The best time of day to knock
The best time to knock is when the people you are selling to are home, which for most residential trades means late afternoon into early evening. Contact rate is the number that moves with the hour, not close rate. If people are not answering, that is a timing problem. If they answer and say no, the hour was fine and something else is wrong.
The hour changes contact rate, not close rate
This is the distinction that makes the whole question answerable. Knocking at the wrong time does not make your pitch worse. It reduces the number of times you get to give it.
Reps who track only sales per day cannot see this. A bad morning and a bad pitch produce the same number at the bottom, so they go home and rewrite a pitch that was working fine.
Who is actually home, and when
Households differ in ways that matter more than any general rule. A neighbourhood of retirees answers at hours a commuter subdivision does not. An area with a lot of shift workers has no reliable pattern at all until you have worked it a few times.
This is why a published "best time to knock" is close to useless as an instruction and useful only as a starting hypothesis. The right hours are a property of your area, not of the trade.
How to find your own hours
Work the same area at different hours across two weeks and record what happened at every door. Then compare contact rate by hour, not sales by hour, because sales are too rare to show a pattern that fast.
Two weeks is usually enough for the shape to appear. It is not enough to be certain, and you should expect the answer to shift with the season as daylight moves.
Common questions
- Is knocking in the morning a waste of time?
- Usually worse for contact rate in residential areas, because fewer people are home. Whether it is a waste depends on what else you would be doing with the hours.
- Should I knock on weekends?
- More people are home, and more of them resent being interrupted. Both effects are real and the balance differs by area, which is a reason to measure rather than to take a position.
- How long until I know my best hours?
- About two weeks of recording every door, comparing contact rate by hour. Sales are too infrequent to reveal a pattern in that window; conversations are not.
More on door knocking
The craft of working a door: approach, first line, reading the house, what to do when nobody answers.
- How to door knock
- The first seven seconds at a door
- 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