Free resource
Door-to-door glossary
The vocabulary everyone assumes you already have on your first morning. Nobody will explain these to you, and asking on day three feels worse than it should.
- 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.
Missing one? Terminology drifts between companies and between trades, and half of it’s regional. Tell us what you were told on your first day and we’ll add it.