Territory.
Turf disputes end more D2D teams than bad pitches do. Usually because nobody wrote the area down properly in the first place.
A sales territory is a geographic area one rep or team is responsible for. In door-to-door it is usually cut by streets rather than by zip code, because a rep walks it. Territories are assigned for a season, worked in smaller areas day to day, and become a source of conflict the moment two reps believe the same street is theirs.
In this section
- What a territory is, in D2D terms
- How to cut a territory
- Territory mapping without a whiteboard
- Backdooring, and why it kills teams
- Territory, area and route are three things
- How big a territory should be
- When to re-knock a territory
- Handing a territory to another rep
- Planning territory around the season
- Settling a territory dispute
Common questions
- How big should a door-to-door territory be?
- Big enough that a rep does not run out of doors before the season ends, small enough that they can cover it more than once. Door density matters more than area: a few blocks of townhouses can hold more addresses than a square mile of acreage.
- What is backdooring?
- Knocking a home assigned to another rep. It is the fastest way to lose a team, because the rep who got backdoored stops trusting the assignment and starts protecting their own streets instead of working them.
- How do you stop two reps working the same street?
- By enforcing the assignment rather than requesting it. KnockMode does this on the team plan, where a knock inside another rep’s territory is refused instead of showing up in a report the next day. No team is running it, because there is no checkout, and a solo rep has nobody to overlap with anyway.
- How often should an area be re-knocked?
- Sooner than most reps think, because the majority of doors ended in nobody answering, not in a no. An area worked once has mostly been sampled at one time of day.
- Who owns the data when a rep leaves?
- The company owns the doors created in its workspace. What travels with a rep is their own record: knock count, close rate, tenure. In KnockMode those are two different things on purpose.