Ask any account team when a renewal starts and they will say 120 days out. Ask when the work actually happens and the honest answer is the last thirty. This post is about the gap between those two answers — what the 120 days hold, where they go, and what a workbench would have to do to give the time back.
In short
- The work is front-loaded on paper and back-loaded in practice. Data collection should finish by 90 days; it rarely does.
- Most delay is waiting, not working — on loss runs, on the client’s SOV, on markets.
- Nobody owns the whole picture. The account executive, the account manager and the placement broker each see a third of it.
The calendar as it is meant to run
By the 90-day mark the data should be in and the submission drafted; by 60, the markets have it; by 30, the client has a proposal. Every broking practice has some version of this calendar. InsightPlacement encodes exactly this one: 120 days expects data collection, 90 expects submission, 60 expects marketing, 30 expects the proposal.
Where the days actually go
Loss runs
Loss runs come from the incumbent carriers, and a request takes two to three weeks to come back. When nobody orders them at 120 days, they arrive at 75, valued at a date an underwriter will call stale, and the submission waits.
The statement of values
The SOV is the client’s document. It comes back late, partially updated, with a few blank construction classes the broker only notices when a property underwriter asks.
Exposures
Revenue, payroll, vehicles, drivers. One missing number holds up one line, and it is usually the one with the shortest market list.
The market
Underwriters work their own queues. A submission that arrives at 45 days competes with every other broker’s late submission, and the declinations that come back are often about timing as much as appetite.
Why nobody sees it coming
Each person on the account team holds a different slice: the account manager knows what data is missing, the placement broker knows which markets are warm, the account executive knows what the client will tolerate. The state of the renewal lives in e-mail threads and a tracker spreadsheet that is accurate on the day someone updates it.
data missing"] -.-> T["Tracker
spreadsheet"] PB["Placement broker:
markets and quotes"] -.-> T AE["Account executive:
client expectations"] -.-> T T --> L["Renewal discovered late
at 45 days"] style L fill:#fdecec,stroke:#e57373
What a workbench has to do differently
- Put the calendar and the readiness on every placement, computed, so “behind” is visible at 110 days, not at 45.
- Prepare the chasing — the loss-run orders, the client data request — so the work of asking is done the day the gap appears.
- Keep one record that all three roles read, with the decisions and who made them.
- Never let software decide for the broker: everything that goes to a client, a carrier or a binder stays a person’s call.
That is the design brief InsightPlacement was built to. The renewals page above sorts the book by days to inception and shows readiness and what is waiting for each placement; the 120-day use case shows the chasing being prepared. The book shown is illustrative.
