematic way to identify who needs what or whether they're getting it.

You haven't been able to deliver on growth expectations with recruiting activity alone.

You know your onboarding and ramp process is weak but don't know where to start fixing it.

Sound familiar? Let's talk.

Schedule Intro Call

How I work

My work is diagnostic-led, economics-driven and carried through to execution. I start by quantifying what inconsistent agent performance is actually costing you in lost production, early attrition, and unrealized conversion, so the business case for improvement is concrete before any work begins. I think in systems rather than point solutions, which means I'm looking at onboarding, workflows, technology, coaching, and incentives together rather than treating each as a separate problem.

1

Initial Diagnostic

A focused assessment of your current revenue system, where it's working, where it's leaking, and what's holding growth back.

2

Action Plan

Sequenced work, clear owners, and an operating cadence that makes progress visible. Prioritized by impact and feasibility.

3

Implementation

Hands-on through execution so improvements stick and performance compounds. I stay involved until the outcomes we expect are delivered.

Meet you where you are

Whether you're a founder-led IMO or a large carrier, I adapt my approach to your environment, your constraints, and what you actually need, not a generic framework.

Work with what you have

I work with the stack you already have, and recommend changes only when they're justified by impact and feasibility. I'm not here to sell you a platform.

Apply data + judgment

I use data to identify problems and size opportunities, then apply 20+ years of pattern recognition to prioritize what will actually work in your context.

Who I am

I'm Ross Cohen. What I bring to this work is a combination of things that rarely sit in the same person: deep familiarity with how insurance and financial services distribution actually works, the analytical rigor to diagnose what's broken and size the opportunity, and the operating experience to build systems that work in complex, regulated environments with people who have real independence.

I spent nearly a decade as COO of Field Productivity at New York Life, where I built the digital selling platform, CRM, and AI coaching infrastructure for a 12,000-person national field organization. Before that I owned customer acquisition P&L at a home services company through a period of 2x growth to over $100M, and ran P&L for multiple credit card businesses at Capital One. I've also built and exited two consumer businesses. Wharton MBA, Harvard JD.