In this series, e123 President Brendan McLoughlin will explain what Strategic Revenue Management (SRM) is with a detailed 6-step guide on how you can implement this framework within your organization.

Move Beyond Product Planning: Strategic Alignment Drives Local Market Wins

Each year, carriers engage in strategic planning to prepare for the future. Yet too often, these efforts focus narrowly on product updates, provider network changes, and benefit adjustments. Necessary? Absolutely. Sufficient? Not even close.

Focusing solely on products overlooks the bigger levers of growth. Strategic alignment across geography, audience, and distribution are the true drivers of predictable, profitable revenue growth.

In Strategic Revenue Management Step 1: Assess, we shared how to identify Local Relative Market Share (LRMS) opportunities. Step 2: Plan is about building a coordinated strategy that aligns the right products with the right markets for the right members with the right distribution. That alignment generates leadership positions in markets you can win.

Hero Products Create Focus and Efficiency

Less is actually more. It’s easy to fall into the trap of creating more plans to cover more ground. But when you try to be everything to everyone, you lose impact. The result? Agents get confused. Consumers get overwhelmed. Marketing gets diluted.

So what should your strategy be? Simplify. Focus your portfolio around “hero products” – plans that solve a real problem in markets where you already have an LRMS advantage.

For example, let’s say your analysis in Step 1 shows strong traction in a market with high diabetes prevalence among seniors due to a plan with robust insulin benefits. That’s a hero product.

Double down. Make the plan even more attractive to that audience by investing in benefits and provider partnerships that deepen its significance. Then build a compelling marketing story around how this solution addresses a need relevant to your target audience.

The hero product approach:

• Gives agents a simple, clear story to tell that resonates with the target segment
• Concentrates marketing dollars where they’ll have the most impact
• Eliminates low-performing plans and reinvests in what’s working

Target Specific Segments in Strategic Geographies

Winning locally means getting laser-focused. The most effective carriers don’t spread themselves thin; they go deep where they have an edge.

Once you’ve identified a hero product, the next question should be, “where else could this work?” Review your current book of business by geography, member segment, product performance, and FMO/agent results.

This isn’t about targeting a state. It’s not even about targeting a city. It’s about clusters of zip codes where your target audience lives and where you are primed to win.

Start with key data such as:

• What chronic conditions are prevalent by zip code (e.g. diabetes, COPD, CHF)?
• What does income and subsidy eligibility look like?
• Where is your provider network strongest?
• Where are competitors weak or absent?

Back to our diabetes example, instead of spreading resources across a whole county, focus on zip codes with the highest incidence of seniors managing diabetes. Or if you have strong veteran benefits, go even deeper and identify areas with high veteran density.

That’s how you create marketing and distribution efficiency. Target specific people in specific places with a product that solves a specific problem.

Identify and Motivate Your Distribution Champions

Now that you have the right product and markets identified, execution depends on your agents. Your top-performing distributors and agents are windows into what works. When someone is consistently selling policies, they’re telling you something about achieving success. To really understand performance, you need to look closely at the data to see:

• Who’s producing consistently in your target markets?
• What agents succeed with specific segments?
• How do top performing agents’ strategies differ from average agents, and what resources can you provide to improve performance?

Find the patterns and build around them. Develop incentives that reward success aligned with your priorities. Replicate what your best agents do and stop investing in those who aren’t producing.

This isn’t about picking your favorite agents. It’s about clarity. Knowing who can win and helping them do more of it.

Data Integration Makes Strategic Planning Possible

You can’t do any of this without the right data.

To build a truly integrated strategic plan, you need visibility across the value chain. That means member-level and agent-level data at the transaction level, including who’s enrolling, in which markets, with what product, and through which distributor and agent.

That’s how you uncover effective patterns. And looking at which products and marketing messages resonate with which members and in what geographies, and replicating that strategy is how you win.

Strategic planning is about more than just products. It’s about putting the right products in the right place, supported by the right marketing investment and agents. Every carrier has limited resources and success comes down to how and where you deploy your resources.

Ready to Transform Your Planning Process?

If your organization is ready to move beyond traditional product-centric planning to a truly integrated strategy, e123 can help. To learn more about our SRM 6-step plan, download our Strategic Revenue Management whitepaper, visit our previous SRM blog posts, watch my presentation on SRM, and stay tuned for the next post in this SRM series.

Ready to start now? Schedule a consultation with e123 and let’s see how SRM can help your organization win in local markets.