Written by Sean McPheat | 
Door-to-door selling is a beast!
It’s like dropping in uninvited, trying to catch the attention of a busy, potentially uninterested buyer.It might just be the toughest sales gig out there…
Most people don’t like receiving telesales calls, never mind someone rocking up to their front door in the flesh. So, if you’re a door-to-door salesperson I salute you!
The thing is, like with cold calling, many salespeople struggle with door-to-door sales scripts. They’re typically either too long or not direct enough to effectively capitalise on the opportunities that door-to-door sales offer.
There is less call for this type of Sales Training nowadays. Fortunately, we’re here to help. In this post, we’ll look at how you can create an effective door-to-door sales pitch and some strategies to make your pitches more effective.
Contents
Before we look at how you can create a door-to-door sales pitch and the strategies you can use to make them more effective, let’s first recap what a door-to-door sales pitch is.
As the name suggests, door-to-door sales are where you go from door to door to make sales presentations to residents or business owners, in the hopes that they would become customers. Flowing from this, a door-to-door sales pitch is the presentation you’ll use to persuade and convince these prospective customers of the nature and benefits of your business or product.
A sales pitch mainly serves two purposes. For one, a sales pitch helps you keep your ideas organised and your narrative compelling. So, in other words, it helps you know and remember what to say to effectively show leads that you’re able to solve their problems.
Moreover, because you only have a minute or two after someone opens their door to convince them of the merits of your products or service, a sales pitch helps you plan ahead and engineer your sales pitch to be most effective and take advantage of every second you have.
Now that we’ve recapped what door-to-door sales pitches are, let’s look at how you can create an effective door-to-door sales pitch. Here, it’s important to keep in mind that, depending on your specific industry or what you’re selling, the process of creating a sales pitch may differ slightly, but you’ll generally need to consider the aspects mentioned here to create yours.
Let’s face it, you don’t want to attempt to sell power tools to someone who is in the market for kitchen appliances, would you?
So, prospecting for door-to-door sales is just like prospecting for cold calling or sending sales emails. This means, just like you would for any other sales campaign, you need to develop your customer or buyer persona for your sales pitch to be most successful.
But how do you go about this? Well, you could think of a specific demographic that’s more likely to buy your product or pay for your service. Or you can go deeper to describe your ideal customer in more detail. These are both very effective strategies.
The key, however, is that, by developing your customer persona, you’ll understand your customers better. And when you understand your customers better, you’ll know their goals, what their pain points and challenges are, and how your product or service can solve them.
Think of it like this. When you understand your customers and their challenges, and you can present them with a solution, you’ll be more likely to close more deals. And once you have your ideal customer persona in hand, you’ll be able to prospect and find the right prospective customers that fit this description and meet these criteria.
It’s understandable that you won’t be able to script an entire generic sales pitch for every prospective customer that opens their door. This is simply because you don’t know what they’re going to say.
Despite this, one thing is certain. It’s that you only have a few seconds to persuade them to listen further. As a result, you need to get the basics out of the way quickly. And by basics, we mean those questions the prospect will have when they open the door and you’re standing there.
And let’s be clear, when they open the door, the first thing that’ll come to mind is certainly not how your product or service can solve their problems. No, they’ll want to know who you are and what you’re doing there. If you don’t tell them quick enough, you’ll never get the opportunity to show them the merits of your product.
So, the common questions that prospects will usually have and which you’ll need to answer are:
• Who you are?
• Where you’re from?
• What you’re doing there?
• When you’ll be leaving?
An effective strategy to use during this stage of your pitch is focusing on you being there only for a few minutes. In this way, the prospect will know that you won’t be there for long and will be more willing to listen to what you have to say. Once you get over this hurdle, you’ll get the opportunity to illustrate the benefits of what you’re offering. So, feel free, work in that “I won’t be long” or “I’ll be brief”.
We mentioned earlier that, as part of developing your ideal customer persona, you’ll understand what their pain points are. So, you might already have an idea of the challenges a prospect is facing. However, when meeting face-to-face, you’ll need to ask questions that will help you find a specific prospect’s problems and challenges.
These questions serve a dual purpose. For one, they allow you to confirm the pain points you’ve established when you determined your customer persona. In a sense, you might also realize that a specific prospect isn’t facing the challenges you anticipated which, ultimately, saves you from wasting time on a prospect who’s not likely to buy.
If the prospect does face the challenges you anticipated, these questions also allow you to interrogate these pain points in more detail which, in turn, allows you to tailor your pitch “on the fly” to be more effective and meet your prospect’s needs even better. This then increases your chances of closing a deal.
Once you’ve confirmed your prospect’s pain points and challenges, you’ll be able to use your product knowledge to demonstrate how you’ll be able to solve these problems with your Solution.
And when we say product knowledge, we mean you should know your product inside and out. As such, you constantly need to stay updated with the latest developments in your field and industry and you’ll have to build up extensive product knowledge and experience.
If you do, you’ll achieve two things. Firstly, you’ll be able to answer any questions a prospect might have about your product. Secondly, you’ll know that you’ll be able to answer any questions your prospect might have. In other words, you’ll exude confidence which, by now, you know is a crucial sales tool.
Confidence allows you to adapt your pitch to the specific requirements of the prospect and meet their needs better and gives you the ability to negotiate better which means improved chances of making a sale. And speaking of making a sale, you should also believe in your product. Simply put, how will you convince someone to buy your product if you don’t believe in it yourself, right?
Once you’re done with your pitch, you should finish it off with a strong call to action. And don’t be mistaken, how you close the pitch can, ultimately, make or break it. Fortunately, there are many options to choose from and, over time, you’ll find the one that works best for your specific style and customer persona.
You can, for instance, use a direct approach and assume that you’ve already closed the sale. Here, you might, for instance, ask the prospect when they want their product delivered.
As an alternative, you could use a less aggressive approach and ask open-ended questions to which you assume the answer will be “yes” in the right circumstances. Here, for example, you could use a free product as an upsell or cross sell to convince the prospect to buy your product.
Finally, you could use an emotionally driven approach that helps you connect emotionally with your customer. Here, you’ll typically share something personal about yourself that forges that connection that helps the sale along. Apart from these approaches, there are many others you can use. No matter what approach you use, though, just make sure to ask for the sale at the end of your pitch.
Now that we’ve seen how you can create an effective door-to-door sales pitch, you can develop your own. When you do, here are three valuable strategies that you can use to make it more effective and that’ll help you pitch more successfully.
You don’t need to go into every conceivable feature and benefit of your product for your sales pitch to be successful. What you basically want is for your pitch to persuade and convince your prospect that they want to know more about your product or service.
The key to doing this is, as mentioned earlier, identifying, and understanding your prospect’s pain points and challenges and understanding how you can solve them. Here, it also helps to be direct in demonstrating to your prospect how what you’re selling can solve their problems.
Ultimately, when you’re able to do this, you should be able to effectively pitch your product in a few sentences. If you take too long then you’ll start to hear all of those sales objections – and you don’t want that!
Yes, yes, we know that we said earlier that you should get the basics out of the way quickly. However, in some cases, this might not even be enough to prevent the door from closing in your face. Remember, we also mentioned earlier that the idea of your sales pitch should be to persuade and convince your prospect that they want to know more about your product.
So, why not change it up in some cases and start your pitch with an open-ended question that grabs the prospect’s attention from the outset? For example, imagine an insurance salesperson that knocks on the door and starts off by explaining who they are and what they’re doing there when the prospect opens the door.
Once the prospect hears that the salesperson is from an insurance company, they probably want to end the conversation already. Now, change it up, and imagine that they ask, “You’re probably paying too much for insurance?” when the prospect opens the door.
In this case, the prospect’s attention will already be piqued, especially since insurance is a grudge purchase that many people believe they’re paying too much for. As a result, the prospect will be more willing to hear the salesperson out.
Another effective strategy is to build a connection with the prospect. Here, you’ll have quite a few options to do this. For one, you could find some common ground from interactions with a previous prospect, something about the area the prospect lives in, or any other aspect that could help you find common ground and incorporate that into your pitch. It could be about the weather, the new drive they have just had laid or something of note to break the ice.
Imagine that it’s pouring with rain, and you’re soaked. You don’t have an umbrella and as someone answers the door you say with a grin on your face “And think, I do this for a living!” You get a reaction and then you lead in with your question.
Another strategy to build a connection with your prospect used to know their name and all their relevant information beforehand. When they notice that you took the time to learn more about them, it will help you connect with some of them on a more personal level which, in turn, will help them feel more comfortable with you. But be careful, knowing someone’s name can freak some of them out – they might wonder what else you know about them. It’s a high-risk strategy that will either work very well or it could bomb for you.
Although these are just two examples of strategies you can use to build a connection with your prospect, there are many others you can use. No matter which you use, the result is that, when you build a connection with your prospect, your pitch will feel more like a conversation between two friends than a sales pitch. It’s all about building rapport in the initial moments of the interaction.
If you want to sell better door-to-door, it’s crucial that you create an effective door-to-door sales pitch that will help you engage prospects better and close more deals. Hopefully, this post helped illustrate how you can create such a pitch and the strategies you can use to improve yours.
If you want to up your sales performance even further, why not consider MTD Sales Training for your training needs.
Through our Account Management Training, Sales Management Courses and Sales Coaching we’ve delivered training solutions to thousands of organisations around the world.
To learn more about our courses and how we can help you, contact us today for more details or to discuss your specific needs and requirements. Also take a look at our popular portfolio of Sales Training Courses here.
Sean
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training
Updated on: 5 September, 2023
Originally published: 20 August, 2007
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