2023 Gold Winner: Best use of customer insight

The Gold winner of ‘Best use of customer insight’ at the 2023 B2B Marketing Awards was B2B agency Seeblue, for its collaboration with Allianz Partners. This initiative marked a pivotal reimagining of the Allianz Partner value proposition, taking sales to new heights, particularly in large enterprise, NGO, and IGO strategic accounts.

Campaign summary
Allianz Partners, global leaders in health, life and disability insurance, and health services were seeing the value of their large customer renewals decline year over year. They were also failing to capture their fair share of new enterprise acquisitions. Evidence showed they were failing to articulate their full value to business customers and especially to large strategic accounts.

They were not customer-centric in how they addressed business issues beyond simply providing health insurance coverage for their employees. Applying a 360° insight model, Seeblue fundamentally changed thinking within Allianz Partners’ global sales and marketing teams.

The programme has an ROI of 598:1 having overachieved on strategic account targets (three wins vs a target of one). It has elevated the perception of marketing within Allianz Partners, where ‘Proven Meets Pioneering’ is central to growth.

About the client company
Allianz Group has been in business since 1890, and are the market leaders in the healthcare insurance market. In 2022, Allianz Group was named the world’s number #1 insurer for the fourth year in a row in the 2022 Best Global Brands Ranking by Interbrand. They insure 122 million people and serve in 70+ countries.

Allianz Partners is a wholly owned subsidiary and is one of the largest global entities in the Allianz Group. Seeblue works specifically with the Health division of Allianz Partners, which provides health, life, and disability insurance and health services globally.

Business Challenge
Allianz Partners has a loyal B2B customer base, but, year after year, renewal conversations were increasingly price-focused, leading to revenue erosion. They were not conveying the benefits of their whole health portfolio or the wider Allianz Group. This narrow and inward view of their capability meant sales teams struggled to achieve revenue targets and had a low new acquisition win rate, often losing out in tender processes.

The marketing team wanted to elevate their overall positioning to business customers and specifically to improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales engagement into large strategic accounts. Seeblue was tasked with developing the strategic direction, messaging and practical application of ‘Proven meets Pioneering,’ resulting in increased win rates within large global strategic accounts.

The core requirements identified for this program were as follows:

  • Gather 360° insight into how Allianz Partners and Brokers were engaging large enterprise customers, focused on improving win rates and deal sizes in strategic enterprise accounts (specifically, in the leading growth region of Asia, the NGO and IGO sector where there is large growth potential and named global strategic accounts).
  • Account engagement and activation by combining messaging, strategic direction, and account-specific insight packaged into assets for 1:1 account delivery.

Strategy
The objective was two-fold:

  • To redefine the Allianz Partners value proposition and positioning, to create a unifying customer-centric strategy that showcased their strength and brought together their operational relationships, solutions, heritage within the Allianz Group, and the core company values.
  • To help their client retain top strategic account renewals and secure one new strategic account win

Seeblue set out to elevate Allianz Partners as the one-stop insurer, planning to implement a consistent narrative throughout every communication, from acquisition and retention marketing to sales enablement and outreach. The team wanted to extend the conversation beyond the Operational Claims teams. They targeted the C-level, particularly CHROs and brokers who manage the shortlist of insurance providers for RFPs.

Seeblue set out to develop a value proposition and subsequent messaging framework, which served as the foundation for the new positioning – ‘Proven meets Pioneering’. This reflects the depth of their expertise and widens engagement opportunities into C-level and beyond the normal operational stakeholders. The narrative was applied to flow through all enterprise marketing channels, to create a unified and aligned proposition visible to internal and external stakeholders.

Further, to support the commercial goals of this program, Seeblue conducted deep-dive account-specific research on 10 key strategic accounts in alignment with local and regional sales leadership.

Research and strategic insights
‘Proven meets pioneering’ is more than a campaign. It’s a re-definition of the entire Allianz Partner value proposition, that flows through the entire brand and business. The research work informing and activating this program was completed in 2 phases.

Research phase 1: Inside-out

Starting in April 2022, Seeblue conducted 75 Interviews with a broad range of stakeholders over a six month period. These interviews included brokers, sales, marketing, customer success, product, and C-level employees. This gave Seeblue insight into the core strengths of the business. Seeblue analyzed win:loss data to understand successes and shortcomings, identifying opportunities for future success.

Research phase 2: Outside-in

Seeblue conducted bespoke research into regional growth opportunities (with a deep dive into Asia) to gather extensive insight into the market structure, key competitors, industry marketing, PR and events landscape, and opportunities for brand penetration. Seeblue also identified and prioritized regional brokers and new key stakeholders.

Seeblue gathered IGO (International Governmental Organisation) and NGO (Non-Governmental Organisations) sector insights and gained in-depth views of the international private medical insurance requirements, inclusive of competitors, market trends, and challenges, which helped the agency to extract the most relevant information and present back to Allianz as actionable insight.

Seeblue refined the intent keywords that they were tracking and identified active intent among both existing and acquisition target accounts. Seeblue then validated and prioritized this with regional sales teams, to define a list of 10 priority strategic accounts.

Seeblue conducted deep account-specific research on these 10 accounts and delivered organization charts containing core stakeholders, taking the ‘Proven meets Pioneering’ narrative to the next level of specificity for each target. Seeblue produced one-to-one account reports for each account. These documents compiled all account-critical insight, including the strategy, opportunities, stakeholder map, contact-level insights, and engagement plan.

Target audience and customer insight
The decision-making unit for global employee health and medical cover is a complex one comprising end customer C-level and operational decision-makers, their broker, and service delivery partners. This program identified, targeted, and engaged each audience group with a specific set of objectives and desired outcomes.

Their target accounts spanned across various industries, however, they achieved notable success in the IGO (International Governmental Organizations) and NGO (Non-Governmental organizations) sectors.

Value proposition and positioning

  • Value Proposition: Proven meets Pioneering: Trusted, for over 130 years to support our customers, day or night, around the globe
  • Positioning: Allianz Partners is on a constant journey of innovation, embracing the latest digital technology, and leading change. To deliver the very best care now, to support a healthier tomorrow.

Media and channels used
All enterprise marketing channels including the client website, customer microsites, sales presentations, tender documents, and marketing collateral. Marketing collateral includes videos, PowerPoint templates, social media graphics, and posts, and paid social adverts.

Timescales
The campaign began in April 2022, and consisted of two core phases:

  • Value proposition, positioning and GTM development (April 2022 – May 2022).
  • Research & insights (April 2022 – March 2023).
  • Internal research (6 months).
  • External research (3 months).
  • 1:1 strategic research (3 months).
  • Sales execution, social selling, and engagement with assets and materials created – ongoing.

Results

  • 10 high-intent strategic account opportunities were identified.
  • Two new accounts won against the target of one new win.
  • One strategic account was successfully retained.
  • Blended 33% win rate so far.
  • Contributing to 47% of the new revenue target for 2023.
  • 598:1 ROI

Testimonials
“The strategic approach and deep account insights has really won the support of Sales for ABM and demonstrated the real benefits of working with Seeblue.”

Head of Go to Market, Health

“I can’t explain how useful this is to their go to market / pitch strategies. This is a VERY important piece of work. This content will have a direct $$ contribution to their year(s) when it comes to the large corp segment and without a doubt it upgrades their close ratios on the more complex cases.” 

Regional Head of Sales & Distribution

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