Outreach is where a placement leaves the broker’s hands for a few weeks. What comes back is a mix of quote letters, declinations with one-line reasons, and silence. Most teams keep that state in an inbox and a spreadsheet; the declination reasons, which a surplus lines affidavit will need later, are the first thing to get lost.
This post follows the hotel group’s renewal through outreach: eight submission e-mails drafted per market, sent as a dry run, five declinations logged with their reasons, and quote letters read into structured quotes for a person to confirm. Carriers and figures are illustrative.
| Actors | Placement broker (sends, confirms quotes), account executive |
|---|---|
| Trigger | The marketing plan is adopted |
| Agents involved | Market outreach drafter, quote extractor, placement compliance agent |
| Decisions | Send the submissions; confirm each extracted quote; record a declination and its reason |
| Systems touched | insight_comms (dry-run provider in the demo), the data room for quote letters; InsightXtract reads real letters |
| Outcome | Every approach, response and reason on the record, and quotes as structured rows rather than PDFs |
| What is measured | Days from adopted plan to first quote, response rate per carrier, declination reasons by carrier |
One e-mail per market, one record per e-mail
The outreach drafter writes one submission e-mail per planned carrier, covering the lines that carrier is in the plan for, and prepares Send the submission to N markets — a dry run. Accepting sends them through the platform’s communications service. In the demo that service is the dry-run provider: each message is recorded with a message id and nothing leaves InsightPlacement. In production the same call goes to the broker’s configured mail provider.
A market’s life in the plan
On the hotel group’s property line, two markets quoted and three declined: one with capacity committed in the region, one with coastal wind exposure outside appetite, one that doesn’t write in Florida. On general liability one declined on fleet size; on umbrella, two declined on coastal wind and on loss frequency. Each reason sits on the market row with its date.
Quote letters into quotes
Quote letters land in the placement’s data room. The quote extractor reads each into fields: carrier, line, limit, retention (or deductible or SIR), annual premium, taxes and fees, valid-until date, and the bullet lists under Exclusions, Subjectivities and Enhancements. Anything it cannot find is left empty and listed as missing — it never invents a premium or a term the letter doesn’t state. In the demo the reader is a deterministic stand-in; in production InsightXtract reads the real documents with a confidence and page per field.
# a quote letter, as the reader sees it (illustrative) Carrier: Saltmarsh Excess & Surplus Line: Commercial property Limit: $83.7M Deductible: $25,000 Annual premium: $441,000 Taxes and fees: $22,000 Valid until: 2026-11-20 Exclusions: - Roof cosmetic damage Subjectivities: - Signed statement of values - Roof inspection at locations over 20 years
The fields the extractor reads. Missing ones are listed, never guessed.
Step by step
Eight e-mails, one per planned carrier, each naming the lines it is approached for.
Accepted; each message recorded with an id. The submission version moves to sent.
Each with its reason and date: capacity committed in the region; coastal wind outside appetite; outside territory.
Each quote letter read into a structured quote; prepared as “Confirm N quotes read from quote letters”.
Confirmed quotes enter the comparison; an unconfirmed one shows but is marked so.
At quoting or proposal, a line with a single quote fires THIN_MARKET as a warning.
What the agents prepared, and what each rests on
| Agent | What it prepared | What it cites | Who decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outreach drafter | Send the submission to the planned markets (dry run) | The approved submission; the adopted plan | Placement broker |
| Quote extractor | Confirm the extracted quotes | The quote letters in the data room | Placement broker |
| Compliance | Count admitted declinations per surplus line | Declinations with reasons | Compliance |
Edge cases
| What happens | What InsightPlacement does |
|---|---|
| A letter without a premium | The quote is extracted with premium missing and listed as such; it cannot be the recommended quote until a person fills it. |
| A quote expires | Expired quotes drop out of the comparison. |
| A declination with no reason | It is logged, but a surplus lines affidavit wants reasons; the compliance view shows it without one. |
| A market never answers | It stays approached; the late-marketing and thin-market controls catch the consequences. |
For the account team
No more reconciling an inbox against a spreadsheet. The market row says what happened, when, and why.
For broker IT
Sends go through insight_comms; the dry-run provider records rather than sends, so a demo or a test never e-mails a carrier.
For practice leaders
Declination reasons by carrier, over a year, say more about appetite than any appetite guide.
Questions we get asked
Do the e-mails really go out?
In the demo, no: they are recorded by the dry-run provider. In production a person still has to accept the send.
Can we keep using our own e-mail?
Yes. Log the approach and the response on the market row; the record and the controls work the same way.
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