Your numbers.
A bad week feels like a bad week. But nobody answering and people answering and saying no are two different failures, and most reps can't tell you which one cost them.
Close rate is sales divided by contacts, where a contact is a door at which a human actually spoke to you. Divide sales by every door you knocked and you get a knock-to-close ratio instead. That is useful for planning a day and useless for judging a pitch. Keeping them apart is what tells you whether you are knocking at the wrong hour or saying the wrong thing.
Common questions
- How do I calculate my close rate?
- Sales divided by contacts. A contact is a door where someone spoke to you. If you divide by every door you knocked, you are calculating something else and it will read much lower.
- What is a good close rate in door-to-door?
- It varies enough by trade, season and area that a single number would mislead you, and we would rather not invent one. The number worth watching is your own, measured the same way each week.
- What is the difference between contact rate and close rate?
- Contact rate is how often somebody answers. Close rate is how often a conversation becomes a sale. A low contact rate is a timing or area problem. A low close rate with a healthy contact rate is a pitch problem.
- What is a disposition?
- What happened at a door: sold, not home, callback, appointment, not interested, do not contact. Every number above is built out of them, which is why tapping the right one matters more than it seems at the time.
- How do I prove I actually improved?
- By comparing the same measure across two periods, which requires having recorded the first one. This is the part reps skip, and it is why most improvement gets asserted and never shown.