5 Things To Do When Your Competitor Goes Out Of Business

Video. We're going to discuss when your competitor goes out of business, how do you get their customers? We're going to go through five different strategies that we've implemented with businesses to help them take advantage and get the customers and grow their business. My name is so Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting, and we partner with local service businesses to help them increase their sales, keep their schedules full and on the channel. That's what we talk about. So if you like that content, be sure to hit like and subscribe. And let's get right into it. All right, so the first thing when someone says, hey, my competitor went out of business, like, what should I do? First thing you want to do is you want to secure their phone number. So this could be several different ways. You could contact your phone provider and try to purchase that phone number. You could also contact the business because now they're out of business and say, hey, I want to buy this phone number for you from you. Can you please facilitate that process? The reason that this is so important is because all of their customers have their phone number. And even if, if, if they have like stickers on their, on the wall or on the units, then when they call that number, then you can maybe put a tracking number in there or whatever. But at the end of the day, you're going to get their calls for their customers. And so you want to try to secure their phone number. That's going to be number one. We always start there is either contact a business owner who used to own it and you can find who that is, or contact your phone provider and try to secure their phone number. All right, Second is create a unique offer for their customers. Now, let's say that you're not able to get their phone number, or maybe you are, but. But you want to create a unique offer for their customers. So there's many different ways that this could work. But let's say that you sell service contracts and you have a service contract that the customer just went out of business. Well, what you could do is you could say, we're actually honoring this company's service contract for the next six months, and we're going to allow you to roll that over into our business. Very simple way of basically getting a customer on a service plan by leveraging a relationship with that past company. That's a simple one. The second thing is like a discount of some sort. Like, hey, you know, we don't want you to be stuck without a company or service provider, so we're willing to offer you a $50, whatever, discount to work with us instead. It's a really good thing. The most important part to this is kind of broadcasting it out there. So if you know someone that was using this company and it went out of business, here's an opportunity to use our company and we're going to give you X, Y and Z. So, so that you can try our services out. It's a really great way to leverage the ability to get new customers from that experience. All right, next is to buy their customer list and offer the old owner referral commission. So let's say that they have been in business for a couple years or even longer than that. Nine times out of 10, they have a customer base. And we always talk about in this funnel here, like this blue ocean of retargeting customers to bring them back into your funnel. And so they may not even know that the company went out of business. And they're going to make a call and it's going to be disconnected, and then nothing's going to happen, and they're going to have to go out and find a new company. So if you can buy their customer list from the old owner or even offer the old owner a referral commission and basically say like, hey, any new customer that you contact and transfer over to us, or recontact and transfers over to us, we'll give you 50 bucks or whatever. And so this is an opportunity for them to call their customers and just say, like, hey, we, unfortunately, we're going out of business. However, I partnered up with this other company and they're going to take great care of you. They also offered to take your service contract and roll it right over to their program. And here's the contact over there, here's their phone number, and then give them 50 bucks or whatever for that. It's a great way to kind of bridge the gap for customers, but also to incentivize the person that just went out of business to then give you customers to them. So let's say you don't know who this business owner is. You don't even know the phone number or how to contact this person. You don't know how to get their list. Yeah, you could create an offer, but how do those people that are searching for it find out about it? And this is going to be the best way. And this is what we do with companies. We create blog posts about the other company going out of business. So how does this look? We just did this for a basement waterproofing company and it just rained and they got like five leads from this, which is what gave me the idea to make this content because it was a great success and they got customers out of it that were searching for their competitor that went out of business. So how does this look? So you create a blog post content that says such and such business went out of business. What do you do? And so it kind of walks through the whole thing, which is like, this was a company that was in business and they went out of business this date, and here's your opportunity to offer them something. So I know that it can be tough because they had this warranty or they had this thing. So what we do as a company is we're looking, looking to honor their warranty and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's our offer. Contact us here. And you would be shocked at how many times people are searching online for this company and then they see the article that says it went out of business and then they go and they click on it. And then now they have a solution to their problem, which is, oh man, I searched this company, they went a business. But here's another option for you and this. The blog post content that we created actually ranks fourth in the entire world for this company. And so it's, in my opinion, it's a home run to capture the audience of the other company. And they obviously, they weren't able to screw the phone number. They did create a unique offer which was transferring warranty. They did not buy a customer list because they don't even know the owner. The owners didn't. They had no contact, they have no idea. But they created this blog post about them going out of business, which then converted into leads. So if you can't get their phone number, you can't get a customer list. You don't know the business owner. Create a unique offer, broadcast that out there, and then create content that's relevant, that is in the they ask, you answer format. And so to go into this a little bit further, one question that someone is asking is, did such and such company go out of business? Does my trans. Does my warranty last? If this company's out of business, think about the questions that your prospect's asking and then create a blog post that has all those questions in there and then provide answers that's utilizing your company. And then the last one is to hire their key employees. We had another instance of a moving company that we work with which a competitor, kind of competitor, quasi competitor, went out of business. And so what they did was they were in the position where they could hire a couple of their key employees that had a lot of key relationships with a lot of their partners. And so they brought them on and just bolstered up their division that they had with these key employees and basically took the company and blew it up. Because now all those relationships that they have, they just say, hey, we're working with this company now. They have the phone numbers, they have the relationship, they have the deal flow coming in. And so it's a quick way. Quick in the sense that you have to have the capital to be able to fund it, but quick way that you can secure the key people that already have the relationships that then can take you to the next level in your business. Almost buying the company without buying the company. And so those are the strategies that we've implemented with businesses. I'm curious to see if you've had other successful work ways that you've been able to leverage companies going out of business to grow your business and drop a comment below. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post videos weekly about growing local service businesses and I'll see you in the next video.