The Situation
When a large State account in the Southwest opened RFP bid opportunities for their State employee health benefits program, our Hero Company was one of four major health insurance carriers to submit a proposal. Each of the four already had an existing share of the State’s business, however the State made the decision to disenroll all employees from their health plans, creating an opportunity for each carrier to potentially win (or lose) a share of the employee pie.
The stakes were high and a successful marketing campaign was critical to convincing State employee’s of our Hero Company’s superior offering in a bid to win a larger share of business with the State.
Preliminary meetings were held between our Hero Company’s sales and marketing teams nearly a year ahead of the anticipated finalist presentation time frame. Sales shared with marketing the requirements of the RFP as set forth by the State and discussed proposed value messaging and membership goals. The enterprise marketing team took the lead on the effort.
Over the next six months, the enterprise marketing team focused solely on a large media effort to focus attention on brand. The campaign included billboards, CCTV, radio, etc. that targeted State employees.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
With only a couple of months before the finalist presentations were due, the clock was ticking and it was time for action. The sales team reached out to John Heimann with an urgent request.
“We needed materials with information about our plan offerings and the ancillary benefits we were including that differentiated us, a website that State employees could access that explained plan options and benefits and a campaign to get all of this in front of State employees. All the enterprise marketing team was talking about were billboards. We reached out to John and he jumped in to course correct and get a marketing plan together that helped us win.” Hero Company Lead Account Executive for the State Account
John created a marketing plan that took the goals, target audience and value messaging the sales team had established for the State account and re-framed the entire objective of the marketing effort. John helped shift the marketing team’s efforts away from media and towards a strategy that included tactics that more precisely targeted State employees and that drove to critical information that would influence their health plan decision. The plan included materials that, as part of the RFP, could be distributed to State employees by our Hero Company representatives, a Website that clearly provided all of the health benefit and ancillary benefit options being presented by the Hero Company and “reasons to believe” that gave the State a clear picture of how our Hero Company would care for their employees after the sale.
Better ROI
Following the finalist presentations, the State made the decision to offer two choices of carrier to their employees rather than four and one of those was our Hero Company.
Our Hero Company revised membership goals upward now that the entire membership opportunity was split between two carriers instead of four. At the end of open enrollment our Hero Company beat that goal by over 1,000 members.
“If it weren’t for John, I’m not sure where we would have ended up. In the end, his leadership resulted in marketing efforts that really nailed our value prop to the State. We felt that our membership goals were lofty to begin with. To exceed that number is a tribute to the team effort that went into State campaign with marketing being a huge contributor to the win.” Hero Company Lead Account Executive for the State Account