What Intake Is For
Intake is not a survey; it is the evidence-gathering half of qualification. Our insurance qualification rubric defines four pass bars, appetite fit, authority, provable timing, consent, and the intake script is simply the conversation that produces checkable answers for each, in an order that feels like help rather than interrogation.
In our campaigns this happens inside an SMS conversation run by Human + AI SDRs, which has a structural honesty advantage: every question and answer is in the transcript that arrives with the meeting, so intake quality is inspectable, not asserted.
The Five Questions, With Phrasing That Works
- Timing. "When does your current policy come up for renewal?" lands naturally when the opening already explained why now (a renewal-window outreach). The answer is the x-date, the single most valuable field captured, and it gets banked whether or not a meeting books.
- Incumbent. "Who handles your business insurance today, and how long have you been with them?" Length of tenure reads loyalty; a recent switch reads shoppability; a hesitation often reads an unmanaged account.
- Authority. "Who decides who your insurance goes through?" Asked as process, not status, it surfaces the real decision-maker without making the answerer defensive, and it routes the meeting correctly.
- Appetite screen. Two or three closed questions tuned to your criteria: employee count band, what the business primarily does, states of operation. Enough to check the class-and-size bars without turning intake into an application.
- The claims question. "Any claims or coverage headaches in the last few years?" Phrased as headaches, it invites the story version, which is more honest than a yes/no and previews placeability.
Sequencing and Tone
Order matters because trust compounds: timing first (it explains the outreach), incumbent second (natural continuation), appetite screens third (quick, factual), authority fourth (by now conversational), claims last (requires the most trust). Tone rules that hold across the sequence: name why you asked when a question could feel intrusive, accept "prefer not to say" gracefully and log it, and never fake a survey, the conversation is commercial and says so.
The disqualification paths deserve scripting too. Wrong appetite: thank, exit, do not book, your producers' calendars are not a consolation prize. Wrong timing: bank the x-date and schedule the return touch. Wrong person: ask the routing question ("who should we be talking to about that") before ending.
From Answers to a Billed-or-Not Decision
The intake's output is a pass/fail against the signed criteria doc, made before the meeting books, and the answers travel with the booking: producer opens the meeting knowing the x-date, the incumbent, the authority answer, and the claims preview. Under our model that record is also the billing evidence, a meeting that cannot show passing intake answers in its transcript is a meeting that never bills, which keeps the intake honest by construction.
What this means for you
- Intake exists to produce checkable answers for the four qualification bars: timing, authority, appetite, consent, plus a claims preview.
- Phrasing does the work: authority asked as process ("who decides who your insurance goes through"), claims asked as headaches.
- Sequence by trust: timing, incumbent, appetite screens, authority, claims.
- Script the disqualification paths: exit gracefully on appetite misses, bank x-dates on timing misses, route on authority misses.
- Intake answers should travel with the meeting and back the invoice; unverifiable intake is a claim, not a qualification.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Datamangroup, x-date mechanics (the timing question's foundation)
- Connections Magazine (Quality Contact Solutions), producer prospecting realities
- Insurance Xdate (carrier and premium history context for intake)