Door knocking.
Most of what gets taught about knocking is either a motivational speech or a script someone wrote for a different trade. This is the part that survives contact with an actual street.
Door knocking is selling face to face at a stranger's home. A rep works a planned area, records what happened at each address, and goes back to the ones worth a second visit. Most doors end with nobody answering. That is a scheduling problem, not a rejection, and the reps who improve are the ones who can tell the two apart.
In this section
- How to door knock
- The first seven seconds at a door
- The best time of day to knock
- Which days actually convert
- What to do when nobody answers
- Reading a house before you knock
- Door-knocking etiquette
- Knocking in bad weather
- Staying safe on the doors
- How many doors a day is realistic
- The mistakes that cost you the door
- Apartments versus subdivisions
Common questions
- How many doors should I knock in a day?
- It depends on how tight your area is more than how fast you walk. A dense subdivision where houses share a street puts far more doors in front of you than a rural route where you drive between them. Track your own number for a week before you borrow anyone else's target.
- What is the best time of day to knock?
- Late afternoon into early evening is when most people are home, which is why contact rate rises there even when nothing about your pitch changed. Mornings are usually worse for contact and better for nothing in particular. Your own numbers will tell you within about two weeks.
- Is nobody answering a rejection?
- No, and treating it as one is expensive. A door where nobody answered has told you nothing about your pitch. It has told you something about your timing. Those need different fixes, and reps who lump them together end up rewriting a pitch that was fine.
- How long does it take to get good at this?
- Longer than most companies budget for and less time than it feels like in week two. What shortens it is having a record of what you actually did, so a bad week can be checked against a good one instead of remembered.
- Do I need an app to knock doors?
- No. Reps have worked doors with a clipboard for decades. What an app changes is whether the callbacks you earned on Tuesday are still findable on Thursday, and whether your close rate is a number or a feeling.