From Assumptions to Clarity: Clearwater Benefits
Transforming a stalled plan rollout into a data-backed customer growth strategy.
TL;DR
- Client: Clearwater Benefits, national health-share provider serving 1099 and independent workers.
- Problem: A new plan option launched through a major distribution partner drove impressive quote volume but disappointing enrollment. The internal team couldn't tell if the issue was the pricing, plan design, education gaps, or a partner audience mismatch.
- Solution: A 4-week Customer Growth Sprint focused on customer insight extraction, demand validation, and awareness mapping.
- Shift: Moved from assumption-led planning and partner anecdotes to customer-backed clarity on who actually buys and why.
- Impact: Clear target profile, identified deal-breakers, pricing insights, awareness map, and partner-ready relaunch strategy grounded in actual customer data instead of internal theories.
The Challenge
Clearwater Benefits had a problem most companies would kill for: tons of top-of-funnel interest. The new plan option launched through a major distribution partner was generating impressive quote volume.
But conversion rates were disappointing.
The team had theories. Lots of them. Was it pricing? Plan design? Education gaps? Wrong partner audience? Sales process friction? Every stakeholder had an opinion, but nobody had data to back it up. Internal conversations were going in circles while the clock ticked on scaling to additional partners.
The symptoms showing up:
- High quote volume, low enrollment
- Competing internal theories driving decisions without validation
- No clarity on whether the plan had real market demand
- Partner relationships were at risk if they couldn't fix the conversion
- Pressure to scale to additional partners without understanding what was broken
Clearwater couldn't confidently move forward without understanding who this plan was actually for, what was blocking conversion, and how to fix it before burning more partner goodwill and internal resources.
Jessica Price
Chief of Staff
Clearwater Benefits
"We’ve never really done customer research at Clearwater. I’m trying to open the organization to how important it is, and this work is going to drive a lot of future projects... There’s so much here we can immediately use for the plan relaunch. I definitely want to spend time going through the voice-of-customer work and pulling this into our June 1 rollout....This is exactly the kind of work we need as we get ready for our relaunch."
The Shift
What made this work worth doing: Clearwater needed to stop operating on assumptions and start operating on customer intelligence. They had paying customers who could tell them exactly why they bought and what nearly stopped them.
The belief that had to change: "Our partners know their audiences best" → "Our actual customers know what actually drives decisions."
The barrier they faced: A new plan option with no baseline customer data, competing internal stakeholders with different theories, and partners expecting results. Without clarity on what was blocking conversion, every decision felt like another expensive guess.
The Work
- Customer insight extraction
Ran qualitative research targeting existing high-value customers to uncover actual buying criteria - not what the team assumed mattered, but what paying customers said drove their decisions. This included buying criteria analysis from existing customers, feature and benefit ranking, pricing and coverage sensitivity mapping, and deal-breaker identification. - Demand validation
Compared what existing customers valued against what the new plan offered. Some features the team thought were competitive advantages turned out to be "nice-to-have" but not purchase drivers. Other concerns they'd dismissed as edge cases were actually deal-breakers for large segments. - Partner audience analysis
Mapped how different partner audiences behaved differently and what that meant for positioning and messaging. High-value customers consistently came from specific partner types - older, higher-income audiences who already trusted the recommender. Other partner audiences were generating volume but not conversions due to a communication misalignment. - Customer awareness mapping
Built a complete awareness map showing where prospects were in their understanding journey and what content, channels, and messages actually moved them forward. This gave the entire GTM team a shared playbook for meeting prospects where they were, instead of where marketing hoped they'd be. - "Aha" moment: Most prospects didn't understand how health shares work at all. They were comparing Clearwater's plan to traditional insurance using completely wrong criteria. The conversion problem wasn't the plan - it was that prospects were asking the wrong questions because nobody had educated them on what they were actually buying.
Mandy Sohaney
PRoduct director
Clearwater Benefits
"[The Customer Growth Sprint] is incredibly helpful...I don’t feel overwhelmed — it all makes sense... I can already see these as Facebook posts, email headers, all kinds of things. This is great!"
The Outcome
- What's different now:
Clearwater has a clear target customer profile for the new plan option and knows exactly what drives conversions versus what sounds good in internal meetings. Marketing is building education content based on actual customer language and concerns instead of internal assumptions. Sales knows which features to prioritize and which ones are table stakes that don't actually influence purchase decisions.
The team stopped treating all partner audiences the same. They now know which partner types drive high-value customers and can prioritize relationships accordingly instead of spreading resources across partnerships that generate volume but not revenue. - Decisions enabled:
Leadership gained confidence to scale to additional partners, but with much clearer criteria for which partnerships to pursue. The team can now design partner-specific strategies instead of one-size-fits-all approaches that weren't working.
Sales has a prioritization framework based on what customers actually value, not what stakeholders think matters. Marketing has customer-backed messaging angles and knows which awareness gaps to close first. - Internal wins:
All teams working from the same customer data, instead of relying on competing opinions. Marketing, product, and sales are now aligned on a relaunch strategy grounded in customer reality rather than internal theories.
The Voice of Customer library built during the Sprint became the go-to resource for anyone creating messaging, prioritizing features, or building campaigns. Real customer language replaced consultant-speak and internal jargon.
The Takeaway
For other organizations:
If you're launching new offerings through partners and seeing high volume but low conversion, the problem probably isn't your partners or your product. It's that you're making decisions based on assumptions instead of customer data. Your paying customers already know what's blocking conversions - you just have to ask them.
Who's probably in the same stuck place:
Companies launching through distribution partners, where you can't directly control the customer experience, but get blamed when conversion tanks. Organizations with multiple internal stakeholders who all have theories about what's wrong, but no shared data to validate any of them. Teams are burning partner relationships by pushing volume without fixing the underlying conversion problem.
What this case proves:
Customer intelligence beats internal opinions every time. You don't need massive research budgets or six-month timelines to get clarity - you need to talk to your actual paying customers and listen to what they tell you. Four weeks of focused customer research beats months of assumption-based planning and expensive course corrections.