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Overcoming a 10% Revenue Gap Through Account Segmentation and Commercial Enablement

by | Sep 16, 2025 | Blog, Case Studies

Facing a projected 10% revenue shortfall, a leading clinical services provider in the Health Plan market partnered with us to realign its commercial strategy—transforming how accounts were prioritized, managed, and grown, ultimately achieving its 2024 targets and laying the foundation for sustainable future growth.

THE OPPORTUNITY

A provider of clinical services operating in the Health Plan market was projected to miss a key top line metric by over 10%. Due to the nature of their business, this miss would lead to the business missing its revenue target by more than 10%. As the leadership team recognized this challenge, they turned their focus towards optimizing their Commercial function to maximize the likelihood of achieving their top line target.

However, they quickly realized that their strong market capitalization combined with a market shift towards more plans bringing services in-house meant that meaningful growth was unlikely to come from new accounts. The business needed to grow its existing account base significantly in a short period of time, a difficult task amplified by concerns over the commercial team’s ability to carry out the activities necessary to achieve any identified growth opportunities.

While assessing these challenges, the leadership team decided to act quickly to attempt to identify growth opportunities, enable its talent to capitalize on those opportunities, and de-risk the future state to ensure the organization achieved its 2024 targets and continued growth into 2025.

THE SOLUTION

Identifying Growth Opportunities

The most pressing challenge facing the organization was to identify which accounts posed a growth opportunity and organize the business to maximize the likelihood of the health plan providing additional business. While many throughout the organization had an opinion on where growth could come from, few were aware of the size of the opportunity and the actions needed to capitalize on it. To solve this challenge, the team created an Account Segmentation framework to score accounts and categorize them based on the account’s importance to the business (Current Value) and the account’s potential for growth in the calendar year (Growth Opportunity).

Once created, the framework was used during cross-functional workshops involving leaders and key commercial representatives to agree upon a score and ultimate “category” for accounts. Accounts fell into 1 of 4 categories:

  1. High Current Value, High Growth Opportunity
  2. Low Current Value, High Growth Opportunity
  3. High Current Value, Low Growth Opportunity
  4. Low Current Value, Low Growth Opportunity

Through this process, the organization was not only able to identify and prioritize its account-base to create an aligned business, the business also began the process of increasing trust in the commercial team by creating an open forum for teams to share their thoughts and input into the process. Where previously the commercial team had made decisions independently, this new process involved various teams to motivate all to act toward an agreed upon goal.

Enabling the Account Managers with Account Planning, Account Teams, and Compensation Incentives

Once the organization had identified its “Growth Accounts,” the leadership team shifted its focus towards ensuring the account managers of those accounts were empowered to achieve the desired targets. As the team assessed the needs of its account managers, three factors became clear:

  1. Lack of Structure – Each Account Manager was largely acting independently to achieve the needs of their accounts as they saw fit. The Commercial Leadership team was largely focused on reinforcing the requests of Account Managers throughout the organization rather than implementing the processes needed to standardize the account management process.
  2. Large Variance Between Level of Effort Required – Managing a larger account (many of which were growth accounts) required overwhelmingly more effort than working with a smaller, low growth account.
  3. Misaligned Incentives – Account managers were not appropriately incentivized to drive the growth outcomes that the organization desired.

To solve the lack of structure, the organization implemented a rigorous Account Planning process, requiring documentation of key account information and activities that was reviewed regularly by commercial leadership team members. This process of proactively managing accounts towards a goal rather than reactively addressing account needs changed the mindset of the commercial organization while providing them the tool needed to outline specific steps to drive growth.

While solving the lack of structure, however, this account planning process created additional overhead for already overwhelmed account management team members. To support account managers of larger accounts, resources were re-allocated to form account teams that were allocated to an account, consisting of an account lead, a shared support resource for day-to-day activities, and an operationally focused team member to represent delivery capabilities. These account teams afforded account managers the much-needed time to plan for and drive growth.

Finally, new team roles and new growth targets meant new compensation structures. The team’s previous compensation structure was outdated and atypical of an account management team tasked with growing accounts. The leadership team organized resources to create a new market-competitive compensation structure that encouraged a more individualistic and opportunistic mindset centered around rewarding team members who were able to grow their accounts.

Minimizing Future Risk

Although these tools and processes were designed to sustain success beyond 2024, the leadership team remained concerned about the Commercial organization’s ability to repeatedly achieve increasing targets. To cement and build upon the progress made by the Commercial organization thus far, the leadership team worked to shore up various aspects of the commercial function, including:

  • Annual Planning: Reorganize the annual planning process to be client focused. Drive increased accuracy and organizational alignment around projections for the upcoming year.
  • Account Management: Standardize the framework for managing accounts across Account Managers to reduce variation in outcomes and allow for smoother onboarding and account transitions.
  • Contract Review and Management: Set the expectation for what each contract should include and identify areas to renegotiate with clients.
  • Reporting and Analytics: Define and track the key metrics needed to measure the success of the commercial organization.
  • Deal Review: Create the oversight needed to support account managers with particularly large or complex deals.
  • Commercial Operations: Outline the responsibilities of a Commercial Operations team function and the path forward for hiring new team members into the open roles.

THE IMPACT

Upon completion of this project, the team achieved the top line number, growing the key metric by roughly 12%. However, arguably more important than the success in 2024 was the infrastructure created for the future of the business. During the project, the organization began to operate as a truly aligned business, collaborating amongst teams on key processes that had previously been sub-optimally completed independently. This newfound trust between teams created a more supportive and collaborative working environment where the team felt confident in achieving increased targets for 2025. In addition, the Commercial business defined a standard way of working that created trust internally and externally, improving relationships with clients and other business functions.