Clari vs Gong for Commercial P&C Brokerages

Renewal revenue is forecastable almost entirely from retention rate and rate changes on the existing book, without needing a sales pipeline tool at all. Treat it as a finance forecasting exercise: apply your historical retention rate and expected rate movement to the current book, and you'll get a number close enough to actuals that pipeline software adds little.

New business is the opposite: unpredictable, relationship-driven, and slow, often taking a year or more of cultivation before an account actually moves its coverage. That's the only part of the book where a real pipeline tool earns its keep, since it's the only part that actually behaves like a sales process with distinct stages and meaningful uncertainty.

A commercial P&C brokerage's new business list is usually short, maybe a dozen or two real target accounts a producer is actively pursuing at any time, each one large enough to matter individually. Clari's governance model fits that scale well: you can track each pursuit through stages like initial relationship, marketing to carriers, proposal presented, and bound, with enough granularity to spot a pursuit stalling before it's been dead for six months without anyone noticing.

The rollup also helps agency principals see new business pipeline across producers without relying on each producer's individual, often optimistic, verbal update in a weekly meeting.

Producers in this industry build relationships over years, often across golf outings, industry association events, and informal check-ins that never touch a recorded line at all. Even where calls do happen, many producers treat their prospect relationships as personal book-of-business assets built over a career, and recording those calls for company analysis feels like surrendering something they consider theirs.

That resistance isn't just stubbornness, it reflects how commission-driven insurance sales actually works: a producer's relationships are often more portable and more personally owned than in other B2B sales roles, which makes them more protective of the conversations that build those relationships.

Build your brokerage forecast as two clearly separate lines: expected renewal revenue based on retention rate and rate trend, and new business revenue based on your tracked pursuit list with realistic stage probabilities. Report them separately to leadership rather than blending into one number, since the drivers behind each are completely different and blending them obscures which lever actually needs attention if the forecast comes in short.

This split also makes it much easier to spot a retention problem early, since a declining retention rate against a strong new business number can still produce flat or declining revenue, a pattern that's invisible in a single blended forecast.

Build the forecast as separate lines:

• Forecast expected renewal revenue from your historical retention rate and rate trend on the existing book, treating it as a finance exercise, not a pipeline.
• Track the new business pursuit list, a dozen or two real target accounts, with realistic stage probabilities for each.
• Add account rounding as its own input: new coverage lines placed with existing clients, such as umbrella.
• Review the lines separately so a retention problem is not mistaken for a new business shortfall.

Confirm that agency principals actually want visibility into the new business pursuit list specifically, rather than a vague desire for 'better forecasting' that's really a renewal retention problem in disguise. Ask producers directly what would make tracking their pursuits worth the administrative effort, since goodwill and a clear value exchange matter more here than a mandate. And decide whether Gong's cost is justified by the handful of producers who are actually comfortable with recorded prospecting calls, rather than assuming brokerage-wide adoption.

A lot of new revenue in a P&C brokerage doesn't come from a brand-new logo at all, it comes from rounding out an existing account: adding a line of coverage the client hasn't placed with you yet, such as umbrella or cyber, alongside their existing property and casualty policies. That activity sits somewhere between renewal and new business, and it deserves its own tracked category rather than getting lost inside either the renewal forecast or the new-logo pursuit list, since the sales motion, mostly relationship-based cross-selling to an existing client, looks different from both.