10 reasons why you should carry out “door-to-door” commercial actions10 reasons why you should carry out “door-to-door” commercial actions

For those who are not familiar with the world of product and service marketing, this expression may sound unusual, but nevertheless, they are one of the most used actions by the majority of the large companies we know. I am sure that at some point in your lives you have had the opportunity to meet a door-to-door salesperson or, where appropriate, have worked as one.

What are door-to-door sales actions? What does it consist of?

Basically they consist of meeting “face-to-face” with the potential client, going to look for them on their turf, establishing a line of empathy with them and persuading them in such a way that they buy our product or service.

We can divide these actions based on the segment or target clientele we want to focus on, thus separating commercial actions for direct B2C clients (Business to Client), or those that are focused on B2B companies and corporations (Business to Business). I understand that when we hear these technical definitions we do not know what certain reports we can see on the Internet refer to, but basically and as a summary this is their meaning.

From the perspective of my experience, there are many occasions in which I have had to carry out door-to-door sales actions; in fact, I would recommend to all those who today from their commercial management chairs do not stop practicing it. You learn many qualities that sometimes you thought you could not develop.

Whether our door-to-door action is a reason to attract new clientele (hunting) or to maintain existing relationships with our consumers (farming), we must take into account a series of parameters when planning our visits.

Door-to-door visit actions – Hunting

• Develop a database of the clientele to visit.
• Study the structural situation of each company or client.
• Develop a visit plan by sector.
• Know the profile of the client or executive we want to introduce ourselves to.
• Prepare graphic material (brochures, flyers, dossiers, etc.) and business cards.

We just have to start the visits, the responses we can find are multitudinous, even not very pleasant surprises; we have to understand that we are visiting our future clients without a prior appointment.

What advantages do these techniques have?

• Our future client does not have time to react.
• It allows making a greater number of visits in a day.
• It is the first direct contact.

From here on, the value of each salesperson counts, the contacts they have, the empathy, the wisdom, and the patience to act depending on the case. Ultimately, as I often say, there are “salespeople who are born and others who are made”.

Door-to-door visit actions – Farming

This type of actions are not as “aggressive” (with all due respect to the contextualization of the word) as hunting actions. In this case, the client is already made, our mission will be not to let that relationship we have built extinguish after the first sale is made. Therefore, the actions to be carried out will be the following:

• Location of the clients that produce the most for us.
• Prioritize visits according to billing volume.
• Set prior appointments through phone calls or emails.
• Analyze potential accounts for their possible billing based on the structural moment they are in.
• Make a brief presentation of our products or services. At this time we will be able to expand with our client after having “broken the ice” in our previous hunting action.

As I explained to you a few paragraphs above, many times I have had to make door-to-door visits, contemplate them in action plans and of course carry them out, and without a doubt I would not fail to highlight the 10 reasons why you should not stop doing them:

1. You have direct contact with your client.
2. Your client knows the representative of the company they buy from.
3. Empathy for the brand is strengthened.
4. New business opportunities arise with potential accounts.
5. We build loyalty with our clientele.
6. The salesperson does not lose the sense of the sales action.
7. The visits serve as a thermometer of the market situation.
8. We detect our clients’ trends.
9. We find out about the promotions and offers of our competition.
10. The criticisms and advice of our clients help us to improve our product or service.

No one better than the salesperson can guide the company to elucidate the true state of the market in which it operates, the economic circumstances of society, the trends of our clients, and the image of our brand in society.