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Rethinking Medicare B2B Sales Enablement—From Channel to Customer
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working as a content strategist in Medicare B2B sales enablement, it’s that too often, carriers think only about what they want and not enough about what their sales agents need.
Don’t get me wrong, I 100% believe in achieving business objectives—I just think there’s a way to do it that’s less “rah-rah us” and more “what’s in it for you.” Said another way, great B2B sales enablement content is about finding the overlap between your business goals and your audience’s needs.
To do that, you need to stop thinking about them as a sales channel and start thinking about them as consumers. This is especially true when working with an independent sales force that can choose to sell other carriers.
Why you need to think about B2B sales enablement from a B2C perspective
As the tension between Medicare carriers and independent sales agents grows over commissions and plan availability, it’s more important than ever for carriers to develop deep, lasting relationships with agents. That means creating—and maintaining—personal relationships.
I always hear people say, “It’s just business; don’t take it personally.” Sorry, but no. Business, as any good salesperson knows, is inherently and incredibly personal. There’s even a book on it.
That’s why so many business meetings take place on the golf course, over breakfast, or during happy hours. When you know and trust someone, it’s easier to do business with them. You’re more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.
Despite AI’s creep, businesses are still made of people. It’s not possible to check your personal life at the door.
That’s why we need to abandon the idea of staid (i.e., boring business-y) B2B sales enablement. In the fog of information overload and ho-hum content, you must break through. The best way to do that is by treating your sales agents and brokers as customers first and as salespeople second.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
What a B2C approach to B2B sales enablement looks like
B2B sales enablement content isn’t about selling your plans, products, and benefits. It’s about empowering brokers to generate more leads, close more sales, and retain more business.
To do that, you need to understand their sales journey, their pain points, and their aspirations just as you would with Medicare beneficiaries. You need to empathize with sales agents to empower them.
Once you understand their workflows and hurdles, you can create the right sales enablement tools and resources that help them work smarter, faster, and more compliantly. By addressing agents’ needs first, you’ll achieve your business goals as a natural outcome.
Let’s make it more concrete with a real-world example.
- Situation: Launch a new sales enablement content platform
- Objective: Drive adoption and engagement of new platform
- Goal: 50% independent broker adoption by year end
- Agent needs: Get essential Annual Election Period (AEP) to-dos done like Annual Notice of Change (ANOC) outreach
- Content solution: Create an easy-to-follow sales play on the new platform with step-by-step instructions for strategic ANOC outreach
- Outcomes: More agents complete ANOC outreach, which drives retention, and platform adoption exceeds 50%
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
Make tentpole moments and flagship content your go-to sales enablement solutions
Since Medicare is notoriously complex, it’s no wonder selling it is too, especially for carriers with multiple products, benefits, and lines of business. Too often I see the tendency to kitchen-sink sales enablement plans by including everything everywhere all the time. The thing is, even the best brokers can’t juggle all that at one time.
It’s better to focus on higher quality content rather than mass quantity. A great way to stay disciplined is by creating tentpole moments—those go-big tactics that give you a lot to talk about before, during, and after they occur. B2C marketing is no stranger to tentpole moments, but Medicare B2B sales enablement content tends to be about the three Ps: product, product, product.
Heinrich created a B2B tentpole moment with Ascend, a virtual sales enablement conference to level up agents’ lead pipelines. We empowered agents to generate their own leads and explained why agent-earned leads make for stickier sales. Over the course of two days, agents learned from top-performing agents about social media, grassroots marketing, and referrals. One agent said it was the best field support they’d ever seen from a carrier.
Sure, it’s great that agents liked it. But what matters more is what it did for agents and the carrier. Ascend attendees had a 120% increase in sales compared to non-attendees. That’s a huge win for agents and the carrier.
Another B2B tentpole moment was the creation of an agent value proposition campaign, Improving Lives during AEP 2025, a particularly fraught time for the Medicare industry. We tapped into agent’s deepest reasons for selling Medicare—helping others—and expressed gratitude for the hard work agents do with Agent Appreciation Week with an inspirational video, optimistic virtual thank-you card, and daily giveaways like Starbucks gift cards. The campaign deepened agent loyalty and helped Humana exceed KPI benchmarks by 500% or more during an AEP filled with industry tumult.
Our sales enablement content strategy takes a similar approach. We create a flagship content piece for every selling season. It anchors agents’ attention to what matters most during that timeframe, whether it’s the Open Enrollment Period (OEP), lock-in period, or AEP.
For example, onboarding and retention dominate Medicare brokers’ workload during OEP. As such, we created an onboarding and retention playbook to sustain clients for the long haul. As we learned more about agents and their needs and the Medicare market evolved, we reimagined the playbook from a static, in-the-weeds PDF to an interactive guide focused on what matters most.
From 2021 to 2025, our onboarding and retention guide has an average viewing time of 13 minutes and 56 seconds—almost 14 times the 1-minute benchmark for web-based content. This level of engagement time proves agents aren’t just flipping through the guide but are actively studying it.
Heinrich is your go-to B2B sales enablement partner
While we were born for business, we live for creativity. That creativity comes to life in our agent content, of course, and also in our B2B sales enablement strategy. Marketing isn’t just about effective communication—it’s about seeing things anew. Get in touch to see what we can do for your B2B sales enablement content.