Centene: Creating Value to Accelerate Growth

Centene, a Fortune 500 health insurance company, provides services to government-sponsored health care programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare. The company, which sought to drive significant growth, offers varied plans addressing vision care, behavioral health, pharmacy services, and other health needs.

Jesse Hunter, Centene’s executive vice president, recognized that Centene could generate billions of dollars in additional revenue if its different specialty insurance capability groups could coordinate to create opportunities for customers to buy multiple products from the company. With that goal in mind, Jesse and Scott began working together to articulate the new strategy. They involved the CEOs of each capability group to create aligned objectives with distinct priorities that included creating a unified brand for the combined services, and building a collaborative culture. This significant effort involved strategic planning, change management, and leadership.

“Scott’s experience and expertise were valuable assets for our efforts to redefine our specialty sales strategy,” Jesse said. “He helped position us to achieve our long term growth objectives”” he added.

Once the strategy was clarified, it was time to bring it to life with a new market approach that shifted the focus from products, like vision care insurance, to markets, such as government or employer groups. This required Centene to develop new leadership, and an enterprise sales group that would represent all of the companies’ capabilities to specific market segments. To lead this new effort, Centene called on Pam Shipley, a leader of once of its health plans. She and Scott worked closely together to implement these growth strategies.

So far, these efforts have produced over $50 million in new revenue from clients that began buying multi-product offerings from Centene—and at least $1 billion of qualified opportunity in the coming year.