What Is a Good Quote-to-Bind Ratio? Start With Which Quotes Count

Why the ratio flatters the agency: quotes that never reach the AMS

The leak this article is about sits in the denominator. When a producer runs a household through the comparative rater, sends the price and logs nothing in the AMS until the prospect says yes, the bind lands in the system with a new client record; the quote that preceded it, and every quote that did not bind, exists only in the rater’s history and an email thread. Counted from the AMS alone, the agency appears to bind a large share of what it quotes, because the losses were never written down.

Illustrative example: in a quarter, the rater shows 400 households quoted and sent. The AMS shows 250 quote activities, and 100 households bound. From the AMS, the quote-to-bind ratio reads 40 percent. From the rater, it reads 25 percent. Neither number is a benchmark; the point is that the 150 quotes in the gap are the ones nobody can follow up, because no list holds them.

The fix is a definition and a habit, not software. A quote counts the moment a price reaches the prospect, and it gets an AMS (or CRM) record that day with the line, the premium quoted, the lead source and a next activity date. Once the rater count and the AMS count agree within a few quotes a month, the ratio means something.

Three versions of the quote-to-bind ratio worth running

One agency-wide percentage hides the reasons it moves. Three cuts, all from records the agency already has, explain more than any benchmark:

• By household, not by policy. A home-and-auto quote that binds as auto only is one household won and one policy lost. Count household binds and policy binds separately, and list the households that bound monoline after being quoted for more than one line: that is the account-rounding list, already qualified.
• By lead source. Web leads, referrals, existing clients adding a line, X-date and remarket calls, and walk-ins can bind at different rates for reasons that have nothing to do with the producer. A falling agency-wide ratio during a month of heavier purchased-lead volume may be a source-mix change, not a sales problem.
• By days from quote to second contact. For each presented quote, find the date of the next logged contact after the price was sent, and bucket the quotes: same day, one to three days, four days or more, never. The “never” bucket is the most useful number in this article, because each quote in it is a price the prospect is weighing with nobody from the agency in the conversation.
• By producer and line, last. Split personal and commercial, and split by producer only after the definitions above hold, so nobody is judged on a ratio built from different counting habits.

Each cut is a pivot of the same three columns: quote date, bind date (or blank) and source, plus the household ID and the date of the second contact. If the export cannot produce those columns, the first finding is that the quote stage is not being recorded.

Commercial lines: submissions, proposals and two different ratios

On the commercial side, the chain has an extra step the personal-lines formula ignores. The agency submits to markets; carriers quote, decline or ask for more information; the agency builds a proposal from what came back; the client binds or does not. Dividing binds by submissions mixes two separate questions: whether the markets wanted the risk, and whether the client accepted the proposal.

Keep them apart. Submission-to-quote (how many submissions produced at least one usable carrier quote) is a market and submission-quality question: missing loss runs, thin applications, the wrong market for the class. Proposal-to-bind (how many proposals presented turned into a bound account) is the sales question. An agency can have a healthy proposal-to-bind ratio and still lose renewals-to-be because half its submissions die at the underwriter’s desk.

For both, record the date the proposal was presented and the date of the next contact after it. A commercial proposal that sits for two weeks with no follow-up call is the same leak as the personal-lines quote in the “never” bucket, with a larger premium attached.

The Monday list: what happens to unbound quotes

A ratio is a score; the list underneath it is the work. Every Monday, one named person pulls every quote presented in the last 30 days that has not bound and has no next activity date, and every quote marked lost in the last week. Each line gets an owner and a date before the meeting ends.

Lost quotes close with three fields filled, or they do not close: the X-date (the current policy’s expiration), the carrier the prospect stayed with or moved to, and the premium the agency has to beat. A loss reason (price, coverage, timing, no response) is useful; those three fields are what make next year’s call possible.

One caution on that call. Under the federal telephone rules, a business relationship formed by a residential subscriber’s inquiry or application lasts three months from that inquiry; one formed by a purchase lasts eighteen months (47 CFR 64.1200(f)(5)). A personal-lines prospect who was quoted a year ago and bought elsewhere may no longer fall inside that window at the X-date, and a sales call to a number on the national do-not-call registry is restricted unless the person gave permission (64.1200(c)(2) and the definition in (f)(15)). Asking at the time of the quote for permission to call before the X-date, and recording the answer, keeps that option open. State telemarketing laws can add their own rules. This is rule text; the agency’s attorney decides how it applies. Not legal advice.

How do I follow up on insurance quotes that didn’t close? An email template

Follow up on an insurance quote that didn’t close with a short, specific message from the person who quoted it: restate what was quoted, name the one thing needed to bind, and ask a question the prospect can answer in a line. Log the email in the AMS with a next activity date, so the quote leaves the “never” bucket above. When the agency’s set number of attempts gets no answer, close it as lost with the three fields above.

Two checks before it goes out. First, confirm in the rater or with the carrier that the quoted premium still holds for that effective date; resending a price that has since changed starts the next conversation on the wrong foot. Second, the email rules. A quote the prospect has not accepted is not a transaction “the recipient already has agreed to,” the FTC’s wording for transactional email, so a follow-up written to sell the policy is likely commercial email under the FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide, which requires, among other things, accurate From and subject lines, the agency’s valid physical postal address, a clear way to opt out, and opt-outs honored within 10 business days. Calls follow the phone rules above.

A quote follow-up email template, with the agency’s details in the brackets:

• Subject: Your [home and auto] quote from [agency], starting [date]. The subject line says exactly what the email is.
• Opening: Hi [first name], on [date] I sent your quote for [coverage] with [carrier] at [premium] for the [policy term], starting [effective date].
• The one step: To bind it, I need [the signed application, the second car’s VIN, proof of prior coverage]. If part of it doesn’t fit (the price, a limit or the start date), tell me which and I’ll rework it.
• The easy question: Is [effective date] still the right start, or have you decided to stay with [current carrier] for now? If you’re staying, when does that policy renew, and may I email you a fresh quote before then?
• Sign-off: [producer name], [direct phone], [agency name and physical postal address], and one line on how to stop these emails.

When a quote-to-bind project is not worth it, and a free first step

Not every agency needs this. If the agency presents a handful of quotes a week and each producer can name every open one from memory, a shared list with next-contact dates does the whole job and a ratio adds little. If the rater count and the AMS count already agree, quotes carry a source and a next activity date, and someone runs the Monday list, there is nothing here to buy.

It earns attention when the counts disagree, when nobody can say how many presented quotes had no second contact, or when lead spend is rising while the agency cannot say which sources bind. The Revenue Review takes two weeks: read-only access to the AMS, the rater history and the phone log, read against each other, and a written report that prices each finding, with a 90-day plan. Lumina is not an insurance agency, places no coverage and gives no licensing or E&O advice. A free 20-minute call is enough to tell whether the Review fits.