100% feeling it. The conversations have gotten harder. Dealers who were passive program partners two years ago are now auditing every line on every deal. They know exactly what each product costs and what they should be netting. The days of dealers not understanding the economics are over at the stores that matter.

The consolidation of dealer groups actually helps us in some ways. Bigger groups negotiate harder but they're also more sophisticated buyers who value consistency and claims service over just the split. Single-point stores are the ones who get into price-only conversations and those are usually the accounts that aren't worth much anyway.

To answer the renegotiation question from the dealer side: yes we have done it successfully twice in the last eighteen months and the approach that worked both times was the same. We pulled twelve months of claims data, calculated our actual loss ratio on each product, and presented the conversation as a program performance review rather than a price negotiation. When you show a VSC provider that your claims frequency is running below their underwriting assumptions and your cancellation rate is below portfolio average you are not asking for a better split. You are pointing out that you are a better-than-average risk and your current pricing does not reflect that. That framing changes the conversation completely. The providers who pushed back were the ones where the claims data was not actually in our favor, which was itself useful information about which products we should be replacing.

The dealer group point is worth pushing on. Yes, bigger groups negotiate harder, but they also churn product lines more aggressively when they find something with a better split or a better claims story. Loyalty at that level is much thinner than it looks on a volume report. The accounts I have seen survive renegotiations are the ones where the vendor had penetration data that proved their training was actually moving the number. If you can show a GM that your involvement is worth 0.3 more products per deal, the split conversation gets a lot easier. If you cannot show that, you are just a line item.