Industry playbooks
Insurance sales call playbooks
Your buyers are trying to pull days out of the claims cycle and points off the loss ratio while running on a core system older than half their claims staff — and every dollar they spend gets a second look from actuarial. Practise against a claims executive who will ask where your integration touches the core, what your false positive rate does to their SIU queue, and how the savings show up in a reserve review, so the first time you hear it isn't on a live call.
Every call type for Insurance
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Insurance, the people who pick up are P&C carrier claims and operations executives. The titles you will actually reach:
- Chief Claims Officer
- VP of Claims Operations
- SVP Claims
- Director of Claims Transformation
- Chief Underwriting Officer
- SIU Director / Director of Special Investigations
- Chief Operating Officer (Carrier)
- VP of IT / Head of Core Systems
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Cycle time is driving complaints, DOI attention, and non-renewals
Auto and property files that should close in 12 days sit at 28 because the adjuster is chasing a photo estimate, an appraiser assignment, and a coverage question in three different queues. Every extra day shows up as a policyholder call, then a DOI complaint, then a non-renewal at the next term. Claims leaders can quote their average days-to-close from FNOL to final payment from memory, and they can also quote the number their board asked about last quarter.
The policy admin system is 20+ years old and every change is a six-figure project
The core was written in COBOL or an early Java stack, the two people who understand it are within five years of retirement, and the vendor's professional services rate is $250/hour. A field addition to a claim record becomes an eight-month IT roadmap item with a business case. The reflex answer to any new system is 'where does it touch the core?' — because when integrations break there, statutory reporting and check issuance break with them.
Claims leakage is quietly eating the loss ratio
Overpayment on soft-tissue bodily injury, missed subrogation opportunities, salvage left on the table, adjusters settling above reserve to close a file before month-end. Nobody has a clean number for it — the range they'll admit to is 2–5% of paid losses — and every point of leakage is a point they have to claw back in rate, which takes a filing and a regulator's approval.
Fraud is caught too late to matter
By the time a file gets referred to SIU, the rental car has been paid, the medical bills are in, and the adjuster has already built rapport with a claimant they now have to accuse. Referral rates hover around 1–2% when the industry estimates fraud at closer to 10% of premium. Prior analytics tools drowned SIU in false positives and got turned off.
Cat season breaks the staffing model
A hail event in the Midwest or a named storm on the coast puts 4,000 claims into a queue built for 400 a week. They deploy independent adjusters at 2–3x internal cost, cycle times triple, and the complaint volume follows six weeks later. Everything they buy gets judged on whether it holds up during the surge, not on a normal Tuesday.
Agent and broker channel friction
Independent agents own the customer relationship and will move the book to another carrier over claims service. Producers call the claims VP directly about a file for their best commercial account. Retention is a channel conversation as much as a price conversation, and slow claims handling is the complaint agents raise at every carrier council meeting.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “We run on a 20-year-old core system — integrations die there.”
- Agree with them before answering, because they're right and they've been burned. Then get specific about the integration surface: read-only against the claim file, flat file or message queue rather than writing to the core, no schema change, no change to check issuance or statutory extracts. Ask what broke last time — usually a vendor tried to write back into the PAS. Then offer the smallest possible proof: one line of business, historical claims, no production connection at all until they've seen it score files they already know the outcome of.
- “Every dollar goes through actuarial scrutiny — the ROI better be bulletproof.”
- Don't bring an ROI calculator with your own assumptions in it. Bring the model empty and let them fill it with their paid losses, their LAE ratio, and their leakage estimate. Ask which number their chief actuary would trust: cycle time reduction is hard to book, but a measurable drop in ALAE per claim or a documented subrogation recovery lands in a reserve review. Offer to run the pilot as a back-test on closed claims so the savings are calculated against actual settlements, not projections.
- “We tried a fraud analytics vendor two years ago. SIU drowned in false positives and we shut it off.”
- Ask what the precision was and what the referral threshold was set at — most failures are threshold and workflow, not the model. Then invert the pilot: instead of scoring new claims, score last year's closed SIU-confirmed files and see whether it would have flagged them, and how many clean files it also flagged. Let the SIU Director set the alert volume they can actually work, and size the deployment to that capacity rather than the model's output.
- “We're mid-migration to a new policy admin platform. There's no IT bandwidth until 2027.”
- That's a reason to talk now, not later. Core migrations run 24–36 months and claims service degrades during them — ask what their cycle time has done since the project started. Position anything you sell as sitting outside the migration path so it doesn't compete for the same integration team, and get the pilot scoped so the claims org owns it, not IT. If it genuinely requires IT, say so and ask to be on the roadmap conversation for the quarter after go-live rather than pretending otherwise.
- “We can't have a black box making claim decisions. We'd get destroyed in a market conduct exam.”
- Concede the frame: the model recommends, the adjuster decides, and every recommendation carries a reason code in the file notes. Walk them through what an examiner would actually see — the audit trail, the disparate impact testing, whether the model touches coverage or only routing and prioritization. Ask whether their compliance and legal teams have a model governance standard already; if they do, get it and answer against it rather than against a generic AI objection.
- “We're a mutual. We don't have a technology budget line like a stock carrier does — surplus is policyholder money.”
- Speak to it as a combined ratio conversation, not a tech spend. Every dollar of expense ratio and every point of loss ratio comes out of the same surplus, and slow claims cost them in complaint handling, agent defection, and rate adequacy. Ask when the planning cycle closes and what the board's expense ratio target is for next year, then size the deal to fit under whatever threshold doesn't need board approval for the first phase.
- “Send me something and I'll route it to our innovation team.”
- The innovation team is where claims vendors go to die. Acknowledge it politely, then anchor back to the operational number: 'Happy to — before I do, is cycle time actually a priority for you this year, or is the pressure coming from somewhere else, like severity or retention?' If they name a real pressure, book time with them and the person who owns that number. If they don't, you've learned this is a stall and you should ask who does own claims cycle time in the org.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- Combined ratio
- Loss ratio vs. expense ratio
- LAE / ALAE / ULAE
- Claims leakage
- FNOL
- IBNR and adverse reserve development
- Subrogation and salvage recovery
- SIU (Special Investigations Unit)
- Severity vs. frequency
- Policy admin system (PAS) / core
- Book of business
- Rate filing and rate adequacy
- Cat season / PML
- Market conduct exam
- Straight-through processing (STP)
Metrics they are measured on
Combined ratio (the number under or over 100 that defines the year), Loss ratio and expense ratio, tracked separately by line, Average cycle time from FNOL to close, by line and by segment, LAE per claim / ALAE ratio, Claims leakage as a percentage of paid losses, SIU referral rate and fraud dollars recovered or denied, Policyholder retention rate and DOI complaint count, Subrogation recovery rate and net promoter score at claim close
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Insurance buyer
A live AI prospect with Insurance context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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