If you've spent any time selling technology into insurance, you'll recognise the experience. The meeting goes well. The underwriter nods. The innovation director calls it "exciting." Someone says "let's explore this further." You leave the building feeling like you're close to a deal.
You're not. You're close to the beginning of a process that could take six to eighteen months — or, more commonly, end quietly in an email that says "unfortunately, our priorities have shifted." The problem is not that insurers are dishonest. It's that the language they use in partnership conversations carries specific signals that technology companies routinely misread.
The decoder ring
Here's what the most common phrases actually signal — and what you should do in response:
"This is really interesting. Let us take it back to the team."
Translation: You've generated genuine interest, but the person you're speaking to does not have authority to commit. They need to socialise the idea internally before anything happens. This is the most common outcome from a first meeting and is not inherently negative — but it is not a buying signal.
What to do: Ask specifically: "Who else would need to be involved in a decision to move forward, and would it be helpful if we joined a follow-up meeting with them?" This tests whether your contact has a clear internal path or whether they're being polite.
"We'd love to run a pilot."
Translation: This sounds like progress, but a pilot proposal from the innovation team without a defined budget, success criteria, and senior commercial sponsor is often a way to keep the conversation alive without making a commitment. The pilot itself may never materialise, or it may run but have no path to production.
What to do: Before agreeing, ask three questions: "What's the budget for the pilot?", "What criteria would we need to meet for this to progress to commercial deployment?", and "Who on your side will own the relationship through the pilot and the decision at the end?" If the answers are vague, the pilot is not real yet.
"Can you put together a business case we can take to the board?"
Translation: Your contact sees value but cannot secure budget alone. They are asking you to do the internal selling work for them. This is both a positive signal (they're trying to advance it) and a risk signal (they need board approval, which adds months to the timeline and introduces stakeholders you haven't met).
What to do: Offer to co-author the business case rather than write it alone. This ensures the language, priorities, and framing match the insurer's internal culture. Ask to understand what other initiatives are competing for the same budget — it helps you position your proposition realistically.
"We need to run this past our information security team."
Translation: This is actually a good sign — it means the conversation has moved past commercial interest and into operational evaluation. But it's also where most partnerships die, because technology companies are unprepared for the documentation requirements.
What to do: Respond within 48 hours with a pre-prepared compliance pack — security questionnaire, DPIA, data processing terms, and an operational resilience summary. Speed and completeness at this stage signal maturity and dramatically accelerate the process.
"Our priorities have shifted" or "We're putting a pause on new partnerships."
Translation: The internal champion either lost the argument, lost their role, or was never able to build sufficient support. This is the polite version of "no." Pushing back is unlikely to change the outcome.
What to do: Accept the decision gracefully. Ask whether there's a specific trigger that would reopen the conversation — a budget cycle, a strategy review, a new appointment. Maintain the relationship at a low cadence (quarterly check-in, sharing relevant content) without applying pressure. Many partnerships that fail first time succeed twelve months later when circumstances change.
"Can you present at our innovation day / conference / offsite?"
Translation: This can be genuinely useful if the audience includes decision-makers. But if the invitation is to present alongside eight other technology companies to a room of middle managers, you are being used as content. The insurer gets to demonstrate innovation activity without committing to anything.
What to do: Ask who will be in the audience. If underwriting directors, broking heads, or C-suite executives are attending, it's worth the effort. If it's an innovation team showcase, weigh the time investment carefully.
The signals that actually matter
After working on dozens of partnership assessments, the signals that reliably predict conversion are not what most technology companies expect:
The underwriting or P&L owner is in the room. If the person who controls the portfolio, sets the pricing, or manages the client relationship is actively engaged in the conversation, the partnership has commercial gravity. If the conversation is entirely owned by innovation, digital, or strategy functions, it may be intellectually genuine but commercially weightless.
They ask about your commercial model. When an insurer asks "how would we pay for this?" or "what does the revenue share look like?", they are mentally modelling the economics. This is a fundamentally different conversation from "tell us more about your technology."
They reference a specific portfolio or client segment. "We have a £15 million mid-market fleet book that's running at a 68% loss ratio" is a conversation with commercial intent. "Insurance is a really interesting market for your technology" is not.
They introduce you to other internal stakeholders unprompted. When your contact starts bringing in the head of claims, the IT integration lead, or the compliance officer, they are building an internal coalition. This is the strongest signal that the partnership is being treated as a business initiative rather than an exploratory conversation.
They push back on something. Paradoxically, constructive challenge is a better signal than easy agreement. If an underwriter says "I'm not sure your data would be reliable for this segment" or "our compliance team would have concerns about this data usage", they are engaging with the proposition seriously enough to test it. Enthusiastic agreement with no pushback often indicates polite interest rather than commercial evaluation.
Protecting your time and resources
The technology companies that succeed in insurance are the ones that qualify opportunities rigorously. Not every expression of interest warrants six months of investment. A practical qualifying framework after any initial meeting:
Is there a named commercial sponsor with P&L authority? If no → the opportunity is exploratory. Maintain contact but don't invest heavily.
Is there an identified budget or funding mechanism? If no → the partnership has no fuel. Ask what would need to happen for budget to be allocated.
Is there a specific use case tied to a quantifiable business problem? If no → the conversation is too abstract to convert. Push for specificity.
Is there a realistic timeline with defined next steps? If no → the opportunity is open-ended and likely to drift.
If none of these conditions are met, the honest assessment is that you are in a pre-pipeline conversation. That's not worthless — relationships matter in insurance, and today's "no" can become next year's "yes" — but it should be resourced accordingly. The worst outcome for a technology company is investing enterprise-sales effort into an opportunity that was never going to convert on the current timeline.
Want to qualify your insurance pipeline more effectively? Take the free Partnership Readiness Diagnostic → to understand where your proposition stands and which conversations are worth investing in.