Competitive Immunity™

Program Description
No product market is static. When a breakthrough is made in a therapeutic area, imitators follow. There is always someone looking for a better way to solve health problems. Any time a new product enters a market, the market changes for everybody. Successful product teams have a clear and effective plan for addressing the market change.

Whether your product is the market leader or trying to gain market share in a competitive field, your team must strategically and preemptively position itself and its product against the new competitor in order to build competitive immunity and protect market share.

Competitive Immunity™ is a half-day to full-day workshop built around a central concept—building a wall around your castle. The simulation represents the forces at work in a competitive situation: the castle represents your piece of the market; the wall represents your messages, with its strengths and weak spots; the advancing armies represent the competitive forces. Your job is to recognize the competitors’ approaches and to eliminate or minimize your vulnerabilities.

Program Objectives
In order to succeed, sales consultants will need to be able to:

1. Fully understand your key marketing points in terms of what they mean to the customer, including the problems they solve for the physician and the patient.
2. Utilize core marketing messages in a way that demonstrates the value of your complete range of resources to the customer.
3. Develop a physician-specific action plan that links customer needs to your complete range of capabilities in a way that provides strategic value to the customer and long-term returns to your own bottom line.
4. Understand and tailor marketing messages to address the full spectrum of needs that exist within a customer practice.
5. Understand the competitor’s product, messages, strengths, and weaknesses so they can proactively address competitive messages.
6. Provide a framework for each representative to develop a thorough account strategy for one of their five key accounts, which they can use as a template for other accounts.
7. Ask thoughtful, purposeful questions to identify customer needs and priorities in order to build utility and the value link to marketing resources and tools.

Implementation and Customization
Competitive Immunity™ can be run with groups of 10 to 1,000 sales representatives and managers at all levels. It is highly customized to your unique products, market dynamics, and marketing messages. It is best used preemptively before the launch of the new competitive product.