Turning a Competitor's Outage Into 7 New Opportunities

The Challenge

Our primary competitor in the MFA space suffered a 12-hour service outage that locked out thousands of users across hundreds of organizations. Social media and industry forums lit up with frustrated customers. This was a rare competitive window, but exploiting it clumsily could backfire.

The Approach

I avoided any messaging that was negative about the competitor. Instead, I reached out to known competitor customers with a message focused on resilience and redundancy: "After events like yesterday, many organizations are evaluating their authentication architecture for single points of failure. We published a guide on building resilient MFA deployments with failover capabilities. Would that be useful?"

The guide was genuinely valuable — it covered architectural best practices for MFA resilience regardless of vendor. Our product naturally fit the recommendations, but the guide stood on its own as useful content. This approach generated goodwill rather than the backlash that aggressive competitive messaging would have triggered.

The Result

Seven competitor customers engaged in evaluation conversations. Three moved to active POCs within 30 days, and two deals closed that quarter for a combined $310K. The remaining five entered long-term nurture as their competitor contracts approached renewal. Total pipeline generated was $1.1M.

Key Takeaway

Competitor misfortune is an opportunity that demands restraint. Leading with value and empathy rather than fear and negativity attracts the right kind of prospect — one who is making a thoughtful decision rather than a reactive one. Those prospects become better long-term customers.