“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and
over again and expecting different results”
- Albert Einstein, Physicist

Face-to-face sales are enjoying a strong resurgence as reported in a 2003 article by Jane Spenser in The Wall Street Journal:

“Dozens of companies, including AT&T Corp. and regional utilities, are unleashing armies of door-to-door sales representatives to pitch services such as phones, cable television, and natural gas. Comcast Corp. registered 40,000 customers last year with its door-to-door ‘win back’ campaign that involved wooing customers from competition such as DirecTV.”

Similarly, Fortune Magazine featured Daryl Harms as “The Door-to-Door Billionaire” in its series on “Eleven World-Class Entrepreneurs.” Harms built his TV cable business by going “block to block, zeroing in on houses with the tallest antennas.”

Here is how I learned a new definition of “birddog.” It was spring 1970, one and a half years since the Vietnam Tet offensive and six months since I had returned from my Peace Corps experience in Nigeria. I had jumped back into the encyclopedia business with Grolier, doing my door-to-door thing. I loved the selling; I hated the rejection.

A competitor whose company had just gone under called me looking for a home for himself and his sales crew. Over lunch, “Larry” and I cut a deal. Then, while savoring my cherry pie, Larry casually asked, “Do you use the birddog system?”

My fork stopped in mid bite, “What’s that?” I replied.

Larry volunteered that he was also tired of knocking on doors. Therefore, his training program for new people emphasized teaching them the door opener plus the qualifying or introductory piece of the presentation. “Just enough,” Larry explained, “so the trainee can position me to deliver the presentation. I drop off two or three trainees in the field, park my car, and wait for one of them to fetch me to give a presentation to a waiting family.”

Why hadn’t I thought of this! I adopted the system on the spot. Where once I thought one hundred orders a year was an achievement, I was soon writing three hundred orders a year. I’ll always be grateful to Larry for showing me how to simultaneously accelerate training of new people and increase the number of presentations I could give to qualified prospects, all while avoiding much of the rejection part of the business.

While the itinerant peddler with his pack was an early American icon and door-to-door selling jobs multiplied in the desperate 1930’s, the golden age for door to door was the twenty years after World War II when millions of families had discretionary income for the first time. Door-to-door sales resistance was relatively low, because many people had never had the money to buy the products they wanted instead of just those they needed. Unfortunately, the door-to-door method wore itself out with overuse. Cities and counties restricted door-to-door selling.

Sales managers responded to new market conditions; those who did not change prospecting practices faded away. Most sales groups stopped approaching home and apartment dwellers. Ironically, door-to-door has been relatively fallow over the past decade or so but is now reemerging as a viable sales method.

Recent “Do Not Call” legislation has allowed millions of people to register their phone numbers to stop telemarketers. Many telemarketing companies are switching to face-to-face sales to move product and services. This is another reason our direct-sales industry will be growing tremendously.

Here are five practical ways to maximize door-to-door selling:

1. Card the neighborhood —— Maintain a card or Palm Pilot file on who lives at each address. Copy residents’ names from the mailboxes or the list adjacent to the entry buzzer. Develop coding that provides information quickly, such as “husband and wife only home together on weekends,” “occupant has already been approached,” and so forth. Then you can rotate sales people working the same apartments without worrying about calling on the same person twice. This also helps you be the first to catch the coveted new move-ins. A less-effective system, but better than keeping no system at all, is monitoring automobiles. If you record that you gave a presentation to a home with the green Chevy SUV, then a subsequent sales person will skip that house the next time through that neighborhood.

2. Combine daytime appointments, nighttime orders —— Use the daytime, when people feel more comfortable talking to strangers, to set appointments, and the nighttime to deliver the sales presentation. You may be surprised how many people are home during the day, for a variety of reasons. They may be self-employed, telecommuting, or simply not following the traditional nine-to-five schedule.

3. Offer a free service or gift —— Give people a free gift for listening to your presentation. Many companies have found it is easier to make an appointment when the prospect is guaranteed to receive something free. Home improvement companies offer a free energy-efficiency check; the vacuum sales person offers a one-time free cleaning; a company selling preschool educational products may offer a child evaluation test.

To make the “free gift for an appointment” offer work for you, the gift must tie in with the product or service you are selling. Free tickets to a movie, a certificate to a restaurant or another non-related enticing gift sounds like a good idea. However, offering a gift with no tie-in to the product or service sold, almost guarantees appointments with people who are more interested in the gift than what you are selling.

4. Use new sales people to set appointments —— Teach new sales people how to set appointments during their first week of training. New sales trainees can learn their short appointment talk more quickly than the much longer sales talk. Mastering appointment-setting skills is easier than mastering skills for closing orders. Thus, it makes sense to get these new people into the field early setting appointments. If sales trainees are fairly compensated for making appointments that lead to a sale, using your sales recruit’s energy makes a lot of common sense. Not only do you create an effective low-cost appointment system, you provide a learning exercise for your new sales person.

5. Hire door-to-door appointment setters —— Today we often think of telemarketing as the only live appointment-setting system for professional sales people. Not true. The current (and increasing) phone resistance, new legal hurdles, and telephone-call-filtering devices make door-to-door appointment setting at least worth a test.

An offshoot of door-to-door is “jumping in,” which refers to a sales person approaching a prospect in a public place. This has become somewhat commonplace by its use in mall based marketing research surveys. The prospect is asked to participate in a questionnaire and/or to receive a free gift. This, in turn, will lead to an invitation to come to a near-by office or coffee shop for a sales presentation.

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