Meridith Elliott Powell, an award winning author, and business strategist opened the third and final day of this year’s Medicare Marketing & Sales Summit with a keynote address on how disruption creates opportunities if you have the right mindset. Later, a leadership panel discussed strategies to improve sales performance, member engagement, and broker relationships in the year ahead. Here are the highlights.
Keynote: Uncertainty can be the path to opportunity
Keynote Meridith Elliott Powell provided an energetic and inspiring message that centered on thriving amid uncertainty, stressing that disruption creates opportunity when met with the right mindset.
Powell encouraged attendees to cultivate a “relentless vision”—a focused, unwavering commitment to goals that helps leaders persevere through obstacles. Listening and networking, she emphasized, remain the fastest pathways to growth. She guided participants through an interactive exercise that pushed them to network with intention by meeting new peers and asking open‑ended, curiosity‑driven questions.
Customer feedback, especially complaints, can be a catalyst for growth, Powell said. Drawing on examples from Procter & Gamble and Buc‑ee’s, she demonstrated how speaking the customer’s language, addressing unmet needs, and ensuring customers feel heard builds trust and loyalty.
“When the customer feels valued, when the customer feels heard, they feel trust," she said. "They will choose you over the competition. There's nothing you sell that your competitors don't sell. You have to figure out what the marketplace isn't offering and offer that."
She reminded attendees that in today’s fast-moving, uncertain marketplace, success depends on focusing on a few high-impact activities and staying agile enough to pivot quickly. while remaining agile to pivot quickly. Productivity—not busyness—is what drives meaningful results.
Panel: Lessons From a tough AEP and the road ahead
The 2026 landscape for Medicare Advantage is defined by tightening margins, reduced benefits, and heightened compliance monitoring—challenges that set the tone for a candid leadership panel moderated by Peggy Sullivan, productivity strategist, and creator of the Busy Busting Framework.
“If you would have asked me for my words for Medicare… the ones that come to mind initially because of the AEP were ‘exhausting’ and ‘destructive’,” said Andrew Napierala, vice president of Medicare and individual market sales at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield.
“Any one of these things happening simultaneously would be a lot for us to deal with.”
Despite the headwinds, panelists described how their organizations found ways to stabilize membership and support teams through unprecedented disruption.
Operational strategies that drove retention
Napierala shared one of the panel’s most striking examples of navigating forced disruption: discontinuing more than 100,000 members from a regional plan’s membership and still maintaining strong loyalty.
"We disrupted over 60 percent and discontinued over 60 percent of our membership,” he said. “I’m proud to say 87 percent renewed with us.”
Strategic moves such as hiring additional telesales agents, leveraging overflow vendor support, and simplifying product portfolios helped teams meet demand and manage member concerns during a chaotic AEP. The message: even large-scale change can be managed when processes and staffing are aligned around the member.
How to build broker relationships
Broker partnerships emerged as a central theme. Several panelists noted that during this AEP, some brokers prioritized other plans, even when working from leads provided by carriers.
“One lesson that we learned the hard way this year is that the broker channel is a transactional relationship… we actually gave the brokers their leads, and some of them re enrolled elsewhere,” said Gregorio Vasquez, senior director of Medicare markets at MVP Healthcare.
Yet the panel agreed that brokers remain essential. Nishant Shukla, chief marketing officer at SCAN Health Plan, emphasized the need to deepen the relationship: “We can’t just see brokers as a distribution channel. We need to see them as our partners in improving the well-being of our members… Investing in that broker community… is absolutely critical.”
Refocus team priorities
The discussion also turned to organizational priorities. With teams stretched thin and demands rising, leaders stressed the importance of reducing low value tasks and clarifying roles.
“Busyness affects all three aspects—creativity, morale, effectiveness—in a domino effect,” Vasquez said. “My job as a leader is to understand what makes them busy so I can remove those obstacles.”
Michael Spartano, vice president of sales at Martin’s Point Health Care, echoed the sentiment, noting that sales teams often become the “catch all” for responsibilities that belong elsewhere. “If I’m at a team meeting and someone makes the slightest comment about something that’s clearly not a sales action… we need to get it off the plate,” he said. Clearing administrative burdens frees teams to focus on the work that drives results.