Glossary
The words nobody explains on day one.
Every trade has a vocabulary it assumes you arrived with. This is the door-to-door one, defined plainly, with a page for each term so you can send somebody a link instead of an explanation.
- Area
- A block of streets a rep is responsible for on a given day. Smaller than a territory, bigger than a route.
- Backdoor
- Knocking a home already assigned to another rep. The fastest way to lose a team, which is why shared territory has to enforce one rep per street rather than politely suggest it.
- Blitz
- A whole team working one neighbourhood at the same time, usually with a competition attached.
- Callback
- A door where someone answered, didn’t buy, and gave you a reason to come back. Worth more than four fresh doors, and the one most often lost to a notes app.
- Close rate
- Sales divided by contacts, meaning conversations rather than doors. A rep quoting a close rate against total doors is quoting a knock-to-sale rate and flattering themselves.
- Contact
- A door where a human actually spoke to you. The denominator that matters.
- Disposition
- What happened at a door: sold, not home, callback, appointment, not interested, do not contact. The whole record is built from these.
- DNC
- Do not contact. A homeowner who has asked to be left alone. Permanent, and worth honouring for reasons beyond politeness.
- Door
- One address, and every conversation that ever happened there.
- Knock-to-close
- Total doors divided by sales. Useful for planning a day, useless for judging a pitch.
- Not home
- Nobody answered. Not a rejection but a scheduling problem, and the reason time of day matters more than most reps think.
- Pin
- A marker on the map for one door, coloured by its disposition.
- Ramp
- How long a new rep takes to reach a productive number. The biggest cost in a door-to-door org and the least measured.
- Route
- An ordered list of doors for one session, so you aren’t deciding where to walk next while standing on a driveway.
- Sit
- A scheduled appointment where a full presentation happens, usually inside. Solar and alarms live on these. Pest control mostly does not.
- Territory
- A geographic area assigned to a rep or a team, usually for a season.
- Turf
- Interchangeable with territory in most companies. In KnockMode it’s the part of the app holding the map, Knock Mode and your pipeline.
Why the definitions are opinionated
A few of these have a real answer and a commonly used wrong one. Close rate is the clearest case: quoted against total doors it is a knock-to-close ratio wearing a better name, and the difference changes what you would fix next.
Where that happens the definition says so rather than splitting the difference. A glossary that refuses to take a position on its own terms is a list of words.