How to door knock
To door knock well, work a planned area instead of wandering, open with one short sentence about why you are on this street, and record what happened at every address before you reach the next one. Most doors end with nobody home. The reps who improve are the ones who log that outcome separately from a refusal, because the two need different fixes.
Plan the area before you plan the pitch
New reps spend their preparation time on what they will say and almost none on where they will be. That is backwards. The pitch gets roughly the same number of reps either way, but a badly chosen area caps how many conversations you can possibly have before you open your mouth.
Pick a block you can finish. Working half of three neighbourhoods leaves you with three partial records and no idea which streets are done, and you will re-knock houses you already worked without meaning to.
The first sentence is doing all the work
The homeowner is deciding whether you are a problem before you finish your first sentence. They are not evaluating your offer yet, because they do not know what it is. They are deciding whether to end this quickly.
What helps is being specific about why you are on this street in particular. A reason that could apply to any street in the country reads as a script, and a script tells them this is a sales call they can safely end.
Record the outcome at the door, not at the end of the day
Anything you plan to write down later, you will write down wrong. Not because your memory is bad, but because forty doors blur and the two that mattered were the two you were least focused on at the time.
The outcome you record is the whole basis of every number you will later use to decide anything: whether to change your hours, whether to change your pitch, whether the area is worth a second pass. Tapping the right one takes a second and it is the highest-leverage second in the job.
Go back to the doors that earned it
A door where somebody answered, listened, and told you to come back is worth more than several fresh doors, because the expensive part already happened. That is also the door most likely to be lost, because it depends on you being somewhere specific on a specific day.
Fresh doors feel like progress and callbacks feel like admin. The numbers usually disagree.
Common questions
- What should I say when someone opens the door?
- Who you are, why you are on this street specifically, and one question that is easy to answer. Keep it to a sentence or two. The goal of the opening is to buy the next thirty seconds, not to sell anything.
- How do I stop sounding like a script?
- Learn the structure instead of the sentences. A memorised script is audible, and it collapses the moment the homeowner says something it did not anticipate.
- Do I need an app to knock doors?
- No. 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.
- How long before I get good at this?
- Longer than most companies budget for. What shortens it is having a record of what you actually did, so a bad week can be compared against a good one instead of remembered.
More on door knocking
The craft of working a door: approach, first line, reading the house, what to do when nobody answers.
- 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