Competitive Simulations - 10 Best Practice Advices

2017, February 27th

Walking in the Competitor’s Shoes

Today I would like to share my passion and best practice advices for competitive simulations / competitive workshops1 with you. Honestly, I would have loved to have them, when I first started with Competitive Intelligence ;-)

In the meantime I have experienced competitive simulations from many different perspectives, in various settings and companies in the Pharma/Biotech/Medtech industry: national Marketing roles, in my international CI position, as participant and facilitator and now as business consultant. It’s a magic tool, which needs to be very well planned.

When are competitive simulations useful?

Before your own launch, such as a new product, a new indication, moving up the treatment paradigm (e.g. you are established in 2nd line and now move up to 1st line usage)
Before a competitive entry: This could be an originator, a biosimilar or generic product.
Or both (before your own launch and a competitive entry): Define the window of opportunity.
After a (competitor) launch, in order to re-fine your strategy.
A changing competitive environment, such as regulatory, access and pricing.
The simulations can be conducted on a national, international or global level.

10 Best Practice Advices:

One key element is the excellent preparation:
- High quality competitive briefing decks of all relevant competitors
- Precise and situationally tailored scenario design: Where to play?
Cross-functional and cross-level team set up: Each team plays a defined competitor and gets informed by the respective briefing deck. For the best outcome it is crucial to have a balanced team set up - across roles, seniority, personality type and ideally previous competitor experience.
Open, constructive and creative mind-set of the participants: Get “inside the mind” of the competitor. Be the competitor!
Please find more Information on the topic mind-set and mind-shift in my article „What you can learn from your competition“
Competitive teams: It’s worth to define a team leader and note taker per team as it helps to coordinate and capture the group discussion.
Break-out exercise 1: Think like the competitor. Develop their positioning, strategies and messaging! What helps a lot to capture the ideas and present them back, are easy to fill break-out slide decks.
Break-out exercise 2: Act like the competitor: Develop tactics and counter-messaging. Again easy to fill slide decks are supportive here.
Break-out exersise 3: Be your own company again: Identify threats and gaps. Develop strategies to mitigate risks and address gaps.
Therefore competitive simulations can be used in a protective manner as well as in a very innovative way by developing new solutions.
Break-out exercise 4: Implementation: It’s very important to include the implementation part at the end of a competitive simulation in order to capture key learnings and next steps including who’s responsible to take action. This is the first and a key step to transform the insights of the workshop into reality.
Back to plenary presentations: Between the different phases the plenary presentations give an excellent chance to learn from the other teams, answer crucial questions and give feedback to the current approach. A competent and inspiring facilitation is a key success factor here.
It’s worth to build an expert panel / judge panel with senior leaders across the organization. They advise the different competitive teams, ask questions and give feedback to the teams, so that they have the chance to optimize their approaches. At the end of the workshop they define the winning teams of the whole workshop. Let’s celebrate with a little prize.
Depending on the set-up the experts can take on a mentor role and advise the teams during the break-out sessions.

Using these advices you are on an excellent path to reach objectives successfully, e.g. to inform business planning, define or re-fine competitive strategies, support decision making, define and trigger tactical actions!

Alongside the obvious results, there are very precious additional outcomes:

Innovation: Like already mentioned competitive simulations may not only be used with a protective intention and mindset. They have the amazing potential to create even break-through innovations by using the co-creative cross-functional perspective: The total is greater than the sum of their parts. This could be achieved by identifying the competitive and your own gaps in a structured way. Thus Competitive Intelligence can be really intelligent: Far beyond risk mitigation it thrives on your innovations!
Team Development: One feedback, which I literally got after every competitive simulation, which I designed and facilitated, was: “It was so great and insightful to work cross-functionally together!” The cross-functional perspective helps to come to new solutions. In addition it helps to foster the confidence- and trust-building within the team.
Another positive “side effect” is that the understanding of the competitive landscape across the teams and organization is rising. On an international level e.g. later launch countries can learn from early launch countries. And on a local level I even used an adapted version for a sales force training.

All of these additional outcomes without extra time and costs ;-) I’m enthusiastic of the potential of competitive simulations.

When are you using competitive simulations? With which purpose? Are there any other best practice advices, which you found helpful for conducting competitive simulations?

Lots of success for your next competitive workshop!

Annette Freund

FREUND INSPIRED MOVE

Annette Freund is Founder and Managing Director of the consulting company FREUND INSPIRED MOVE in Switzerland. She is inspired by change processes: Strong Individuals! Reforming Teams! Transforming Organizations!

She provides her services in German and English speaking environments.

¹There are many different names out there for Competitive Simulations, such as competitive workshop, scenario planning, stress test, war-gaming etc. However some of them are considered as politically incorrect in the meantime.