Insurance is the industry where a rep's homework shows fastest, because the buyer can check every claim you make against a public filing. Learning how to research insurance companies for sales starts with one question the website will not answer directly: who takes the risk? A carrier underwrites and holds it. An MGA writes it on someone else's paper. A broker or agency sells it and holds none. Each buys software, data, and services differently, and each has a different person who signs. Once you know which one you are talking to, the statutory filings, rate dockets, and complaint indexes tell you the rest: which lines are growing, which states they just entered, whether the combined ratio is squeezing them into a spend freeze or a modernization push. The checklist below is built around that reading order. The prompt under it reads the company for you and labels what it could confirm.
What is different about selling into Insurance
Carriers budget on the calendar year and spend it under a regulator's eye. Every state they write in has its own insurance department, its own rate approval process, and its own exam cycle, so procurement moves through compliance, information security, and a third-party risk review before it reaches the person who wanted the tool. Statutory annual statements are due March 1, which means finance and actuarial are unreachable from January through mid-March. Tech decisions sit with the CIO; claims and underwriting leaders own their own line budgets; at a mutual, the board and policyholders replace shareholders, so 'shareholder value' arguments land flat. The fastest way to lose them is to call an independent agency a carrier, or a carrier an agency. One holds the risk and the reserves, the other holds the relationship, and pitching either on the other's problems tells them you did not read the first page of the filing.
How to research insurance companies for sales: the checklist
Work the four groups in order: read first, then look for signals, then check that the questions are answered, then pull anything missing from the sources. Budget twenty minutes for a carrier and ten for an agency.
You are researching {{company}} ({{company URL}}), an insurance company, so I can sell {{our product}} to them. Read their website, their most recent annual report or 10-K if public, and any press or careers pages you can reach.
Produce a one-page brief with these sections:
1. What they are: carrier, reinsurer, MGA, or broker/agency, and the lines of business that carry their premium.
2. Footprint: domicile, states of operation, and any state or line they entered or exited recently.
3. Distribution: captive, independent, direct, or mixed, and who owns the customer relationship.
4. Financial pressure: anything on combined ratio, expense ratio, reserve changes, or rating actions.
5. Technology and change: core-system programs, named vendors, new executive hires in claims, underwriting, or IT.
6. Likely buyer for {{our product}} and the regulatory or procurement step that will slow the deal.
Tag every line Confirmed (with the page or filing it came from) or Inferred (with the reasoning). Do not fill gaps with industry averages. End with three questions the research could not answer that I should ask on the first call.- The 10-K and investor presentation for a public carrier or holding company: segment premiums, combined ratio by line, and the 'Information Technology' and 'Cybersecurity' risk-factor sections, which name the modernization programs they are funding.
- The NAIC annual statement summary for the writing entity (statutory, not GAAP): net premiums written by state and line tell you where they are growing and where they are shrinking.
- Rate and form filings on SERFF for the states they write in: a new product filing, or any filing in a new state, is a launch plan with a date on it.
- The distribution page: captive agents, independent agents, direct-to-consumer, or a mix. The channel decides who buys sales and marketing tools, and whether the carrier or the agency pays.
- The careers page filtered to claims, underwriting, actuarial, and IT: job titles naming Guidewire, Duck Creek, or Majesco are the core-system roadmap in plain text.
- A combined ratio above 100 for two consecutive years: expense pressure that funds anything with a claims-cost or expense-ratio story, and starves everything else.
- Rate filings in a state they did not write in last year: expansion, which means new agents to appoint, new marketing, and new compliance surface.
- A core policy-administration or claims-system replacement in job posts or press: an 18-to-36-month program during which every adjacent tool gets re-evaluated.
- A new Chief Claims Officer, Chief Underwriting Officer, or CIO inside their first year: they inherit a vendor list and usually change it.
- An acquisition of an MGA, agency group, or book of business: integration budgets, duplicate systems, and a decision about which stack survives.
- Are they a carrier, a reinsurer, an MGA, or a broker/agency? Every other question depends on it.
- Which lines of business carry the premium: personal auto, homeowners, commercial P&C, specialty, life, or health? A workers' comp specialist and a life insurer share almost nothing.
- Which states are they domiciled and licensed in, and where did premium grow or shrink last year?
- How do they distribute, and who owns the agent or customer relationship?
- Who owns the budget for what I sell: the CIO, the head of claims, the chief underwriting officer, the head of distribution, or an agency principal?
- SEC EDGAR for public carriers and holding companies: 10-K, 10-Q, proxy statements, and 8-K announcements.
- The NAIC Consumer Information Source (CIS): complaint ratios, licensing states, and financial snapshots for individual insurers.
- SERFF Filing Access: rate and form filings by state, free to search for most states.
- State insurance department websites: company licensing lookups, enforcement actions, market conduct exam reports, and producer license verification.
Read the statutory filing before the marketing site; the site says what they want to be, the filing says what they are.
Run the research on a real account
The checklist tells you where to look; it does not know which items matter for the carrier you are calling Tuesday or for what you sell. That is the part worth handing to Claude. Paste the checklist and the prompt with the company URL and it comes back with the items ranked for this account, and the ones it could not verify flagged.
I sell {{our product}} to {{buyer persona}} at insurance companies. I am researching {{company}} ({{company URL}}).
First, read their site and any filings you can reach and tell me what kind of insurance company they are: carrier, reinsurer, MGA, or broker/agency, and their main lines and states.
Then take the research checklist below and rewrite it for this account: drop the items that do not apply to this type of company, reorder the rest by how much each one matters to a {{our product}} conversation, and for each 'signal' item say whether you saw it, did not see it, or could not check.
Name the most likely budget owner for {{our product}} here and the regulatory or procurement step that will slow the deal. Mark everything Confirmed or Inferred.
CHECKLIST:
{{paste the checklist above}}Research any account with Claude
- Account brief skill →The Claude skill that turns a company URL into a source-grounded first-call brief, plus the account plan template.
- 90-second account brief prompt →The copy-paste prompt version for one account, right now.
- Account brief from a URL, the use case →The full play, with the tool chain that researches every account on the list before the first call.
Frequently asked questions
How do you research insurance companies for sales?
Start by deciding what kind of insurance company it is, because a carrier, an MGA, and an agency buy different things from different people. For a carrier, read the 10-K or statutory annual statement for premium by line and state, check SERFF for recent rate filings, and scan the careers page for core-system job titles. For an agency or broker, the license lookup and the carrier appointments tell you more than any filing. Twenty minutes with those sources gives you a brief you can defend on the call.
What is the difference between a carrier, an MGA, and a broker, and why does it matter for outreach?
A carrier underwrites the policy and holds the reserves, so its budgets sit in claims, underwriting, actuarial, and IT, and its purchases go through compliance and third-party risk review. An MGA underwrites on a carrier's paper under delegated authority; it behaves like a small carrier for operations and like an agency for distribution. A broker or agency sells and services policies and holds no risk, so it buys sales, marketing, and agency-management tools with a principal's signature. Pitch a claims story to a broker and the call ends politely and early.
When is the worst time to prospect an insurance carrier?
January through mid-March. Statutory annual statements are due to state regulators on March 1, and finance, actuarial, and much of operations are heads-down until they are filed. Reinsurance renewals cluster at January 1 as well, which pulls underwriting leadership into the same window. Budgets for the next calendar year are usually set between September and November, so the two windows that reward outreach are late spring, after the filing crunch, and early fall, before the budget locks.