For those who are not familiar with the world of marketing products and services, this expression may sound unusual, but nevertheless, they are one of the actions most used by most of the large companies that 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, if necessary, have worked as one.

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

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

We can divide these actions based on the segment or target clientele that we want to focus on, thus separating commercial actions for direct B2C (Business to Client) clients, or those that are focused on B2B (Business to Business) companies and corporations. I understand that when we hear these technical definitions we do not know what certain reports that we can see on the Internet refer to, but basically and in 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 that everyone who, today from their commercial management chairs, should not stop practicing it, You learn many qualities that sometimes you thought you couldn’t 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 have to take into account a series of parameters when approaching our visits.

Door-to-door visiting actions Hunting
Prepare 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 manager to whom we want to present ourselves
Prepare graphic material (diptychs, brochures, dossiers, etc…) and business cards

We just have to start the visits, the responses that we can find are multitudinous, even not very pleasant surprises, we have to understand that we are visiting our future clients without an appointment. What advantages do these techniques have?

Our future client does not have time to react.
Allows you to make a greater number of visits in a day.
It is the first direct contact.

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

Door-to-door visiting actions Farming.

These types 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 to not let that relationship that we have built become extinct after the first sale made. Therefore, the actions to be carried out will be the following:

Location of the clients who produce the most for us.
Prioritize visits based on billing volume.
Establish prior appointments through phone calls or emails
Analyze potential accounts for possible billing based on the structural moment in which they are located.
Make a short presentation of our products or services. At this moment, 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 previous paragraphs, many times I have had to make door-to-door visits, contemplate them in the action plans and of course carry them out, and without a doubt I would not fail to highlight the 10 reasons why not to stop doing them:

You have direct contact with your client.
Your client knows the representative of the company from which he buys.
Empathy for the brand is strengthened.
New business opportunities arise with potential accounts.
We build loyalty with our clientele.
The salesperson does not lose the meaning of the sales action.
The visits serve as a thermometer of the market situation.
We detect the trends of our clients.
We inform ourselves about the promotions and offers of our competition.
The criticism and advice of our customers help us 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.