How To Do Door To Door Sales Like A Pro

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Updated: September 12th, 2024

What Is Door To Door Sales?

Door to door is a direct selling strategy commonly used by sales and marketing reps. The technique involves engaging the customers face-to-face and getting your products in their hands. When done right, door-to-door sales help to build a customer base and to build relationships that last.

According to statistics, an average salesperson can create one lead for every 50 doors knocked. However, to succeed the salespeople need to implement the strategy in the right manner.

In this post, we look at various ideas on door-to-door sales. Keep reading to discover much more information relating to door-to-door sales.

Door-To-Door Sales Key Takeaways

Door-to-door selling is an important way to engage customers face-to-face and get your product in their hands.
D2D sales is an effective way to grow a customer base
Door-to-door salesman must possess specific strategies to connect with their prospects and close deals
Success of the D2D sales strategy depends so much on presentation

How Door-To-Door Strategy Works

Door-to-door sale is when sales representatives prospect directly to individuals face-to-face. Rather than relying on digital or offline marketing campaigns to generate leads, door-to-door salespeople walk from one home to another engaging the prospects in a talk about product or service features.

For the direct selling technique to generate success, the sales representatives must apply convincing techniques.

What Are The Key Pillars Of the D2D Sales Approach?

Prospecting: The search for new customers is essential to the D2D sales funnel.
Qualifying: This involves identifying a need your prospect has that matches the features of your product or benefits of your offer.
Pitching: The process involves proposing your products as the “cure” to prospects' pain points.
Closing: When you ask the potential customer to purchase the products or service
Follow-up: the door-to-door salesperson establishes a contract to ensure the customer received what he ordered, and was satisfied.

Real-world Examples of Door-to-door Sales

Here is one of the door-to-door selling success stories you would love to hear.

1. How Dundas Valley Pools Acquired Customers Through Door-To-Door Sales

Dundas Valley Pools is a trusted pool construction and renovation company. Initially, finding customers was an uphill task until the owner settled on a door-to-door sales approach.

They looked at Google Satellites to determine pools in their area. From there, they took a list of all the pools they could find and picked their addresses.

After that, they went door-to-door and spoke with homeowners, telling them that they had started a new pool business and were happy to help them with anything they needed to be done on the pool.

This proved to be one of the most valuable activities they could have done. It resulted in their initial 20 customers for pool openings/ closings as well as safety cover installations-- a total of $7000 in net revenue!

Here was their first postcard to potential customers. This is what they used on their first door-to-door sales:

Tips For Successful Door to Door Selling Strategy

Make sure you know the product inside out
Focus on providing value to the customer
Build rapport with people you meet
Understand how to ask questions that qualify prospects
Learn to listen to your prospects
Explain the product features before calling the customer to purchase
Manage your time well
Know-how and when to close the sale

Door-to-door selling is about being able to persevere, and handle rejections. Without these qualities, you will give up soon after knocking on the next door.

Case Study

Dan Steward started Dundas Valley Pools.

Door-to-door sales has been one of their most effective ways of acquiring customers.

They started the business as lean as possible - what they first did was look at Google Satellites to determine pools in their area.

From there, they took a list of all the pools they could find and collect their addresses.

After that, they went door-to-door and spoke with homeowners, telling them that they had started a new pool business and were happy to help them with anything they needed to be done on the pool.

This proved to be one of the most valuable activities they could have done. It resulted in their initial 20 customers for pool openings/ closings as well as 3 safety cover installations-- a total of $7000 in net revenue!

Here was their first postcard to potential customers. This is what they used on their first door-to-door sales:

They've tried other marketing tactics and noticed empirically that the customers they get from paid ads are different customers than from their door-to-door sales or word-of-mouth.

Despite costing them much less, the door-to-door customers and word-of-mouth customers are 7 times out of 10 better customers than their paid-for customers.

Why?

They’re familiar with the business and have either been introduced to the brand in person or through a reliable friend that can vouch for the business. These customers are more comfortable with pricing, more comfortable with service, and just overall tend to be better customers to work with.

Dan Stewart, on starting Dundas Valley Pools ($8,000/month) full story ➜

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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