Here’s a familiar scenario in the insurance business: a $50,000 commercial prospect is on the line. Your team springs into action. You gather data, analyze risks, strategically approach markets, and then . . . you build a world-class proposal. It’s a highly polished branded deliverable, featuring a persuasive executive summary, clear coverage comparisons, and a compelling narrative about your agency's value-add. You present it with confidence, having put forth your best efforts to win the business.

Now, picture a $3,500 prospect. They need protection just as badly. But do they get the killer proposal? Rarely. They get what is affectionately known in the industry as "carrier paper,” likely in the form of a forwarded email containing five different PDF attachments from three different carriers. Each quote is formatted differently, full of jargon, and difficult for a prospect to compare side-by-side.

This stark contrast in prospect experience is the "Proposal Problem." It’s an open secret that custom, consultative proposals are reserved for the whales, while smaller accounts get raw data. It’s understandable from a time-management perspective, but this approach is silently leaking revenue from your brokerage.

Why Carrier Paper Becomes the Default

It's not that brokers don't care about smaller clients. In our conversations it’s very clear that they want every customer to feel valued and appreciated. Relying on carrier paper is simply the result of time constraints; it’s an economic limitation.

Building a high-quality custom proposal can easily require half a business day. It requires hours of copying and pasting coverage details from carrier documents, manually adjusting limits, meticulously reviewing and editing, drafting summaries that synthesize disparate, complex information, and reformatting templates that never quite look right. 

For an account representing $25,000 in revenue, it’s a worthwhile investment. The ROI is clear. 

But for a $2,500 account? Spending three hours just to present options eats up a massive chunk of the first year's commission before you've even won the business. The default becomes efficiency over effectiveness: forward the raw carrier paper and hope the price is right.

How “Efficiency” Leaves Money on the Table

While forwarding carrier paper saves time upfront, it costs you significantly on the back end. Here’s how this "efficiency" is actually a revenue leak:

1. It Confuses the Buyer and Lowers Close Rates: Insurance is complicated. A small business owner likely doesn't understand the nuances of policy language. Dumping confusing, disparate PDFs on them leads to analysis paralysis. A confused buyer often says "no," or simply sticks with their current agent because deciphering your email is too much work. In the best case scenario when you win the business, you have to answer a barrage of questions over email to get the prospect over the finish line. The efficiency gains are lost by the complexity of closing the deal. 

2. It Commoditizes Your Value: When you only send carrier paper, you implicitly tell the prospect that price is the only variable that matters. You aren't demonstrating your expertise as a risk advisor. If you compete on price alone, it becomes a race to the bottom.

3. It Misses Cross-Sell Opportunities: A consultative proposal allows you to highlight coverage gaps and recommend crucial additional lines. Carrier paper only addresses exactly what was requested, missing easy upsell opportunities that increase account value and retention.

The cumulative effect is massive. While your team is chasing one whale, dozens of smaller, winnable deals slip through the cracks simply because you are triaging prospects based on a short-term perception of efficiency and value. 

Efficiency is better understood as delivering your level-best customer experience faster and cheaper rather than degrading the experience. 

The Fix: Democratizing the Custom Proposal

Most brokerages are searching for ways to grow their business without growing their headcount. So the solution to the proposal problem can’t be to throw more staff time at small deals. The solution is to turn that three-hour process into a ten-minute task.

Modern AI can now automate the heavy lifting. Imagine an insurance-specific AI that automatically ingests those messy carrier PDFs, intelligently extracts key data points, spreads them into a side-by-side comparison, and populates a sleek, brokerage-branded template instantly.

By eliminating manual data entry and formatting, you democratize the custom proposal. You can deliver the whale experience to every single prospect without increasing workload. When you level up the presentation for smaller accounts, close rates rise and brokers spend their time advising, not copying and pasting information. 

Outmarket’s Proposal Builder was designed to solve this problem from start to finish. It's custom-tuned specifically for the insurance industry and designed to meet the unique needs of commercial insurance brokers.

But here’s the catch: you can’t solve this with technology alone. You need to enact a cultural shift across the brokerage that encourages brokers to use the technology to capture more value from smaller deals. The technology should empower brokers to do more cross-selling and invest in those client relationships. AI-generated custom proposals shouldn’t just plug the revenue leak, they should enable business growth at scale by freeing your people up to do what they do best. 

Watch the Outmarket Proposal Builder in action